Language Learners' Library

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I’m gonna talk about four things in this post to save some space.

  1. Vocabulary Challenge: The Tools of the Trade
Tools of the Trade
  1. the farmer’s plough
  2. the soldier’s spear
  3. the butcher’s knife
  4. the baker’s oven
  5. the builder’s shovel
  6. the scribe’s ink
  7. the jester’s balls
  8. the merchant’s coins
  9. the musician’s flute
  10. the scholar’s books
  1. Grammar Challenge: The Imperative
The Imperative
  1. Come over here.
  2. Go away.
  3. Drink the potion.
  4. Boil the water.
  5. Be quiet.
  6. Write this down.
  7. Tell me more.
  8. Speak up!
  9. Answer truthfully.
  10. Don’t complain.

  1. I notice that so far, judging by the header table, the languages we have fluency in are English, Italian, Russian, Czech, and Chinese and the languages we’re trying to learn are Chinese, Japanese, Latin, and Esperanto. So we only overlap on Chinese.

  2. Ramble:

About writing systems

I’ve been reading about writing systems on Wikipedia a bit lately, and that’s got me thinking. The first writing system was Sumerian cuneiform, which was invented, obviously, by the Sumerians. They spoke a “language isolate”, a language that cannot be reliably shown to have relationships to others. It gradually transitioned into Sumo-Akkadian cuneiform, under the influence of Akkadian which was a Semitic language.

There are then two tenuous connections which may or may not exist. Cuneiform might be the ancestor of Egyptian hieroglyphs, and it might also be the ancestor of Chinese characters. But also, it could be only one or neither case. Cuneiform existed in many different versions until about the second century CE. Hieroglyphs (representing Egyptian, a non-Semitic Afro-Asiatic language) went off and did their own thing, becoming first Hieratic and then Demotic, which still survives to some extent in Coptic church writings. However, hieroglyphs also evolved into an alphabet, used by the Phoenicians to represent their Semitic language.

The Phoenician alphabet was phenomenally successful, spawning the scripts of the other Semitic languages Hebrew and Arabic. It also spread west to become the Greek and, indeed, the Latin alphabets, which were used to transcribe Indo-European languages. In the modern world many more languages have adopted the Latin script, from language families in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania.

The Phoenician script even formed the basis of the Nagari alphabets of India, which were used with Indo-European and Dravidian languages.

I made a set of tables to show how the spread of writing may have moved across linguistic boundaries.

Script Language Language family
Sumerian cuneiform Sumerian Isolate
Sumo-Akkadian cuneiform Akkadian Afro-Asiatic
Egyptian hieroglyphs Egyptian Afro-Asiatic
Phoenician alphabet Phoenician Afro-Asiatic
Latin alphabet Latin Indo-European
Latin alphabet, later Many languages Multiple families
International Phonetic Alphabet Every language All families
Script Language Language family
Sumerian cuneiform Sumerian Isolate
Sumo-Akkadian cuneiform Akkadian Afro-Asiatic
Egyptian hieroglyphs Egyptian Afro-Asiatic
Phoenician alphabet Phoenician Afro-Asiatic
Nagari Indian languages Indo-European, Dravidian
Script Language Language family
Sumerian cuneiform Sumerian Isolate
Sumo-Akkadian cuneiform Akkadian Afro-Asiatic
Egyptian hieroglyphs Egyptian Afro-Asiatic
Hieratic Egyptian Afro-Asiatic
Demotic Egyptian Afro-Asiatic
Script Language Language family
Sumerian cuneiform Sumerian Isolate
Sumo-Akkadian cuneiform Akkadian Afro-Asiatic
Chinese characters Chinese languages Sino-Tibetan
Kana Japanese Japonic

In summary, I just find it cool that, if hieroglyphs and Chinese characters were both descended from or influenced by some stage of Sumo-Akkadian cuneiform, almost everyone in the world (apart from the Koreans) uses a writing system influenced to varying degrees by Afro-Asiatic languages. I wonder if there are any common remnants of the language structures of that family in our modern scripts.