
What the Heck is Cuneiform, Anyway? (2015) - signor_bosco
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/what-heck-cuneiform-anyway-180956999/?no-ist
======
gliese1337
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."

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

~~~
jhbadger
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.

------
sbmassey
It recorded an early flaming in the diatribe against Engar Dug:
[http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section5/tr5411.htm](http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section5/tr5411.htm)

~~~
GnarfGnarf
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?

~~~
contingencies
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](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](http://www.brownielocks.com/beans.html)

~~~
sbmassey
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.

------
theoh
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](http://www.eyemagazine.com/review/article/elegantly-nerdish)

