LINA02H3 Lecture Notes - Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Northwest Semitic Languages, Abjad
Document Summary
Pictographic pictograms: symbols for objects and concepts. Means wedge shaped" because of the shape of its original pictograms: made by pressing a stylus into soft clay, combination of straight lines because curved lines are hard to make with stylus. System a mixture of morphographic pictograms and phonographic symbols. Abjad: main symbols represent consonants only: later diatrics added vowels. Writing spread throughout the area as aramaic (northwest semitic) become the lingua franca across the middle east (assyrians, akkadians, babylonians, and. Persians adopted aramaic as the official language of their empires. ) Modern hebrew and arabic continue to be abjads; which are well-suited to the structures of semitic languages. Symbols represent words, not syllables: different from sumerian. Originally pictographic/icographic morphed to become morphographic as well, with words for a morpheme. Expanded in certain order: phonetic extension provides info about pronunciation of corresponding morpheme. Can be decomposed into two elements: radical (signific): may hint at meaning, phonetic: may give clue to pronunciation.
