cladking Wrote:
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> MDaines Wrote:
> -------------------------------------------------------
> > The Mercer quote was found on sacredtexts.com.
> > I’ll leave you all to the apparently huge task
> > of clarifying the groundwork that led to
> > transliterating Egyptian hieroglyphs into the
> > current understanding of them. If I thought there
> > was a straight and simple answer out there
> > somewhere, I might ask why there is such certainty
> > that the images represented sounds that could be
> > linked to an alphabet rather than entire words.
> > I’m curious but the earliest Sumerian symbols
> > (pre-cuneiform) are my subject, so I’ll leave it
> > at that. Note that I don’t refer to them as
> > proto-cuneiform because this is the study of a
> > pre-existing symbolic (pictographic) language that
> > degenerated into abstraction (cuneiform), not the
> > usual understanding of it as the beginning of
> > intelligent communication - that led to our
> > current sad state of bickering, obfuscation and
> > misinterpretation.
>
> I believe . . .

Quite.

M.