8 ms·

I've never understood why cuneiform is so _complicated_. There's only 112 syllables in the chart in the linked blog post... why do some of them require more tha

I've never understood why cuneiform is so _complicated_. There's only 112 syllables in the chart in the linked blog post... why do some of them require more than 10 "wedges"?

simplicio 6y ago
I think the full syllabary is larger. The cuneiform block in unicode is ~1000 characters*. (The article says "instead it uses between 600 and 1,000 characters impressed on clay to spell words", which is kind of ambigious on whether there's 600-1000 characters in the syllabary or 600-1000 per tablet, but 1000 characters would be consistant with the number of unicode codepoints)
- stan_rogers 6y ago
  It wasn't a strict syllabary. Like Egyptian hieroglyphs, there were logograms as well, and rebus forms were also used (combining logograms representing more than one syllable, along with syllabics). And like hieroglyphics and Central American writing systems, there were several alternativechoices representing the same syllable/consonant. 600–1000 characters is big for a syllabary, but consistent with several early writing systems. Writing ain't natural; it took us some time to figure it out, if it can be said that we've figured it out at all. (We probably won't have a real answer until we somehow manage to freeze and ship a "gold" LTS release of a language.)
  - otabdeveloper4 6y ago
    Chinese is the +- the most written language today, and uses pretty much the same system these convoluted logo-syllabaries did. I don't think there is any sort of evolution or progress story to be mined here.
    - ithkuil 6y ago
      Do you find a good reference for the amount of contemporary written production per language? Chinese is often cited as the language that currently has the most native speakers (followed by spanish and the english); however written production doesn't necessarily have to follow that metric. For example I'm by no means a native English speaker yet my written production in english outweighs my native language production by several orders of magnitude (I mostly write grocery lists in my native language, that's it)
      - Blikkentrekker 6y ago
        I am not a native speaker of English and yet somehow find myself writing my todo lists in English. I produce little more texts in my native language than some social communication.
    - Blikkentrekker 6y ago
      Not quite. Chinese uses a system where every morpheme has it's own grapheme with some minor exceptions. Almost every grapheme maps to a single morpheme and thus a single pronunciation though there are obviously different morphemes with an identical pronunciation that might even be completely different parts of speech. It is more similar to how Japanese is written, which has graphemes that correspond to phonemic moræ in the language, as well as digraphs of graphemes to express more complicated moræ, as well as finally using Chinese characters to express concepts and ideas, not morphemes as it is in Chinese. Consequently, in Japanese the same Chinese character can be pronounced very differently depending on the context, similar to how, for instance the English words “kingly” and “royal” reflect the same general concept, but are pronounce very differently. What makes the situation even more complicated is that due to historical shifts in semantics, many word are now spelt with characters that no longer reflect the semantic concepts they express in modern times. On top of that, most of these grapheme combinations also have an official way to spell them within the phonemic script, and this is not as phonemic as one might want, with pronunciation exceptions being rampant. — the official way to spell them