What Is The Oldest Written Language – Africa is considered the cradle of mankind based on the number of human ancestors found on the continent and is therefore considered the home of the world’s oldest languages. Historical linguists focus their studies on various San dialects, which they believe are most similar to early languages, and today’s blog will focus on one of these early languages: Meroitic.
Meroitic is the oldest written language in Africa, but very little is known about the language today. The lack of information about Meroitic is due to two main factors: First, it is different from the spoken language that exists today. No descendants of Meroitic Sudan are known today, but it is believed to have been the mother tongue of several other languages in north-central Africa. Also, there are no translated sources, such as the Rosetta Stone that facilitated ancient Egyptian decipherment.
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Despite these challenges, quite a bit is known about the language. First, it is known that Meroitic was an ancient language that was widely spoken in the Kingdom of Kush, which was located in the Nile Valley in present-day Sudan. It was the language spoken between the 3
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In the 2nd century, both the elite and the common people, which proved that the people of Kush were literate and multilingual, as the Kushites spoke many languages, not just Meroitic. Its capital, Meroe, was named by the British archaeologist Francis Llewellyn Griffith, who was the first to attempt to translate the language.
Meroitic was written in two forms: hieroglyphs (composed of pictures) and script (Figure 1). The Meroitic hieroglyphic text is believed to have been derived from ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, a native language, but other native languages were Arabic, Semitic, and Akkadian. The language is believed to be Afro-Asiatic, partly due to the influence of Arabic, but some scholars believe that other Asian languages also influenced the language. Unfortunately, it is still controversial among linguists.
With the recent discovery of Meroitic texts in the city of Sedeinga, hope has been renewed for more information about this ancient language. What we know about Meroitic gives us a lot of information about the origin of the language, the cultural interactions between African groups and their influence on the development of the language. Further study may help clarify the fascinating information we already have.
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Khalil, M. and Miller, C. (1996). Ancient Nubia and language use in Nubia. The languages of Egypt, 27-28.
Smith, R. (2009). Constructing word similarity in Meroitic as an aid to decoding. British Museum Studies in Ancient Egypt and Sudan, 1-10.”Logography” and “Lexigraphy” redirect here. For the printing system proposed by Hry Johnson, see Logography (printing). For dictionaries, see Glossary.
In written language, a logogram, logogram, or lexicon (from the Greek logo, “word” and gramati, “drawn or written”) is a written character that represents a word or morpheme. Chinese characters (pronounced Hànzì in Mandarin Chinese, Kanji in Japanese, Hanja in Korean, Hán tiền in Vietnamese and Standard Sawgun Zhuang) are generally glyphs, as are many hieroglyphs and parabola characters. The use of logotypes in writing is called logography, and a writing system based on logograms is called logography or a logographic system. All known logotypes have some phonetic composition, usually based on the rebus principle.
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Alphabets and alphabets differ from logotypes in that they use individual written letters to represent sounds directly. In linguistics, such characters are called phonemes. Unlike logographs, phonographs have no inherent meaning. Writing in this way is called phonetic writing or digital writing.
The sign system includes the oldest writing systems; The earliest historical civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and Mesoamerica used some form of logographic writing.
All logographic notations ever used for natural languages rely on the rebus principle to expand a relatively limited set of logograms: a subset of letters is used for their phonetic, consonantal, or syllabic values. The term logosyllabary is used to emphasize the phonetic nature of these scripts, where the range of sounds is syllables. In ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, Ch’olti and Chinese, there has been an increasing development of determinatives, which are combined with logographs to narrow down their possible meanings. In China, they are combined phonetically with logographic elements; such “radical and sonorous” characters make up most of the script. The ancient Egyptians and Chinese referred to the active use of rebus for the spelling of foreign and dialectical words.
