The best Cuneiform 101 I've found. Had to learn Arabic 20 yrs ago. Now on to more fun and intellectual uses with Akkadian and Cuneiform.

Thank you for this great content, I'm an Iraqi from Babel and i really want to learn the Mesopotamian languages and you are helping me a lot with these great videos🙏🏼

This guide is so helpful! Thank you! Now I can write a complaint to Ea-nasir about the copper he sold my ancestors maybe 4000 years ago.

لإخواني الناطقين بالعربية: لفظ بِيتُم يقابله في العربية بَيتٌ، والميم التي في آخره تقابل التنوين الذي عندنا في العربية (بَيْتُن) وهي نونٌ تثبُت لفظًا لا خطّا، وقد نرمز لها بتَكرار حركة نهاية الاسم، وتفيد أن الاسم نكرة. وكما يختفي التنوين عند إضافة الاسم (بيتُ رجلٍ) فإن الميم تختفي أيضا في حال الإضافة في اللغة الأكدية (بِيت أَوِيلِم)، والكسرة الظاهرة على اللام هي علامة جر أَوِيل لأنه مضاف إليه. وقد نسمي إضافة الميم في الأكدية تَمْيِيمًا قياسًا على التنوين. والله تعالى أعلم.

Thank you. knowing Arabic as mother tung makes it easy for me to understand Akkadian as you explains it.

@shivmongoose3343

5 ай бұрын

Even the small amount of Arabic I learned in high school makes these lessons easier.

@yoni10014

4 ай бұрын

Arabic and Akkadian are both semitic languages, which makes it more intuitive to those who speak it

I love it! I'll definitely follow along this series. Thank you a lot!

Very good introduction, it is very understandable and interesting. I'm looking forward to the next videos

So freaking difficult

@Triassic_truefacts

4 ай бұрын

Light work

Excellent tutorial. I've been wanting to make proper Cuneiform tablets, and this is invaluable information on how to correctly read and write/indent

@learnakkadian

2 ай бұрын

Glad it was helpful!

@gaapgoetia8953

2 ай бұрын

@@learnakkadian My favorite writing system, just beautiful to look at. Honestly both surprised and glad to find such a concise series. Thanks!

I recently went to the British museum in London and the cuneiform was the most exciting section for me. Hearing you teach her to read and all of that makes me realize how much of the other ancient languages that I've learned have a lot of similarities. I noticed a correlation between a lot of the native American languages especially north of Mexico fit into the Japanese alphabet pretty much perfectly but to be fair, so does cuneiform. It's not perfect but it's like 90 something percent the same way that you would read Japanese which is a very interesting set of letters like ra or mu or bi

This series is so exciting and informative. I can’t wait to learn more!

Loved the It's always sunny intro hahah! Great video

Great stuff, Very well explained, will definitely follow your Akkadian lessons. Thanks

My brain feels like it's been working hard to understand this, but I've definitely gotten everything that you have said on this video! This is really opening my eyes to the complexity of the evolution of language, never mind JUST written language is. Goshhh, this is amazing, thank you SO much for this! :D

Very good video! I noticed you had less problems with your green screen, wich is good because it was distracting. It would be interesting, when you use a sumerogram, to have the corresponding sumerian pronunciation too!

This is so incredibly valuable. Thank you so much

Very helpful lesson! Thank you so much for shedding light on the mystery of Cuneiform writing.

@learnakkadian

4 ай бұрын

Glad it was helpful!

Thank you so much for teaching us this amazing language 😭🙏😍

Loving it so far! :O

Love this channel! Besides reading the tablets, and this being one of the coolest things ever done, the only other practical thing I think this could be used for is writing my olographic will in Akkadian just so the judge has to call an Assyriologist to put my heirs in possession 😂😂

Ha! I guessed the word before you started a transliteration. I really like your lessons! Great job! :)

@dickon728

11 ай бұрын

Me too, once I figured out that the mu wasn't a ri. I'm more used to later scripts.

You are doing God's work, good sir!

