Words similar to cuneiform
Example sentences for: cuneiform
How can you use “cuneiform” in a sentence? Here are some example sentences to help you improve your vocabulary:
After presenting various systems of communication (signs, pictographs, rebuses, shorthand, tallies, Babylonian clay tokens, Peruvian quipus), Robinson discusses such ancient and now defunct but decipherable writing systems as Sumerian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Minoan Greek Linear B, and Mayan glyphs; ditto some of the more outstanding conundra awaiting decipherment--Cretan Linear A, Proto-Elamite, Etruscan, and the Easter Island and Indus scripts.
It is important, too, to note that writing systems are irrelevant: for instance, Polish is written (today) using the Roman alphabet, but Russian, a related Slavic language, uses the Cyrillic; Yiddish, a Germanic language, is written in Hebrew characters; Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, which resemble one another rather closely in some respects, all use different alphabets; and early examples, utterly unrecognizable to untrained readers of modern languages, were written in cuneiform, quite suitable for writing on soft clay tablets with a pointed stylus, and hieroglyphics.
Cuneiform writing thus served different functions; that is, from its original use for pictograms, it became stylized to the point where the images were unrecognizable without decoding.
Around this time the Sumerian civilization living in Mesopotamia (the region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in present-day Iraq) founded and developed the cuneiform script, the world’s oldest form of writing on record.
While it must be noted that the cuneiform system, based on a pattern of wedge-like signs impressed in clay by a specially cut reed stylus, served several Mesopotamian cultures for about 3000 years, it was used for writing several languages of diverse structures: Sumerian was an agglutinative language, in structure of the type of American Indian languages, Hungarian, etc.; Akkadian was a Semitic language, similar in structure to Hebrew; the Elamites spoke a language of which we know little, but it is interesting to note that about 1500 BC they changed from the script writing system they had been using to cuneiform, and in the “short” time of less than 500 years had reduced the number of symbols to 113.
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