phonemically does not always map to the official way to pronounce them. I think modern Japanese might actually be a candidate for the language with the most complicated, least straightforward writing system that ever existed, given that it grows in complexity over time, rather than being simplified. The big difference, however, is that Chinese is a language that is exceptionally suited to be written in a script that has one logo for each morpheme, because Chinese is bereft of allomorphs: each morpheme in Chinese has only one pronunciation, unlike in, say English, where words such as “feet” exist, or the plural marker is pronounced as /s/ or /z/ depending on the stem it is attached to. Japanese is very much a language with allomorphs, much like English, which are not reflected in the Chinese characters, and the morphology of the Japanese verbal system is particularly ill-suited to be written how it is.
      - KMag 6y ago
        Edit: I stand corrected. See below. > Chinese is bereft of allomorphs: each morpheme in Chinese has only one pronunciation This is untrue (edit: actually, it still appears true). For instance, https://www.fluentinmandarin.com/content/chinese-characters-multiple-pronunciations/ https://www.fluentinmandarin.com/content/chinese-characters-... "会 huì or kuài – Again, completely different meanings."
- rozab 6y ago
  I suppose the unicode code block represents the whole history of the script. It was used for thousands of years, after all.
jacobolus 6y ago
Plenty of English syllables require more pen strokes than that...
- Blikkentrekker 6y ago
  There are, then again, many more legal syllables in English than 112. English has such a capacity for consonant clusters and such a large vowel inventory, as most Germanic languages do, that there are many, many possible syllables in English that are theoretically possible, that are easily pronouncible to English speakers, yet occur in no actual word. For instance, /s k r ai d th/ is a legal English syllable, of which I am fairly certain that there is no word in the English language that contains it.
  - TuringTest 6y ago
    Actually that may be a good strategy to build a random name generator for startups, to generate nice-sounding words that are not taken :-P
    - hprotagonist 6y ago
      effectively just such a system is used by pharmaceutical companies to name drug candidates. For precisely this reason.
      - Blikkentrekker 6y ago
        Well this explains quite a bit. Zeproxyn, Versalin, Aspiridon, Cotrazin, — I drew those from the æther.
  - tragomaskhalos 6y ago
    A beauty came up on Only Connect recently: "strengths". Woe betide a syllabary that attempts to cover English :)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
prennert 6y ago
This sister comment links to a video by the same Assyriologist that show cases a lot of what makes it complicated. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26009078 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26009078
samus 6y ago
Cuneiform went through a long evolution. In its early history, it did not relate to syllables, but to concepts, and was much similar to how the Chinese characters and the Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs work. At some point though, some characters became used to represent syllables, and many more specific characters ceased to be used. The Ancient Egyptian writing system had a similar evolution. Not even the CCP could replace the usage of logographic characters for the Chinese languages, but the Chinese writing system inspired several other writing systems: Hiragana, Katakana and Zhuyin/Bopomofo are all derived from it. There are also several other logographic writing systems inspired by Chinese characters, for example the Tangut script.