Very interesting. Thank you

Thank you VERY much for making this video! I wish there was someplace I could learn Sumerian cuneiform. I would PAY to learn. I did find a you tube channel that taught Sumerian numerology. I found that VERY easy to learn. Counting and adding, etc. But the language.. Wow! I need basics. Alphabet first, then compounding. Just like we were in kindergarten again.

@sweetykitty4427

Жыл бұрын

the youtube channel "digital hammurabi" has sumerian on it!

Great explanation. It is a good skill to explain the basic use of the system without getting bogged down in the form of word making or clay stylus as I've seen

@learnakkadian

Ай бұрын

Glad it was helpful!

Thanks! Akkadian is very interesting, i needed video liike this, greetings from Poland!

This is great!

Thanks for the explaination

Ngl this is light work🔥🔥

This is lovely ! I always wanted to invest myself more in bronze-age cultures and mesopotamian empires.

Very impressive effort that you've put into this series, much appreciated! May I point out that in 10:50 when you give the cuneiform for bītum, it can never be written bi-it-um (the /t/ ending in /it/ cannot be the consonant for the next syllable) but rather bi-i-tum or bi-tum or bi-it-tum (rarely) or most often, É :)

@learnakkadian

8 ай бұрын

Thank you so much for pointing this out! For anyone else curious why this is true I’m attaching an excerpt from Huehnergard’s grammar explaining the 3 essential rules of syllabification: “ (A) Every syllable has one, and only one, vowel. (b) With two exceptions, no syllable may begin with a vowel. The exceptions are: the beginning of a word; the second of two succes-sive vowels. (c) No syllable may begin or end with two consonants” -Akkadian Grammar pg 3

It seems like in the word bītum, this violates a golden rule of normalization by effectively doubling the vowel. Even though it’s not written as double, it’s doubled in length. Is the normalization for writing or pronunciation or both and is the vowel actually ever doubled? Second question, what in your view are a couple of the most important/controversial existing interpretations of Akkadian, I mean where the incorrect reading would have the most profound impact on our understanding of that history, or even on how people at the time responded? There are similar issues in Sanskrit and a particularly famous one that caused a rift in early Buddhism.

@learnakkadian

Жыл бұрын

Great questions! The combining of vowels in normalization affects the syllabification of the word where as long vowels only affect the way in which the vowel is pronounced (this does not change the syllable in which the vowel is pronounced). I will talk more about important differences in translations later in the series so please stay tuned.

How come the first a in Hammurabi is not written with a macron but the first i in Bitum is? Also Bitum is similar to the word we use in Hebrew, Bayit.

@dickon728

11 ай бұрын

The first a (ah) in Hammurabi is a short a sound like the u in cut. If it had a macron on it it would be a long a sound. The i in bītum has a macron on it to indicate that it is a long ee sound as the ee in see.

Art historian here .. but a modernist! I often teach the 101 survey so i thought i would at learn learn the basics of the cubeiform writing system. I understand Akkadian is painfully difficult. Edit: and just a couple minutes in, I see why it's often said that cuneiform is a messy writing system. The characters do not line up clearly with an individual phoneme?! We might as well be learning English spelling! 🤙

Yes, the cuneiform text reads "Ha-am-mu-ra-bi". It's written in the Babylonian Monumental script! The one on top reads "a-na ilim" (to the god)

Please, continue! You are doing the Lord’s work. ❤

@learnakkadian

10 ай бұрын

Thanks! Working on a new video now hopefully will be able to post soon.

Nice. Thanks

I love it Thank you so much 😏🙏👌✍

Thankyou sir

Thanks for this intro

The double consonant thing being inferred is kind of like the shadda doubling the consonant in Arabic

How do we decipher dead languages to such an extent that we could propose sounds? I can understand studying and finding patterns for grammar, but then where do we find the vacabularly and the sounds? Thats so wild to me. Great video, im subscribing 💐

Thank you for a great introduction! What would you recommend as reference if I wanted to tell the difference between Akkadian and the Babylonian/Assyrian dialects of cuneiform? I'd like to get to the point of at least looking at a script and saying "This is most likely written by the .....". Thanks in advance.

