5 ms·

I remember learning that cuneiform isn't an alphabet and doesn't have characters, but rather characters to write syllables so it could be used to spell English

I remember learning that cuneiform isn't an alphabet and doesn't have characters, but rather characters to write syllables so it could be used to spell English or Chinese.

pythonlion 5y ago
Its more complicated then that. for example Akkadian is a language that used the Sumerian cuneiform. the way they used it was divided into two. Sumerian was written in a simple way that in which every word have unique symbol. the first advancement in written happened with the second written language Akkadian as so: first, because of many words in Sumerian had only 1 consonant the Akkadians used the symbol of that word to represent 1 consonant. let say the world Ki in Sumerian meant a star and had a symbol * you can use that symbol in you language to write *d and read it "kid" (but you also need a sign for d, I don't have real example). second the used complete Sumerian symbols but read them in Akkadian like Korean used Chinese symbols until 1500. this got evolved until the Assyrian which used old Akkadian system and the new (normal) alphabet system that was invented by the Phoenician long time after.
- philipov 5y ago
  Japanese is a better example than Korean. Hanzi/Kanji are Chinese ideographic characters adopted by Japan and still used today. But Chinese is an 'analytic' language that uses grammatical words instead of conjugation (much like most of English). Japanese words have significant and complex morphology depending on the grammatical context, and Chinese characters aren't well suited for writing that. Ideographs aren't great for languages where the same word is written differently depending on the tense, case, person, etc (like English '-ed' for past tense; 'is' vs 'was'). They're good when you have a distinct word for expressing those things (like English 'will' for future tense). The Hiragana syllabus was developed to write the grammatical parts of words. It was developed by taking existing Chinese characters, just like you described with Akkadian, and simplifying them to make them easier to write. Many Japanese words will contain a mix of writing systems, with the root of the word written in ideographic Kanji and the grammatical conjugation written in syllabaric Hiragana. And there's also Katakana which is a syllabus of even further simplified characters derived from Hiragana, which is used for writing loan words not derived from either Chinese or Japanese. It's of course a bit more complicated and messy than just what I described, but that's the gist of it.
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    It has been a very long time since Chinese was anything other than a complicated syllabary. Amusingly, most literate Chinese do not recognize it, because of complicated rules for which of several characters for each of the ~1200 syllables may be used to spell each word; and the huge overload of homonyms sometimes depend on such a rule to help disambiguate. Most also imagine that non-Mandarin Chinese languages are just dialects of Mandarin with "pronunciation differences", not full-fledged languages. They read texts written by, e.g, Shanghai speakers, and do not realize that the text written has been translated to Mandarin. Most people speaking another such Chinese language are not literate in that language, and rely on written Mandarin, translating as they go. This happens even on nominally "local-dialect" forums. Of course all this has deep political implications, so is not safe to discuss there.
    - philipov 5y ago
      > non-Mandarin Chinese languages are ... full-fledged languages But do they have a flag?
      - ncmncm 5y ago
        They have feathers.
    - BurningFrog 5y ago
      "A language is a dialect with it's own army"
    - babesh 5y ago
