Horses

[Stanley Friesen]

At 01:16 AM 2/3/00 -0500, X99Lynx at aol.com wrote:
>I take this to mean that the Sumerian/Akkadian horse symbol used in Hittite
>may have been nothing more than an ideogram and therefore give no phonetic
>information about the sound of the Hittite word.

That is correct.  This is somewhat of a truism in reading cuneiform.
Within that speciality they use the term "Sumerogram" for ideograms that
trace back to the Sumerian roots of the writing system.

>My question then becomes how often Hittite does this sort of thing - use a
>Sumerian symbol with no phonetic correspondence.  It could not be all the
>time or we would have no basis for sounding the Hittite language.

Not all the time, but still fairly frequently. There is a standard stock of
Sumerograms that most cultures using cuneiform continued to use out of
tradition, regardless of the language they spoke.  One of the most
prominent of these is the glyph for "king".  But it is understandable that
horse/donkey is also written this way.

The phonetic values of the cuneiform symbols are used mostly for those
words not covered by the standard Sumerograms.

--------------
May the peace of God be with you.         sarima at ix.netcom.com