Mesopotamian Languages

Mesopotamian Languages

Writing was invented from the Sumerians around 3300b. C. The cuneiform tablets from the Sumerian give to us exciting material, but not on astronomy. The first existing texts of astronomy come from the Old Babylonian Period. The study of the religious texts made some scholars to suggest Semitic or West-Semitic origin of the concept of starts and earthly phenomena, because the Akkadians take more personal approach to the gods than the Sumerians, but the Sumerian names of constellations, stars and planets were overtaken by the Akkadian and therefore we deny this theory to be correct. The Akkadian overtook also the cuneiform script and it is possible some of the Sumerian script forms have never been pronounced in Sumerian, but only in the Akkadian language. In later time the symbols were used, because of their shortness. The Sumerian word for scale is "rin" and corresponds to the Akkadian word "zi-ba-nh-tum", which could be written with only one symbol of the cuneiform script and not in four like for the Akkadian word. If we look on the astronomy texts, we need to start from the Babylonian and have to keep in mind the influence of the Sumerian language. The word "Akkadian" is taken to denote as a common name the related Semitic languages. They are Babylonian and Assyrian, which are dialects of Akkadian language. The most scholars agree to the view, the cuneiform script is originated by the Sumerians, a language which is related to the Tamil language, but not to the Akkadian languages. Why the Akkadian overtook the script into their language is only to explain by suggestion. The Akkadian pronounced Sumerian cuneiform script in their language. This made the former mostly phonetic and syllabic script more difficult. The Akkadian people added new values and used by time new compound words, which were unknown to the Sumerians. They all were included into the former cuneiform script, therefore the same symbol of the script could denote the value from the Sumerian original, its Sumerian meaning or an Akkadian value. We see a development of the cuneiform script in the Hittite and Aramaic cuneiform script, where we find phonetically complementary added to the former Sumerian symbol. One class of signs are the determinatives, which denote the following noun and which we find in the transliteration written in superscript. These nouns had their origin in the Sumerian and we have a