      My limited understanding is that the reality is muddier than them being full fledged languages that originated independently and share only a common written language. That is a Western overused trope. Cantonese seems more a hybrid language akin to English in that it is a blend of Tang Chinese during a migration of Chinese from further north and the language(s) of people already living in that area. The Cantonese description of the entire Chinese ethnic group is literally the Tang people. It applies to all of what is considered subgroups including Teochew, Taisan, Hakka, etc... Cantonese definitely shares similar pronunciations for certain basic words with other Chinese dialects/languages. Also, Cantonese is just one language in the area. There are other dialects that preserve Tang Chinese pronunciation more clearly and are closer to Mandarin. My Chinese surname in my dialect sounds exactly like it would in Mandarin but not in Cantonese. Supposedly Cantonese is actually closer to Tang Chinese than Mandarin because operas/poems from Tang times still rhymne in Cantonese but not Mandarin. This is supposedly due to language drift rather than them not sharing some common ancestry. Think more of the Norman invasion and how German (proto Viet and who knows what else) merged with French (Tang Chinese) to create English... and then suppose England and France would periodically merge and separate instead of splitting apart decisively after the Hundreds Year War. Thus Cantonese and the other similar languages are definitely full fledged but there is also some shared ancestry with Mandarin. Also there is a long, long history of a common written language. People may wish to highlight one aspect or another. Is it English or French if the histories are much more intertwined? Does that question even make sense or is asking that question mostly political? Someone else may have more knowledge of origins of other Chinese dialects/languages.
DFHippie 5y ago
The number of symbols a syllabary would have to have to represent all the syllables of Sumerian (and Akkadian and Babylonian and whatnot) and both English and Chinese is monstrous. English has syllables like "strengths". Chinese has four tones.
tasogare 5y ago
I wish people could stop spreading lies about writing systems; giving 3 false information in a single sentence is quite a feat. Of course cuneiform writing is a set of characters, a lot of which being encoded in Unicode starting at U+12000 codepoint. One character doesn't equate a syllable, some even are unpronunced (determiners), and the phonology of Sumerian make its a poor way for its writing system to transcribe English.
- macintux 5y ago
  It’s entirely possible to correct someone politely, and it’s strongly encouraged here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - tasogare 5y ago
    My comment isn't unpolite in any way. On the other hand your patronizing comment is rude, so it would be good you start applying to yourself what you are preaching.
    - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
      > giving 3 false information in a single sentence is quite a feat. I'm with macintux. I think that was rather rude. Nor do I think macintux was patronizing.
    - ttctciyf 5y ago
      "Spreading lies" is a perjorative way of referring to speech. "Lies" implies intent to deceive and excludes the possibility of a simple mistake. You may not have intended to impute intentional deception to someone, but that is what you did, and it's offensive.
    - ant6n 5y ago
      Its also possible to be correct and still downvoted into oblivion.
NotChina 5y ago
True except in Persian. Given it was introduced by Sumerians who were not Semitic, you get vowels. Adoption by the Semitic peoples preserved vowels.
hiddencache 5y ago
Many thanks for all the clarifications, appreciated. School was a long time ago and my recollection was hazy.