@learnakkadian

3 ай бұрын

Hey Matt I would recommend checking out R. Labat’s manuel d’epigraphie akkadienne

@learnakkadian

3 ай бұрын

The on catch is that it’s in french, but it is by far the resource and since all you need is the Akkadian transliteration and the sign it won’t be a problem. Hope this helps!

@mattorsie4421

2 ай бұрын

@@learnakkadian Thanks, I'm still waiting for the book to arrive. I do have a small 3x2 tablet and was wondering if you could point in the right direction as to whether it's Akkadian or perhaps a Babylonian/Assyrian dialect? It was label as Sumerian c.a 3000BC but based on my limited knowledge it doesn't seem to be Sumerian.

bitum sounds like it's cognate with arabic beit, also meaning house

@moroccandeepweb5880

4 ай бұрын

It is in fact a cognate with Arabic بيت.

Its not an alphabet. Its a logosyllabary.

Wait! What? What was the translation of the first word you had written out?

Very interesting.Thank you! Greetings from Italy. PS Where the hell are you? :)

is there any difference between akkadian cuneiform script, and that of other cultures/time periods? i would have assumed, for example, that neoassyrian writings would have a very different dialect (at least, if not an altered alphabet) to that of the akkadians but it seems as if theyre entirely the same, even though the two civilizations have an entire bronze age collapse between them.

@learnakkadian

9 ай бұрын

There are big differences in language and orthography between the different cultures which used cuneiform. In the case of the Babylonians and Assyrians, both used the Akkadian language although each had their own specific dialect. Additionally, the Assyrians and Babylonian used different sign forms. These sign forms as well as some aspects of grammar changed over time. For example, Old Babylonian cuneiform used completely different signs from Neo-Babylonian cuneiform. Also cuneiform signs sometimes varied based off context with monumental Old Babylonian signs used on royal inscriptions and Hammurabi's Code while personal documents used cursive Old Babylonian signs. Some cultures like the Hittites or Elamites also used cuneiform with completely different sign forms and languages.

@hackneyedstudios4699

9 ай бұрын

@@learnakkadian can you see a more dramatic shift in cuneiform signs/dialects before and after the bronze age collapse? my understanding is that major centres like babylon survived through the period (whilst settlements like hattusa were largely abandoned); and if thats the case, was there some sort of ‘re-evolution’ and/or ‘re-transmission’ of cuneiform scripts. for instance, maybe there was a broader diversity in dialects etc pre-BAC, and then afterwards perhaps only babylonian cuneiform script was produced with other scripts dying out, before they re-evolved in line with the reemergence of major civilizations - like the neo-assyrians, urartu etc. - which are more closely derived from the babylonian script (in this case). i find this area of history (both the overall study of language, as well as early Mesopotamian civilisation and its developments toward literature) really interesting. i would love to be able to read texts like the epic of gilgamesh and the hymn to inana in their original cuneiform, because i understand that actually understanding the language’s intricacies can open up so much more meaning than is offered by a monocular translation. i very much doubt that i will be able to casually learn cuneiform though, i thought it was a much more simple language (especially since some translated texts ive read seemed to indicate that cuneiform scripts didnt even differentiate tense or anything).

@user-ii5lj6vm1n

4 ай бұрын

​@learnakkadian so is it kind of like different european languages have Roman letter alphabets?

So, the macron “i” makes a sound similar to the English word “it” rather than the more drawn out sounding “ee” sound like the “bi” in your transliteration? Making the word bitum sound like “bit-um” rather than “beet-um”?

@learnakkadian

4 ай бұрын

The macron makes the vowel sound longer so the sounds you have just described would be reversed. Bī gives a bee sound and bi would give a short i sound like pit.

Mar means snake in kurdish....impressive how similer to all the sounds in kurdish!