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None of these systems are purely logographic. This can be described in Chinese. Not all Chinese characters represent morphemes: some morphemes consist of more than one character. For example, the Chinese word for spider, 蜘蛛 zhīzhū, was formed by combining the rebus 知朱 zhīzhū (literally “know cinnamon”) with the determinative 虫. Neither *蜘 zhī nor *蛛 zhū can be used separately in modern Chinese (except to replace 蜘蛛 as a root word, e.g. 蛛丝 meaning spider silk). In Chinese archaeology, the opposite is found: one character representing more than one morpheme. An example is Old Chinese 王 hjwangs (meaning “to declare oneself king”), a combination of the form hjwang meaning king (incidentally also written 王) and the suffix pronounced /s/. (The suffix is preserved in the modern case.) In modern Mandarin, diphthongs are always written with two letters, for example 花儿 huār ‘flower [little]’.
A unique system of logograms developed in the Pahlavi script (evolved from the Aramaic abjad) was used to write Middle Persian for much of the Sasanian period; glyphs consisted of letters that spelled words in Aramaic but were pronounced as in Persian (for example, the combination m-l-k would be pronounced “shah”). These signs, called hozwārishn (a type of heterogram), were completely abandoned after the Arab conquest of Persia and the adoption of a variant of the Arabic alphabet.
All historical logographic systems have a phonological dimension, as it is impossible to have a separate base letter for each word or morpheme in a language.
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In some cases, such as cuneiform, as was used for Akkadian, the majority of symbols are used for phonetic rather than logographic value. Many logographic systems also have a semantic/ideological combination (see Ideology), called “determinants” in Egyptian and “radicals” in Chinese.
The usual Egyptian usage was to add a logogram, which could represent several words with different pronunciations, a determiner to deduce meaning, and a phoneme to determine pronunciation. In the case of Chinese, most characters are a fixed combination of a radical representing its nominal class, as well as phonetics to give an idea of pronunciation. The Maya system used logograms with phonetic additions like Egyptian, without ideological combinations.
The first two types are “one body”, meaning that the character was created separately from the other characters. “One body” icons and iconography are only a small part of Chinese iconography. The two methods that were more fruitful for Chinese writing were “composite,” that is, they were created by combining different characters. Although they are called “relationships”, these tags are still single letters and are written to take up as much space as other tags. The last two types are methods of using characters, rather than forming the characters themselves.
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The most fruitful method of Chinese writing, radical phonetics, was made by ignoring certain distinctions in the syllabic-phonetic system. In Old Chinese, the final ding consonants /s/ and /ʔ/ were usually ignored; these became the Middle Chinese tones, which were discarded even when new characters were created. Also, differences in aspiration (between aspirated and unaspirated obstruents and between voiced and voiceless consonants) were not considered; Old Chinese distinguishes between type A and type B syllables (often described as palatalization or pharyngealization presce vs abce); and sometimes, voicing of initial obstruents or pressing of medial /r/ after the initial consonant. In the past, more sonic freedom was allowed. In the Middle Chinese period, the newly created characters were made to exactly match the pronunciation, as well as the tone, and often used a radical-phonetic character as the phonetic relationship.
Due to the long development of the language, the compound “clues” in letters from radical-phonetic relationships are sometimes useless and can be misleading in modern usage. For example, based on 每 ‘who’ pronounced měi in Standard Mandarin, the characters 侮 ‘put down’, 悔 ‘regret’ and 海 ‘sea’ are pronounced wǔ, huǐ and hǎi respectively. Three of these characters were pronounced very similarly in Old Chinese – /mˤəʔ/ (每), /m̥ˤəʔ/} (悔) and /m̥ˤəʔ/} (海) according to William H. Baxter and Laurt Sagart’s direct reconstruction.
– but sound changes over the next 3,000 years or more (including two different dialectal developments, in the case of the last two characters) have resulted in completely different pronunciations.
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In the context of the Chinese language, Chinese characters (known as hanzi) generally represent words and morphemes rather than pure ideas; however consent
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