Відео

Great to have you 🙂

Totally doable. You'll notice that a lot of people in these videos are hobbyists. Very dedicated hobbyists, but still ;-)

I know essentially nothing about Sumerian word formation,but I'm guessing they may have had an expression for "ox-driven water pump," where the part meaning "ox-driven" over centuries of development and interaction with other languages may have acquired a metaphoric sense of automatic, meaning "it works without needing human labour", allowing it to be combined with any tool or other item besides a mere water pump, such as a needle for a sewing machine, a carriage for an automobile, a bird for an airplane, or as here with an abacus for a computer, even as there are no real oxen involved in operating it.

That's done when we're not yet sure how a sign was pronounced in a given context. Many signs are (very) polyvalent - a bit like # being read "number", "hash" or "pound" in English. Often you can tell from syllabic signs after it what the correct reading was, but sometimes you cannot - and then you write it in caps, like: HASH, indicating it's the HASH sign, but it could be read e.g. "number", too.

I think you're missing the point of this class.

Well, I checked your channel, and although I did find videos like "The Reptilian Enemy," I did not find an improved course on this ancient language.

It's called a Witch Pen, made by William Mitchell Calligraphy in the UK - they have a list of distributors on their website. The pens are rather inexpensive, I bought a few different sizes. When you first get them, you need to remove the (invisible) protective coating on the surface - water and dish soap or alcohol will do for that. They work great for papyrus where normal calligraphy pens fail. If you only write on paper, you can use a regular dip pen, as long as it's wide enough, e.g. 2 mm wide. Hope this helps 🙂

Great! If you like, you can also join our server (link in the description) - it's free and there are Egyptian learners or all levels in there, from newbie to pro.

Not sure I understand ... it's called "Learn Sumerian"? Akkadian may show up occasionally since we rediscovered Sumerian through Akkadian and because the two languages are so intertwined.

Great! Actually, the language in this course is Ramesside Late Egyptian ... in between Middle Egyptian and Demotic / Coptic, so you will see a lot of similarities - I would say 70% similar (as a house number). It's a great place to learn more about earlier Egyptian when you already know Coptic.

The majority of words is written with a combination of sound and meaning signs. This is very similar to what Chinese, Luwian, Sumerian and Maya also do - I would go as far as to say that all original writing systems that were not inspired by another work this way. The shape of the symbols used is of secondary importance - English would not be more or less alphabetic if we used a literal apple as the symbol for A. Re: decipherment - done. Hasn’t been an issue for 200 years now. It’s like asking if we really know how electricity behaves. Yeah, I think we have that one down. Similarity with Coptic - about 70% for Late Egyptian, the stage of the langauge discussed here. A Copt cannot directly understand it but will recognize a lot of words / phrases - and sometimes you can read entire Late Egyptian sentences out in Coptic (but normally you have to change a few words to make it proper Coptic, 1000 years of language change in between). Much less similarity for Middle Egyptian, because its so much older - modern English speakers normally cannot understand AngloSaxon either without learning it. A lot of this is discussed in the first video of this series, check the beginning of the Late Egyptian playlist.

@@learnhieraticsumerian4208 Thank you so much for your most-covering answer.

@@learnhieraticsumerian4208 I completely agree with you about Chinese and Luwian, but yet I disagree concerning Sumerian. Their symbols didn't look anything like palms, feet, other body parts or objects. They were abstract symbols and looked way higher (abstract) level of writing, like of a next generation, whereas the A.E. writing seems to have been primitive, which makes it hard to believe those cultures were developing at the same epoch. To me it is like there's a huge periodical gap between the two though what is ackward to me is the Sumero-Akadian culture seems more ancient than A.E. one. Yes, I know they are dated to the same epochs yet... Well, do you know what the two peoples knew of each other, what diplomatic relationships they had, what artefacts they shared? Thanks in advance!

