What the Heck is Cuneiform, Anyway? (2015) | Hacker News Reader

What the Heck is Cuneiform, Anyway? (2015)

smithsonianmag.com

43 pointssignor_bosco11 comments

There are a couple of errors in terminology.

  At first these phonemes (one symbol for one thing, instead of letters to make a word) symbolized concrete things;

Should say "pictograms", "logograms", or "ideograms", but definitely not phonemes, which are minimal units of sound in a language, and have nothing to do with writing.

At the end,

   Fifteen other languages developed from cuneiform,

Confuses the cuneiform writing system with a language that uses cuneiform. It should probably say "fifteen other languages developer from Sumerian", though I'm not certain if that's actually correct. This is a particularly surprising error given that, right near the beginning, the article acknowledges that "It was used to write at least a dozen languages, just as the alphabet that you are reading now is also (for the most part) used in Spanish, German and many other languages."

Sumerian is a language isolate, so the second quote may only correctly refer to writing systems.

Exactly. The languages didn't evolve from Sumerian, they just borrowed the writing system in the same sense that non Indo-European languages like Finnish borrowed the Roman alphabet.

Hence my uncertainty. In that case, if it is intended to refer only to writing systems, it should probably say "15 other languages' writing systems evolved from Sumerian cuneiform." or "were adapted from Sumerian cuneiform", or some other variation thereon.

It recorded an early flaming in the diatribe against Engar Dug: http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section5/tr5411.htm

Hilarious!

"Engar-dug, blocked at the anus"

I wish the writer had given some idea as to why Engar-dug earned his enmity.

Other pearls of wisdom:

"a young woman did not fart in her husband's embrace"

Was the reverse equally untrue in their culture?

I have it on good authority (the guy has a PhD and reads cuneiform, Syriac, Hebrew, ancient Chinese, etc.) that one of the early religions of Central Asia which spread to China along the Silk Road lauded farting as releasing the souls of vegetables or something similar, I think it was Manichaeism... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manichaeism ... but can't find a reference online. Pythagorus had a lot to say about farts too:

Pythagoras also said that no one was to ever eat a bean under any circumstance! His reasons for making such a drastic statement are based on the theory from a Roman peer of his named Diogenes Laertius. Around the first century, B.C. it was felt that beans are " the materials which contain the largest portion of that animated matter which our souls are made of." Let me explain. The Greek word for soul was "anemos" which also meant wind. The animated matter which Diogenes is referring to is the intestinal digestion that goes on inside us with the beans. Are you starting to catch on? In other words, they believed that the buried dead released their souls in the form of gases or winds, that got absorbed into the fava beans. When you ate these beans, (the intestinal process) these spiritual soul winds got released and then ascended into Heaven. - http://www.brownielocks.com/beans.html

Diogenes Laertius cannot really be described as a peer of Pythagoras, as Pythagoras lived in the 6th century BC, long before anything Roman might be considered a peer to anything Greek, and Diogenes Laertius in the 3rd century AD.

Is there a photo of the original cuneiform text? (Just curiosity, I can't read cuneiform.)

http://i.imgur.com/BIy8fcj.jpg

The rest of the images are in:

Sjöberg, Åke W. 1972. “He Is a Good Seed of a Dog” and “Engardu, the Fool.” Journal of Cuneiform Studies 24(4). 107–119. doi:10.2307/1359629.

http://www.jstor.org/stable/1359629

Of related interest: "Digitale Keilschrift / Digital Cuneiform unites the oldest communication technology with the newest, completing a kind of historical circuit. It is an offshoot of the decodeunicode project (see Eye 64), which aims to create Unicode versions of all forms of writing. This has practical importance where living scripts are concerned, opening digital technology to marginalised language communities; for archaic scripts the rationale is vaguer, or more quixotic. Digitisation will allow for ease of reproduction and searchable versions of cuneiform documents (more than half a million of these mostly hand-sized clay tablets survive). But, as Johannes Bergerhausen writes, its main appeal will be to those ‘who love losing themselves in signs and symbols’ – or, to put it bluntly, geeks."

http://www.eyemagazine.com/review/article/elegantly-nerdish

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