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by cedex12
1876 days ago
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Alright, thanks for the clear up! I'm confused about your quote though: is "remarkably minor" meant to mean "less important than expected"? Were there other forms of "phonetic writing" at play? If yes, then does that mean that there actually were case of symbols appearing directly as written translation of phonetic "concepts"? |
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Yes.
> Were there other forms of "phonetic writing" at play?
At the time that quote was talking about? No, since at that time, proto-cuneiform (as they call it) would have been the only writing system in existence. Go forward a bit, though, and several forms of “phonetic writing” begin to appear frequently: rebuses (as in the quote), syllabic characters (e.g. [baʼugeš] was written BA-UG₇-GE, Edzard 2003), and characters for individual consonants (unattested in Sumerian, but Egyptian used them extensively).
> If yes, then does that mean that there actually were case of symbols appearing directly as written translation of phonetic "concepts"?
Exactly. (Even my earlier quote has examples of that.)