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Thursday, February 19, 2009

About cuneiform writing

Sumerian cuneiform is the first written language and was widely used in Mesopotamia 3000 years ago. (spin a tablet)
"Most later adaptations of Sumerian cuneiform preserved at least some aspects of the Sumerian script. Written Akkadian included phonetic symbols from the Sumerian syllabary, together with logograms that were read as whole words. Many signs in the script were polyvalent, having both a syllabic and logographic meaning. When the cuneiform script was adapted to writing the Hittite language, a layer of Akkadian logographic spellings was added to the script, with the result that we no longer know the pronunciations of many Hittite words conventionally written by logograms. The complexity of the system bears a resemblance to classical Japanese, written in a Chinese-derived script; some of these Sinograms were used as logograms, others as phonetic characters. Modern Japanese graphically distinguishes the logograms (kanji) from syllabary characters (kana) but otherwise retains a similar system." Source: Sumerian Writing - Cuneiform - Crystalinks
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