Every time I come across Cuneiform I'm staggered by its complexity even in its oldest examples. I'm not very familiar with the scholarship on this, but imagine that like other aspects of human invention, writing systems went through long periods of development, whose forms and articles are now lost to history, before the adoption of the existent specimens that have survived to the present day. I wonder how long merchants and tax collectors scratched symbols in the dirt or set them in temporary mud casts which have been lost to time, before bothering to fire the clay records which lasted the intervening millennia.
Proto-Afroasiatic speakers coming out of Africa would mean they did not carry Neanderthal DNA? Meaning also, they acquired Neanderthal DNA later by admixture?
It also means that agriculture was not "invented" by afroastiatic speakers? Meaning that the anatolian ancestors of the first European farmers might have spoken one of the languages spoken in the fertile crescent before the arrival of Afroasiatic speakers.
Thanks a lot for your podcast, it is the best stuff I found so far on ancient history and I got a lot of good reading ideas from it!
Thanks for another great post. I heard once that Semitic languages might have originated in what is today Ethiopia. I wonder if this is true and what scholars and experts think about it.
The thing about Afroasiatic languages is that only in them, when someone decided to try to write them phonetically, did the creators come up with an abjad, or consonantal alphabet. Egyptian hieroglyphics were the first to achieve this, then Hebrew and Phoenician. One of the things driving this may have been a grammar where consonants stayed constant and vowels varied freely around them; Semitic famously has this, and I don’t know anything about ancient Egyptian or Coptic grammar, but they may have had something similar.
Every time someone outside of an Afro-Asiatic language has tried to invent a phonetic script, it has been a syllabary, like the Japanese kanas. Cuneiform was a syllabary, because it was invented by the Sumerians, and Sumerian is not Afro-Asiatic. Akkadian is, but they took over their system from the Sumerians.
The Koreans invented a wonderful alphabet much later, around 1392 ACE; but their scholars would have been aware of Indian alphabets as well as Chinese characters.
Question: I studied Japanese and lived in Japan for a couple of years. Japanese is an Altaic language (Turkish, Russian, etc). How the heck, do you suppose, did Japanese relate to the other Altaic languages?? This has always stumped me.
Russian is an Indo-European language, a member of the Slavic sub-group of the Balto-Slavic branch. Japanese is more usually considered a language isolate, without any known relatives, than a member of a broader family; the Altaic hypothesis isn't universally accepted. Among scholars who do accept it, however, the most common idea I've heard is that Proto-Altaic was spoken somewhere in northeastern China or Manchuria, near the Korean border, between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago.
Every time I come across Cuneiform I'm staggered by its complexity even in its oldest examples. I'm not very familiar with the scholarship on this, but imagine that like other aspects of human invention, writing systems went through long periods of development, whose forms and articles are now lost to history, before the adoption of the existent specimens that have survived to the present day. I wonder how long merchants and tax collectors scratched symbols in the dirt or set them in temporary mud casts which have been lost to time, before bothering to fire the clay records which lasted the intervening millennia.
Separately I can't let mention of the ancient Sahara appear without linking to the Guelta d'Archei in modern day Chad, these amazing photos are so incredible and, I think, perhaps evoke the ancient eras of central Africa's early human history: https://www.amusingplanet.com/2014/04/guelta-darchei-surprising-oasis-in-chad.html
Those photos are so cool, thank you for sharing!
Thank you for another fascinating read.
Proto-Afroasiatic speakers coming out of Africa would mean they did not carry Neanderthal DNA? Meaning also, they acquired Neanderthal DNA later by admixture?
It also means that agriculture was not "invented" by afroastiatic speakers? Meaning that the anatolian ancestors of the first European farmers might have spoken one of the languages spoken in the fertile crescent before the arrival of Afroasiatic speakers.
Thanks a lot for your podcast, it is the best stuff I found so far on ancient history and I got a lot of good reading ideas from it!
Thanks for another great post. I heard once that Semitic languages might have originated in what is today Ethiopia. I wonder if this is true and what scholars and experts think about it.
Thank you for your always informative and entertaining posts!
The thing about Afroasiatic languages is that only in them, when someone decided to try to write them phonetically, did the creators come up with an abjad, or consonantal alphabet. Egyptian hieroglyphics were the first to achieve this, then Hebrew and Phoenician. One of the things driving this may have been a grammar where consonants stayed constant and vowels varied freely around them; Semitic famously has this, and I don’t know anything about ancient Egyptian or Coptic grammar, but they may have had something similar.
Every time someone outside of an Afro-Asiatic language has tried to invent a phonetic script, it has been a syllabary, like the Japanese kanas. Cuneiform was a syllabary, because it was invented by the Sumerians, and Sumerian is not Afro-Asiatic. Akkadian is, but they took over their system from the Sumerians.
The Koreans invented a wonderful alphabet much later, around 1392 ACE; but their scholars would have been aware of Indian alphabets as well as Chinese characters.
I can’t believe there’s not a book on the origin of afroasiatic languages. Maybe you could write that book.
Question: I studied Japanese and lived in Japan for a couple of years. Japanese is an Altaic language (Turkish, Russian, etc). How the heck, do you suppose, did Japanese relate to the other Altaic languages?? This has always stumped me.
Russian is an Indo-European language, a member of the Slavic sub-group of the Balto-Slavic branch. Japanese is more usually considered a language isolate, without any known relatives, than a member of a broader family; the Altaic hypothesis isn't universally accepted. Among scholars who do accept it, however, the most common idea I've heard is that Proto-Altaic was spoken somewhere in northeastern China or Manchuria, near the Korean border, between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago.