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How to write in Cuneiform

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100 points PaulHoule | 1 comments | 09 Oct 25 22:58 UTC | HN request time: 0.311s | source
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cpfohl ◴[10 Oct 25 02:17 UTC] No.45534863[source]▶
6 years to master a syllabic alphabet seems like a stretch...They seem to be crossing learning the language and learning the writing system.

I studied Greek and Hebrew in college, Latin in high school. In each the very first night's homework was to memorize the characters and their pronunciation.

Multiple ANE cultures used cuneiform (Ugaritic, Akkadian, Sumerian, Hittite, and so on). The time to master each depends on your native language, the target language, and exposure to similar languages. The writing system is not the hard part.

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marc_abonce ◴[10 Oct 25 02:51 UTC] No.45535005[source]▶
It's true that learning an alphabet shouldn't take as long as learning the entire language. However, there's still a difference with cuneiform:

All of the examples you mentioned are derivatives of the Phoenician alphabet, which have around 20 to 30 characters each. Even with case sensitiveness and diacritics, I think they still add up to under a hundred characters.

Cuneiform character sets are in the order of magnitude of the several hundreds or even thousands, depending on the language[1], so I imagine that the experience is closer to learning to read Chinese or Japanese and less like Hebrew and Greek.

That being said, I've never tried to learn neither cuneiform or hanzi, so I'm just guessing based on the number of characters.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuneiform#Sign_inventories

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1. efskap ◴[10 Oct 25 04:15 UTC] No.45535327[source]▶
In addition, Akkadian used cuneiform not only for phonemic writing, but also had many signs borrowed as-is from Sumerian as logograms (sumerograms), e.g. for the words for sheep and king. So in that sense it is indeed very similar to Japanese.