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How to write in Cuneiform

(www.openculture.com)
100 points PaulHoule | 1 comments | 09 Oct 25 22:58 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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eloisius ◴[10 Oct 25 00:00 UTC] No.45534254[source]▶
> Like Japan’s kanji alphabet, the oldest writing system in the world is syllabic.

I think they have that mixed up with hiragana and katakana. Kanji are Chinese characters.

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thaumasiotes ◴[10 Oct 25 01:53 UTC] No.45534765[source]▶
Well, if you call them kanji, they're Japanese characters. (Japanese characters with a name that literally means "Chinese characters", but still not Chinese characters.) Kanji are very much not syllabic.

But Chinese characters are.

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pezezin ◴[10 Oct 25 05:40 UTC] No.45535649[source]▶
Chinese characters are syllabic in the sense that most Chinese words are just one syllable. But still the characters have a meaning associated to them, that's why there can be dozens of characters that map to the same syllable.
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1. thaumasiotes ◴[10 Oct 25 06:05 UTC] No.45535762[source]▶
> Chinese characters are syllabic in the sense that most Chinese words are just one syllable. But still the characters have a meaning associated to them

Well, there is semantic information included in the spelling of Chinese words. Far more than is included in other, non-Japanese writing systems.

But that won't stop the script from being syllabic any more than the same phenomenon in every other written language will stop its script from being syllabic or alphabetic. English script is alphabetic even though way is spelled differently from weigh.

Meaning is not used in determining the pronunciation of a Chinese character. (Except to the extent that the same character may have separate uses, as when 長 is pronounced zhang3 if it means 'grow' and chang2 if it means 'long'.) A character indicates a sound, and it always indicates that sound regardless of the meaning of the word in which it appears. This is as pure as syllabaries get.

Kanji do not share those properties. They are not restricted to single syllables. They frequently stand for several different unrelated words. They do not represent any particular sound. They may be drafted into any word with a vaguely appropriate meaning, even if that word is conventionally spelled with other kanji.

> most Chinese words are just one syllable

This is false; they're mostly two syllables.