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It is said that the adoption of Sumerian cuneiform by Akkadian and other languages in the Middle East imposed constraints on those languages (due to the limited number of sounds represented in Sumerian).

Is this true? In what way does the adoption of cuneiform constrained those languages? How is this possible, while in logographic system like the cuneiform, a symbol corresponds to a word as opposed to a sound?

Louis Rhys
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  • Could you cite exactly which source made this claim? It's difficult to comment on second-hand information. – Alek Storm Oct 11 '11 at 17:50
  • I found it on Nicholas Ostler's Empires of the Word, and somehow the passage also exists here (Ctrl+F for "So Sumerian survived its") – Louis Rhys Oct 11 '11 at 17:54

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It seems that the answer lies in the source you cite in your own comment. Cuneiform at this stage was not purely logographic but rather a mixture of logographic signs and phonemic (or what the article refers to as "phonetic") signs, and the inventory of phonemic signs that existed was tailored to Sumerian, which had a very different morphology, phonology and phonetics from Akkadian. Note that the writer says that Sumerian "lived on as an imposed constraint on the expression (emphasis mine) of Akkadian...". By "expression" the author almost certainly is referring to the written expression of the language.

Are you familiar with the Japanese writing system at all? It's like if in a parallel universe you had grown up speaking German but no one ever taught you how to write it, but then someone handed you an instructional manual for Japanese writing--Kanji, hiragana, and katakana--and you had to try to adapt it for use as an orthography for German. For some words and morphemes you could use already-existing kanji and just re-establish their pronunciations. But how would you deal with the inflectional morphology that German has and Japanese lacks? You'd be forced to choose among letting it be implied, coming up with a kluge for expressing it using kana, or re-appropriating certain kanji to represent inflections. And if kanji didn't exist for certain words, how would you adapt kana to "spell them out"? There obviously isn't a one-to-one correspondence between phonemes in German and kana in Japanese, so you'd sometimes have to go without expressing certain contrasts that exist in German, like /l/ vs. /r/ (or, again, invent a novel way of marking these contrasts) and you'd also sometimes be forced to express certain phonemic sequences in a roundabout way--consonant clusters, for example. Of course none of this would hamper your ability to express yourself orally in German, though.

musicallinguist
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  • Thanks for the answer, I think it's a good analogy and yes, I know what Kanji, hiragana and katakana do. Is it possible that a few generations after adopting the cuneiform, the spoken expression got restricted as well? Was it the case with Akkadian? – Louis Rhys Oct 12 '11 at 02:01
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    I don't have any expert knowledge on Akkadian, but it is generally held by linguists that a (spoken) language can never be "restricted" or "constrained" by its orthography, adopted or otherwise. Many languages thrive without any written form whatsoever! – musicallinguist Oct 12 '11 at 02:31
  • A modern real-life parallel can be seen in the situation for Cantonese, although its situation is less extreme. Cantonese, like any language, has a rich, nuanced grammar, with a lexicon, a phonology, and a syntax that are different from those of Mandarin. But speakers of Cantonese use the orthographic system of Standard Mandarin. In cases where there don't exist any characters for native Cantonese words, they have invented new characters, and in some cases Cantonese text utilizes constructions that are more characteristic of Mandarin than of Cantonesese. – musicallinguist Oct 12 '11 at 02:35
  • But native speakers consider "written Cantonese" to be a completely different beast from "spoken Cantonese", and it has not "hampered" the use or development of the language in any way! – musicallinguist Oct 12 '11 at 02:37
  • aren't Chinese characters fully logographic? How does it work? – Louis Rhys Oct 12 '11 at 16:55
  • For the most part yes--it's not perfectly analogous, and that's what I meant when I said the situation was less extreme. But there are function words in Mandarin and Cantonese that don't align, and syntactic constructions that are used in Mandarin that aren't used in spoken Cantonese but that nonetheless are used in Cantonese writing (in newspaper articles, etc.). I'm actually not an expert on Cantonese, but this is how it was explained to me by a native speaker from Hong Kong when I was running a phonetic experiment on tone and intonation in Cantonese that required subjects to read sentences. – musicallinguist Oct 12 '11 at 18:33
  • Oh, and spoken Cantonese has a vast inventory of sentence-final particles that bear a large functional load when it comes to intonation (allowing for the distinction of up to 30 different syllable-tune combinations), and there is not a clean way to represent all of these distinctions in the orthography. But that has not led to the gradual loss of these nuanced particles in the (spoken) language. – musicallinguist Oct 12 '11 at 18:36
  • @LouisRhys I can recommend some books that argue that Chinese characters are not logographic (or ideographic). Most Chinese characters are, in fact, composed of two components, one which hints at the meaning, and another which indicates the pronunciation. Unfortunately, it's been a millenium or so since the pronunciation-bits were chosen, so it's not always terribly useful for guessing how a character is pronounced. – Stumpy Joe Pete Jun 25 '12 at 09:10
  • Mathematical notation is ideographic, but it's not used to transcribe natural language. As far as I know, there are no ideographic scripts that are used to transcribe natural language, although there have been attempts to devise them (see Umberto Eco's "The Search for the Perfect Language").
    For more information on the Chinese logographic script, check out "The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasty" by John DeFrancis.     – James Grossmann Mar 08 '13 at 00:26
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    @LouisRhys > the spoken expression got restricted as well? Was it the case with Akkadian? - Taking into the account the extra-low literacy rate in those times, when the percentage of literate people was compared with the percentage of, say, neuro-surgeons in the modern population, there was no possibility that spoken Akkadian could be influenced by its writing system. – Yellow Sky Feb 02 '14 at 18:51