I saw him give a live talk at Boring Conference a few years ago and the way his beard quivers in person is really quite something. Extremely hard to not warm to the man immediately.
He also taught Tom to play The Royal Game of Ur [1], a Middle-Eastern precursor to Backgammon that was the Chess of that era in terms of popularity. Irving was the one to decipher the rules from a cuneiform tablet.
I went down the cuneiform rabbit hole last summer after listening to the excellent “Fall of Civilizations Podcast” episode about Sumer:
https://youtu.be/d2lJUOv0hLA
This led to many of Finkel’s videos and the book mentioned in this post. (So far I’m not too impressed with the book, TBH.)
I've never understood why cuneiform is so _complicated_. There's only 112 syllables in the chart in the linked blog post... why do some of them require more than 10 "wedges"?
Cuneiform went through a long evolution. In its early history, it did not relate to syllables, but to concepts, and was much similar to how the Chinese characters and the Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs work. At some point though, some characters became used to represent syllables, and many more specific characters ceased to be used. The Ancient Egyptian writing system had a similar evolution.
Not even the CCP could replace the usage of logographic characters for the Chinese languages, but the Chinese writing system inspired several other writing systems: Hiragana, Katakana and Zhuyin/Bopomofo are all derived from it. There are also several other logographic writing systems inspired by Chinese characters, for example the Tangut script.
I think the full syllabary is larger. The cuneiform block in unicode is ~1000 characters*.
(The article says "instead it uses between 600 and 1,000 characters impressed on clay to spell words", which is kind of ambigious on whether there's 600-1000 characters in the syllabary or 600-1000 per tablet, but 1000 characters would be consistant with the number of unicode codepoints)
It wasn't a strict syllabary. Like Egyptian hieroglyphs, there were logograms as well, and rebus forms were also used (combining logograms representing more than one syllable, along with syllabics). And like hieroglyphics and Central American writing systems, there were several alternativechoices representing the same syllable/consonant. 600–1000 characters is big for a syllabary, but consistent with several early writing systems. Writing ain't natural; it took us some time to figure it out, if it can be said that we've figured it out at all. (We probably won't have a real answer until we somehow manage to freeze and ship a "gold" LTS release of a language.)
Chinese is the +- the most written language today, and uses pretty much the same system these convoluted logo-syllabaries did. I don't think there is any sort of evolution or progress story to be mined here.
Chinese uses a system where every morpheme has it's own grapheme with some minor exceptions. Almost every grapheme maps to a single morpheme and thus a single pronunciation though there are obviously different morphemes with an identical pronunciation that might even be completely different parts of speech.
It is more similar to how Japanese is written, which has graphemes that correspond to phonemic moræ in the language, as well as digraphs of graphemes to express more complicated moræ, as well as finally using Chinese characters to express concepts and ideas, not morphemes as it is in Chinese. Consequently, in Japanese the same Chinese character can be pronounced very differently depending on the context, similar to how, for instance the English words “kingly” and “royal” reflect the same general concept, but are pronounce very differently.
What makes the situation even more complicated is that due to historical shifts in semantics, many word are now spelt with characters that no longer reflect the semantic concepts they express in modern times.
On top of that, most of these grapheme combinations also have an official way to spell them within the phonemic script, and this is not as phonemic as one might want, with pronunciation exceptions being rampant. — the official way to spell them phonemically does not always map to the official way to pronounce them.
I think modern Japanese might actually be a candidate for the language with the most complicated, least straightforward writing system that ever existed, given that it grows in complexity over time, rather than being simplified.
The big difference, however, is that Chinese is a language that is exceptionally suited to be written in a script that has one logo for each morpheme, because Chinese is bereft of allomorphs: each morpheme in Chinese has only one pronunciation, unlike in, say English, where words such as “feet” exist, or the plural marker is pronounced as /s/ or /z/ depending on the stem it is attached to.
Japanese is very much a language with allomorphs, much like English, which are not reflected in the Chinese characters, and the morphology of the Japanese verbal system is particularly ill-suited to be written how it is.
These are not allomorphs; these are the minor exceptions where one grapheme can refer to two different morphemes. — in each of those examples, the meaning changes with a different pronunciation.
Allomorphs do not change meaning, and typically occur in complementary distribution. A good example would be the English words “a” and “an” being allomorphs, “a” can only occur where “an” can not, and vice versā, and both have the exact same meaning and function.
Off topic but I read your whole post and still have no idea what you're talking about. I've never even heard of have the words you're using. I would need to Google a lot to work it out.
