{"id":26,"date":"2011-01-05T19:31:28","date_gmt":"2011-01-06T03:31:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/?p=26"},"modified":"2011-04-03T22:06:10","modified_gmt":"2011-04-04T05:06:10","slug":"akkadian-cuneiform","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/2011\/01\/05\/akkadian-cuneiform\/","title":{"rendered":"Akkadian cuneiform — ~2300 BC, Iraq"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Akkadian "ari"<\/p><\/div>\n

The Sumerians and the Akkadians lived near each other for quite a while, with the culture of the Sumerian city-states being dominant at first.\u00a0\u00a0 Eventually the Akkadians recognized a good thing, so adopted writing from the Sumerian cuneiform<\/a>.\u00a0 The Akkadian king Sargon conquered the Sumerians in about 2300BC, so even though the Sumerian language and writing did hang around until about 1800 BC, Akkadian became more and more important and Sumerian less and less.<\/p>\n

The Sumerian and Akkadian languages are not at all related: Akkadian is a Semitic language, and Sumerian doesn’t have any relatives that we know of (in linguistics-speak,it is\u00a0 a “language isolate”).\u00a0 The structure of Akkadian was different enough that the Sumerian cuneiform was a bit cumbersome to use to write the Akkadian language.\u00a0 For the Akkadians to read Sumerian logograms out loud, they needed to choose whether they were going to use the Sumerian word or the Akkadian word.\u00a0 Furthermore, while Sumerian had a number of phonetic symbols, they were for the sounds of Sumerian, not for Akkadian.<\/p>\n

(Imagine if English were written with a writing system that was partially logographic, partially phonetic, that the French had invented.\u00a0 For the symbol representing flowing water, would I read out “fleuve” or “river”?\u00a0 If I wanted to write down “cheek”, they best I could probably do would be “sheek”, which would sound like the French chic<\/em>.\u00a0 That’s sort of like the problem the Akkadians had with Sumerian, but French is much, much<\/em> more closely related to English than Sumerian is to Akkadian.)<\/p>\n

It is then perhaps no surprise that the Akkadians made major changes to the script that the Sumerians used.\u00a0 It was still cuneiform, but remember that cuneiform is a writing technology<\/em> (i.e. reeds and clay) and not a writing system<\/em>,\u00a0 in the same way that “pen and paper” is a writing technology and not a writing system.<\/p>\n

While Akkadians still used a few logograms, they mostly wrote in syllables — there would be one syllable pronounced “ra”, one pronounced “ku”, etc.\u00a0 To write a word pronounced “bakri”, then, you would write the character for “bak” and then the character for “ri”.\u00a0 Syllabic writing systems (or syllabaries<\/em>) are probably the most common type of writing system among all writing systems.<\/p>\n

Here’s a way to impress your friends!\u00a0 Next time you’re at a party and see some cuneiform*, you can tell people if it is Sumerian, upside-down, or a forgery.\u00a0 If there are glyphs\u00a0 composed of more than just the wedge shapes and the little pointy-boomerang things (called “Winkelhaken<\/a>“), then it is Sumerian.\u00a0 (Particularly if some glyphs are sort of shaded with lines or hash marks.)\u00a0 By the time the Akkadians came along, they only used wedges and Winkelhakens, and the the wedge shapes were very<\/em> rarely oriented to have the thick part on the right and the thin edge on the left.<\/p>\n

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Probably legitimate cuneiform<\/p><\/div>\n

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Probably upside-down cuneiform<\/p><\/div>\n

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Probably badly forged cuneiform<\/p><\/div>\n

*Yeah, right.\u00a0 Like that’s going to happen.<\/p>\n

Links: Wikipedia<\/a>, Omniglot<\/a>, Ancientscripts<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Sumerians and the Akkadians lived near each other for quite a while, with the culture of the Sumerian city-states being dominant at first.\u00a0\u00a0 Eventually the Akkadians recognized a good thing, so adopted writing from the Sumerian cuneiform.\u00a0 The Akkadian … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,11,28,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-logograms-language-types","category-previous-script-didnt-quite-work","category-interesting","category-syllabaries-language-types"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}