I remember learning that cuneiform isn't an alphabet and doesn't have characters, but rather characters to write syllables so it could be used to spell English or Chinese.

pythonlion 5y ago

Its more complicated then that. for example Akkadian is a language that used the Sumerian cuneiform. the way they used it was divided into two. Sumerian was written in a simple way that in which every word have unique symbol. the first advancement in written happened with the second written language Akkadian as so: first, because of many words in Sumerian had only 1 consonant the Akkadians used the symbol of that word to represent 1 consonant. let say the world Ki in Sumerian meant a star and had a symbol * you can use that symbol in you language to write *d and read it "kid" (but you also need a sign for d, I don't have real example). second the used complete Sumerian symbols but read them in Akkadian like Korean used Chinese symbols until 1500. this got evolved until the Assyrian which used old Akkadian system and the new (normal) alphabet system that was invented by the Phoenician long time after.

philipov 5y ago
Japanese is a better example than Korean. Hanzi/Kanji are Chinese ideographic characters adopted by Japan and still used today. But Chinese is an 'analytic' language that uses grammatical words instead of conjugation (much like most of English). Japanese words have significant and complex morphology depending on the grammatical context, and Chinese characters aren't well suited for writing that. Ideographs aren't great for languages where the same word is written differently depending on the tense, case, person, etc (like English '-ed' for past tense; 'is' vs 'was'). They're good when you have a distinct word for expressing those things (like English 'will' for future tense). The Hiragana syllabus was developed to write the grammatical parts of words. It was developed by taking existing Chinese characters, just like you described with Akkadian, and simplifying them to make them easier to write. Many Japanese words will contain a mix of writing systems, with the root of the word written in ideographic Kanji and the grammatical conjugation written in syllabaric Hiragana. And there's also Katakana which is a syllabus of even further simplified characters derived from Hiragana, which is used for writing loan words not derived from either Chinese or Japanese. It's of course a bit more complicated and messy than just what I described, but that's the gist of it.
- ncmncm 5y ago
  It has been a very long time since Chinese was anything other than a complicated syllabary. Amusingly, most literate Chinese do not recognize it, because of complicated rules for which of several characters for each of the ~1200 syllables may be used to spell each word; and the huge overload of homonyms sometimes depend on such a rule to help disambiguate. Most also imagine that non-Mandarin Chinese languages are just dialects of Mandarin with "pronunciation differences", not full-fledged languages. They read texts written by, e.g, Shanghai speakers, and do not realize that the text written has been translated to Mandarin. Most people speaking another such Chinese language are not literate in that language, and rely on written Mandarin, translating as they go. This happens even on nominally "local-dialect" forums. Of course all this has deep political implications, so is not safe to discuss there.
  - philipov 5y ago
    > non-Mandarin Chinese languages are ... full-fledged languages But do they have a flag?
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      They have feathers.
  - BurningFrog 5y ago
    "A language is a dialect with it's own army"
  - babesh 5y ago
    My limited understanding is that the reality is muddier than them being full fledged languages that originated independently and share only a common written language. That is a Western overused trope. Cantonese seems more a hybrid language akin to English in that it is a blend of Tang Chinese during a migration of Chinese from further north and the language(s) of people already living in that area. The Cantonese description of the entire Chinese ethnic group is literally the Tang people. It applies to all of what is considered subgroups including Teochew, Taisan, Hakka, etc... Cantonese definitely shares similar pronunciations for certain basic words with other Chinese dialects/languages. Also, Cantonese is just one language in the area. There are other dialects that preserve Tang Chinese pronunciation more clearly and are closer to Mandarin. My Chinese surname in my dialect sounds exactly like it would in Mandarin but not in Cantonese. Supposedly Cantonese is actually closer to Tang Chinese than Mandarin because operas/poems from Tang times still rhymne in Cantonese but not Mandarin. This is supposedly due to language drift rather than them not sharing some common ancestry. Think more of the Norman invasion and how German (proto Viet and who knows what else) merged with French (Tang Chinese) to create English... and then suppose England and France would periodically merge and separate instead of splitting apart decisively after the Hundreds Year War. Thus Cantonese and the other similar languages are definitely full fledged but there is also some shared ancestry with Mandarin. Also there is a long, long history of a common written language. People may wish to highlight one aspect or another. Is it English or French if the histories are much more intertwined? Does that question even make sense or is asking that question mostly political? Someone else may have more knowledge of origins of other Chinese dialects/languages.

DFHippie 5y ago

The number of symbols a syllabary would have to have to represent all the syllables of Sumerian (and Akkadian and Babylonian and whatnot) and both English and Chinese is monstrous. English has syllables like "strengths". Chinese has four tones.

tasogare 5y ago

I wish people could stop spreading lies about writing systems; giving 3 false information in a single sentence is quite a feat. Of course cuneiform writing is a set of characters, a lot of which being encoded in Unicode starting at U+12000 codepoint. One character doesn't equate a syllable, some even are unpronunced (determiners), and the phonology of Sumerian make its a poor way for its writing system to transcribe English.

macintux 5y ago
It’s entirely possible to correct someone politely, and it’s strongly encouraged here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- tasogare 5y ago
  My comment isn't unpolite in any way. On the other hand your patronizing comment is rude, so it would be good you start applying to yourself what you are preaching.
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    > giving 3 false information in a single sentence is quite a feat. I'm with macintux. I think that was rather rude. Nor do I think macintux was patronizing.
  - ttctciyf 5y ago
    "Spreading lies" is a perjorative way of referring to speech. "Lies" implies intent to deceive and excludes the possibility of a simple mistake. You may not have intended to impute intentional deception to someone, but that is what you did, and it's offensive.
  - ant6n 5y ago
    Its also possible to be correct and still downvoted into oblivion.

NotChina 5y ago

True except in Persian. Given it was introduced by Sumerians who were not Semitic, you get vowels. Adoption by the Semitic peoples preserved vowels.

hiddencache 5y ago

Many thanks for all the clarifications, appreciated. School was a long time ago and my recollection was hazy.