Re: Evolution is not a fact

John Wilkins wrote:
John Harshman <jharshman.diespamdie@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

John Wilkins wrote:
TomS <TomS_member@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

"On Fri, 08 Aug 2008 13:44:12 -0400, in article
<d8dum5xspl.ln2@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Cory Albrecht stated..."
Suzanne wrote, On 08/08/08 01:26 AM:
"Woland" <jerrydeon@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:376b47f4-afd5-4c0c-a885-f01818d8c0c1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On Aug 7, 4:22 pm, "Suzanne" <shil...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:,snip.> > Your
point?

<snip>
Akkadians, Sumerians, Babylonians, and Assyrians all had
cuneiform writing, and apparently understood it, which
gives us the information that this gigantic group of
people had some kind of common language at one time.
Cuneiform likely began as picture writing, but eventually
certain things were dropped and then letters were formed
that were equivalent to the positions of the characters of
cuneiform that look like golf tees or nails in their shape.

Suzanne
No, you misunderstand the nature of cuneiform.
1) Sumerian is a language isolate. That means that as far as we can
tell, it was not related to the other languages of the same region.
2) Cuneiform can be used to write any language. Different languages
adopted it. This does not mean that they had a common language

I have not misunderstood cuneiform! It is the first known
written language. People took their knowledge of it with
Cuneiform is not a language, it is an alphabet. Or are you going to
say that English, Finnish and Karakalpak are all written in the Latin
language?
[...snip...]

Cuneiform is a writing system, but it is not an alphabet.

In a broad sense, any writing system which has the general
form of wedge-shaped signs typically written in clay. Usually
each sign represents a word or syllable, not a phoneme (that
is, a "sound", which is what alphabets represent).
Which would make it a syllabary, like many modern scripts. I actually
think that is better than an alphabet because then there's no
mis-spelling. But alphabets started out as syllabaries.
There are various different cuneiforms. The latest ones are pure syllabaries (e.g. the Persian one on the Rosetta Stone). The earlier ones employ lots of ideograms and ridiculous amounts of redundancy (e.g.
Sumerian). And of course you can misspell in any script, and quite easily in a highly redundant one.

Yes, there's an ambiguity of reference here: "cuneiform" can mean the
latest version, or it can mean the oldest one, which is clearly
ideographic (number of sheep, vases of oil, etc, as you might expect for
a trading and accounting scheme).

Also, it isn't clear to me that alphabets are entirely free of
ideography - "beth" is used in ancient Hebrew to mean a house (the
meaning of "beth") as well as a B sound.

It's pretty clear to me. If you mean "a house" you don't use the letter Beth, you presumably use Beth and Teit; the historical origins of a character are not relevant. (Pedantry: the Hebrew alphabet isn't an alphabet, since vowels are not represented. The first alphabet was, apparently, Greek.)

But in a pure syllabary, if the words all had unique sounds, then you
literally cannot misspell the word (because you'd be writing another
word, or nonsense). If words are redundant, as you say, then it is
easier.

I don't see your point. What's the difference between misspelling a word and writing another word or nonsense? Now in any script with a unique mapping of sound to character, it's a bit harder to misspell. Is that what you meant? But it's still possible. Perhaps you misheard the pronunciation; perhaps you made a typo. And there are few scripts with such a unique mapping, nor is it particularly easier for a syllabary to have such a mapping than an alphabet.

.

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