- Grapheme: simply any symbol or character used in a script
- Morpheme: the fundamental unit of meaning in a language, any part of speech whose meaning cannot be further subdivided “sleepwalkers” is thus composed of four morphemes: ”sleep”, “walk”, “er”, and “s”.
- Allomorph: a different pronunciation of a same morpheme, typically dictated by grammatical or phonological reasons. The English words “a” and “an” are allomorphs.
- Mora: a unit of timing that is relevant to the phonology of some languages. English is intuitively divided into syllables by it's speakers, which is a structural unit built around a syllabic nucleus, in English' case a vowel; Japanese is intuitively divided into moræ by it's speakers, which is a unit of time. English speakers typically find it hard to count moræ; Japanese speakers find it hard to count syllables. In Chinese, moræ and syllables are one and the same, with each syllable being pronounced in the same length; in English syllables have variable length with stressed syllables being longer, and mor constantly spaced apart compared to unstressed syllables and the vowel of the syllable also influences the length with some vowels being longer than others.
- Phoneme: the fundamental unit of sound in a language. The English word “English” is composed of the phonemes: /I ng g l I S/ with each phoneme separated by spaces. Different languages differ in what they consider different phonemes. Most famously, Japanese considers what English considers as two different phonemes in /r/ and /l/ as one and the same phoneme, thus Japanese speakers find it difficult to hear the difference between the English words “root” /r u t/ and “loot” /l u t/.
Firstly thanks for taking the time to reply. I had no idea any of this even existed except phoneme. And believe it or not only that because my daughter (I think 8 at the time) came home from school one day with homework about them.
> Chinese uses a system where every morpheme has it's own grapheme with some minor exceptions. Almost every grapheme maps to a single morpheme and thus a single pronunciation
"Almost" being the key word here. I found 1043 Traditional Chinese characters which have more than one pronunciation in CC-CEDICT (ignoring fifth-tone variants). Since that's such a short list, I'll include it in full here:
Interestingly, the equivalent list for Simplified Chinese is shorter (only 1013 characters) because, although many characters with different pronunciation have been unified, many of those already had more than one pronunciation in Traditional Chinese, so the total number of characters with multiple pronunciations decreased.
Some of those are cases where one grapheme represents multiple morphemes, e.g. 的 (number 15 in the list), which originally represented a target (as in 目的 mù dì aim, objective) but is more commonly used as a grammatical particle (as in 我的書 wǒ de shū my book) and purely as a phonetic sign in 的士 (dī shì/dí shì taxi).
Others are remnants of derivational processes similar to English "foot" vs. "feet", e.g. 中 (third last in the list) pronounced zhōng as a noun (center, middle) but zhòng as a verb (as in 中的 zhòng dì hit the target).
In a reply to a reply, you give the example of English "a" turning into "an" if the following word starts with a vowel. That's analogous to 一 (yī one) changing tone depending on the following syllable, e.g. 一個 (yí gè one), 一起 (yì qǐ together).
Then there's register differences like 血 (xiě/xuè/xuě informal/formal/confused for blood) as in 出血 (chū xiě bleed) vs 血壓 (xuè yā blood pressure)
And that's just the standard language. In everyday speech, people have another set of colloquial vocabulary to draw on, which they may or may not be able to associate with corresponding characters.
It's not as complex as Japanese, but the relationship between writing and pronunciation isn't quite one-to-one for Chinese either.
Do you find a good reference for the amount of contemporary written production per language?
Chinese is often cited as the language that currently has the most native speakers (followed by spanish and the english); however written production doesn't necessarily have to follow that metric.
For example I'm by no means a native English speaker yet my written production in english outweighs my native language production by several orders of magnitude (I mostly write grocery lists in my native language, that's it)
There are, then again, many more legal syllables in English than 112.
English has such a capacity for consonant clusters and such a large vowel inventory, as most Germanic languages do, that there are many, many possible syllables in English that are theoretically possible, that are easily pronouncible to English speakers, yet occur in no actual word.
For instance, /s k r ai d th/ is a legal English syllable, of which I am fairly certain that there is no word in the English language that contains it.
I taught myself Linear B one summer, and found remembering all the signs hugely difficult despite its more or less pictographic nature (you don't necessarily know what they are pictures of, but the pictorial nature nevertheless aids memory) - and forgot nearly all of it very quickly. Cuneiform looks at least an order of magnitude more difficult.
As a member I have been missing visiting the British Museum.
I have been stuck at home since January last year. I have been enjoying the videos they have been released. Such as the walkthroughs of the exhibits etc. Or the cinema specials they released in previous years. Most can be found on Youtube.