Omg this is difficult but I'm not giving up 😭

And I thought the Devanagari script was difficult! Lol!

Hello. Could you please help me in how to say / write : "Thank you, teacher" in Akkadian / Sumerian, plz?

@learnakkadian

7 ай бұрын

I searched for this phrase for a while and there is no translation that captures what you want. The Babylonians did not have a word for teacher like we do but would have used a word that in English would be closer to master (Mulammidu). Bunna loosely translates to “thank to” but is more of an attributive word.

@poupoupidoup.pictures1264

7 ай бұрын

@@learnakkadian thank you a million. I have been searching myself for possible equivalents (also in Sumerian, Urartian) since it is obvious we would not have those words in exact same senses we have them in today's English. I was thinking that for "thank you" something like this would go: "In the name of God Khaldi". Again thank you for your kind reply

cHammu - rapi : “the kinsman of the Rephaim (Rephaite the healer)” ‎חַמּוּרָפִּי רְפָאִים Rephaim

How do they know what sounds akkadian had and didn't have?!

@learnakkadian

3 ай бұрын

A lot of it is based off of more modern Near Eastern Languages

I’m curious. In Berber you say išar/ishar for he steals. Is this a coincidence?

@renatodavid3049

3 күн бұрын

Well, both languages are from the same family language tree called 'afroasiatic'

The sounds have a striking resemblance with the Amharic language.

@learnakkadian

Ай бұрын

Interesting where is the Amharic language from?

@creamrisesup

Ай бұрын

@@learnakkadian it's the national language of Ethiopia.

Isn't cuneiform written from right to left?

@learnakkadian

8 ай бұрын

Akkadian is written predominantly left to right or from top to bottom if the inscription is oriented vertically.

I bet Sumerian is even more challenging.

@learnakkadian

10 ай бұрын

I think it definitely is. For anyone with a background in a semitic language Akkadian shouldn't be too hard to pick up.

cut that cut that cut that

An eye for an eye?

😂 they would use the back of throat when speaking making a drinking chugging g sound

I've never learned from a ghost before.

@jonpaul3868

3 ай бұрын

😂

@learnakkadian

3 ай бұрын

👻

Wow I just subscribed from Québec 😊 I hope you are helping Dr irving finkel with his 30,000 tablets? 😊 I wish I could ❤

wild guess: Hammurabi

Its not pronounced ham, like Hamburg. Its pronounced ham, like "harm" Ham'murabi.

Hello and thank you❤ my best interpretation I think it means is an idea posed by symbals rather than by letters... The first: pi = a ⭕ circle which is the symbol for God, Omicron, all, sun, eternal, universe, and the logos, "the". The second being: am, is, be and equals, image and likeness, seed, seedling. The third: mu, the Cradle of civilization of this era on Earth, Eden, Genesis, seed, seedlings in the plantation. The fourth: Ra, god, Sun God, source, energy, force field, progenitor, Ray. The fifth: bi, two, ka, spirit, soul,.... Meaning I Am a child of God, made and sustained by the Sun, and seedling from the Tree/vine of Ra, a Divine being of Source..... How does that grab you? Am I anywhere close? I've never tried this before so I may have just really embarrassed myself, but not as badly if I didn't try... My question would be how did you decide for the symbols to mean the letters that you've chosen????

4:58 pí reads like p ou like π?

@learnakkadian

3 ай бұрын

The accent mark tells you about the cuneiform sign only. It doesn’t affect the sound at all. Like pi

🇮🇷❤️

ch'a mu ra bi (-pi)

Please, "pí "or "pi" with any accent for that matter, or without an accent, is not pronounced "pie." It's pronounced "pea."

@learnakkadian

11 ай бұрын

Very true good point!

Same as Gypsy language wtf

Thanks but I love the great Cyrus king ❤️ 😍 😘, he says :Not any kind of slavery 💯.

YOU ARE WAY TOO CUTE TO SPEND YOUR TIME ON LEARNING THIS DEAD LANGUAGE.