"Their symbols didn't look anything like palms, feet ..." - this is based on a false premise: early cuneiform looks just as pictorial as early Chinese or Egyptian hieroglyphs. Take a look at e.g. Labat to see the original forms - archive.org/details/LabatR.ManuelDEpigraphieAkkadienne5Ed1976/page/n39/mode/2up. The original shape of 𒊕 (sag̃, "head") is clearly a picture of a head. 𒅗 (gu3 "voice", inim "word", ka(g) "mouth" etc.), is the same sign with a little extra mark, 𒋗 (šu "hand") is a hand with 5 fingers, 𒀭(dig̃ir "god", an "sky") is a star and so forth. The reason they look more abstract to you is because you are looking at highly linearized forms that came about after a few centuries of pressing them into clay. The same thing happened with Chinese characters (what images are there in 情？) and Egyptian hieratic. The writing material influences the shape the characters take, but it doesn't change the way the writing system works. You wouldn't be able to recognize many hieratic symbols and yet they correspond 1:1 to the much more recognizable hieroglyphs - which tells you that, again, the shape of the signs means nothing. As to whether Egyptian writing was influenced by Sumerian writing (or vice versa) - not impossible, but I see no reason to assume that. Egyptian writing fits the Egyptian language. 𓁹𓏏𓏤 jrt is "eye" and 𓁹 is also used for the verb jrj "to do", because it has almost the same sound. 𓂋𓏤 r is "mouth" and also used to write the letter "r" in other words because, again, same sound. You can see that whoever designed this writing system was a native speaker of Egyptian, the system wasn't imported from someplace else that spoke a different language. The same is visible in Chinese: 青，情， 清，静，精 are all pronounced qing or jing because they have the same phonetic element in them (青). Look at the kun reading for the same characters in Japanese and they'd be read differently because Japanese took a system that was made for a completely different language and mapped the characters onto their own words based on meaning (the same happens for Sumerian signs in Akkadian). You normally cannot guess the pronunciation of Japanese characters from their constituents while you can most of the time in Chinese => you can tell whether a writing system was designed for the language it was used for or not. In the case of Egyptian, Sumerian, and Chinese they were clearly designed for the language they are used for based on sign-sound correspondences. Not so for Akkadian, Hittite or Japanese. The idea of writing may have been transferred from Mesopotamia to Egypt or vice versa, but that's neither here nor there (impossible to prove, unless a Sumerian text shows up in Egypt or an Egyptian text in Mesopotamia ca 3400 BCE). Finally, can you read any of the three systems? If not, I would encourage you to learn at least one of them. Otherwise it's like trying to write a symphony without playing an instrument first ... probably not going to lead to anything. Not gate-keeping, btw, wanting more people to learn these languages is why we keep putting out these courses. Once you can read them (I'm fluent in Chinese and Egyptian and took beginners' Sumerian), a lot of that "mystery" goes away - and instead you can focus on problems that are a lot more interesting, actually, rather than doubting the standard chronology or whether Egyptologists & Sumerologists know what they are doing (they do ;-) ).

@@learnhieraticsumerian4208 First of all, Live long for such vast explanation! Use this comments for your new future video on pictograms of the AS and AE either as compared or as separated in different topics. Are you a Sumerologist, too?

etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi?text=c.1.8.1*# - Sumerian version of Gilgamesh at the ETCSL.

Overall yes :-). Egyptian II (Late, Demotic, Coptic) is to Egyptian I (Old, Middle, Neo-Middle) like Italian to Latin: a different language, but with a lot of similarities and a large number of words being used throughout the 4,000+ year history of Egyptian. Just don't underestimate how different the grammar of Middle Egyptian and Coptic are ... 2,000+ years don't just go by without change. Oh, and feel free to join our server (in the description) - lots of Coptic enthusiasts and some active reading / study groups.

@@learnhieraticsumerian4208 Interesting. Thanks for the info. I may check out the server once I'm better established with the language. Haven't started it properly yet. Thanks.

Having read up on this, I now see that some experts believe that the '-un-' sometimes written in 'mu-un-ni-' wasn't really superfluous, because the /n/ was genuinely geminated/long. But yeah, nobody seems to think that the contractions were just orthographic.

ua-cam.com/video/LDGXv7cbKpU/v-deo.htmlsi=KPKOYASK5a-6McND

How are you doing after one month?

I read this somewhere too, but I was thinking, can it be that we think this, because Akkadian is a semitic language, and in semitic languages h is fricative? But what if its just how akkadians "heard" it, but really when a sumerian spoke it, it was just h?

Thanks for sharing this, really happy to hear it and I wish you both all the best! Let me know if y'all ever want to "stop by" the reading group.

@@learnhieraticsumerian4208 Thank you! I will happily tell her about the invitation. You and other educators are providing a wonderful community service.

I think you're right. Thanks for pointing this out!

Hi! There's the introductory Late Egyptian series (= New Kingdom Egyptian) that starts from scratch. Not going to lie, the beginning is a little steep in terms of learning the writing system, because we wanted to get to the more interesting stuff more quickly (how to actually make sentences, the different verb forms etc.). How to read Egyptian hieroglyphs by Collier & Manley is a great introduction to get to know the writing system and some useful vocabulary and basic grammar.