I've never understood why cuneiform is so _complicated_. There's only 112 syllables in the chart in the linked blog post... why do some of them require more than 10 "wedges"?

simplicio 6y ago

I think the full syllabary is larger. The cuneiform block in unicode is ~1000 characters*. (The article says "instead it uses between 600 and 1,000 characters impressed on clay to spell words", which is kind of ambigious on whether there's 600-1000 characters in the syllabary or 600-1000 per tablet, but 1000 characters would be consistant with the number of unicode codepoints)

stan_rogers 6y ago
It wasn't a strict syllabary. Like Egyptian hieroglyphs, there were logograms as well, and rebus forms were also used (combining logograms representing more than one syllable, along with syllabics). And like hieroglyphics and Central American writing systems, there were several alternativechoices representing the same syllable/consonant. 600–1000 characters is big for a syllabary, but consistent with several early writing systems. Writing ain't natural; it took us some time to figure it out, if it can be said that we've figured it out at all. (We probably won't have a real answer until we somehow manage to freeze and ship a "gold" LTS release of a language.)
- otabdeveloper4 6y ago
  Chinese is the +- the most written language today, and uses pretty much the same system these convoluted logo-syllabaries did. I don't think there is any sort of evolution or progress story to be mined here.
  - ithkuil 6y ago
    Do you find a good reference for the amount of contemporary written production per language? Chinese is often cited as the language that currently has the most native speakers (followed by spanish and the english); however written production doesn't necessarily have to follow that metric. For example I'm by no means a native English speaker yet my written production in english outweighs my native language production by several orders of magnitude (I mostly write grocery lists in my native language, that's it)
    - Blikkentrekker 6y ago
      I am not a native speaker of English and yet somehow find myself writing my todo lists in English. I produce little more texts in my native language than some social communication.
  - Blikkentrekker 6y ago
    Not quite. Chinese uses a system where every morpheme has it's own grapheme with some minor exceptions. Almost every grapheme maps to a single morpheme and thus a single pronunciation though there are obviously different morphemes with an identical pronunciation that might even be completely different parts of speech. It is more similar to how Japanese is written, which has graphemes that correspond to phonemic moræ in the language, as well as digraphs of graphemes to express more complicated moræ, as well as finally using Chinese characters to express concepts and ideas, not morphemes as it is in Chinese. Consequently, in Japanese the same Chinese character can be pronounced very differently depending on the context, similar to how, for instance the English words “kingly” and “royal” reflect the same general concept, but are pronounce very differently. What makes the situation even more complicated is that due to historical shifts in semantics, many word are now spelt with characters that no longer reflect the semantic concepts they express in modern times. On top of that, most of these grapheme combinations also have an official way to spell them within the phonemic script, and this is not as phonemic as one might want, with pronunciation exceptions being rampant. — the official way to spell them phonemically does not always map to the official way to pronounce them. I think modern Japanese might actually be a candidate for the language with the most complicated, least straightforward writing system that ever existed, given that it grows in complexity over time, rather than being simplified. The big difference, however, is that Chinese is a language that is exceptionally suited to be written in a script that has one logo for each morpheme, because Chinese is bereft of allomorphs: each morpheme in Chinese has only one pronunciation, unlike in, say English, where words such as “feet” exist, or the plural marker is pronounced as /s/ or /z/ depending on the stem it is attached to. Japanese is very much a language with allomorphs, much like English, which are not reflected in the Chinese characters, and the morphology of the Japanese verbal system is particularly ill-suited to be written how it is.
    - KMag 6y ago
      Edit: I stand corrected. See below. > Chinese is bereft of allomorphs: each morpheme in Chinese has only one pronunciation This is untrue (edit: actually, it still appears true). For instance, https://www.fluentinmandarin.com/content/chinese-characters-multiple-pronunciations/ https://www.fluentinmandarin.com/content/chinese-characters-... "会 huì or kuài – Again, completely different meanings."
rozab 6y ago
I suppose the unicode code block represents the whole history of the script. It was used for thousands of years, after all.

jacobolus 6y ago

Plenty of English syllables require more pen strokes than that...

Blikkentrekker 6y ago
There are, then again, many more legal syllables in English than 112. English has such a capacity for consonant clusters and such a large vowel inventory, as most Germanic languages do, that there are many, many possible syllables in English that are theoretically possible, that are easily pronouncible to English speakers, yet occur in no actual word. For instance, /s k r ai d th/ is a legal English syllable, of which I am fairly certain that there is no word in the English language that contains it.
- TuringTest 6y ago
  Actually that may be a good strategy to build a random name generator for startups, to generate nice-sounding words that are not taken :-P
  - hprotagonist 6y ago
    effectively just such a system is used by pharmaceutical companies to name drug candidates. For precisely this reason.
    - Blikkentrekker 6y ago
      Well this explains quite a bit. Zeproxyn, Versalin, Aspiridon, Cotrazin, — I drew those from the æther.
- tragomaskhalos 6y ago
  A beauty came up on Only Connect recently: "strengths". Woe betide a syllabary that attempts to cover English :)

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

prennert 6y ago

This sister comment links to a video by the same Assyriologist that show cases a lot of what makes it complicated. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26009078 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26009078

samus 6y ago

Cuneiform went through a long evolution. In its early history, it did not relate to syllables, but to concepts, and was much similar to how the Chinese characters and the Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs work. At some point though, some characters became used to represent syllables, and many more specific characters ceased to be used. The Ancient Egyptian writing system had a similar evolution. Not even the CCP could replace the usage of logographic characters for the Chinese languages, but the Chinese writing system inspired several other writing systems: Hiragana, Katakana and Zhuyin/Bopomofo are all derived from it. There are also several other logographic writing systems inspired by Chinese characters, for example the Tangut script.