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by bradrn
1879 days ago
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> I'm confused about your quote though: is "remarkably minor" meant to mean "less important than expected"? 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.) |
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