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Sinhala script has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Onegreatjoke (talk)
Pronunciation of foreign language letters?
This map gives the local pronunciations of the name of the letter "U" in various European languages. Serbia and Belarus are marked, despite Cyrillic scripts being dominant. Does this make sense? I'm not sure, since either they don't have a dominant pronunciation of a foreign letter, or it's likely to be a minor topic. Plus, if it's reasonable for these countries to be marked, why aren't Greece and other Cyrillic-dominant countries also marked? Nyttend (talk) 19:57, 14 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Cuneiform, what type of system(s) is it?
Cuneiform, especially early forms of it use ideograms, so should that be added to the page for Cuneiform. Something like: Cuneiform is mostly a logo-syllabicwriting system, some early forms also made extensive use of ideograms. these various versions of cuneiform were used to write several languages of the Ancient Near East.
this is probably a bad potential edit so if anyone has a more seamless way please respond.
It depends which cuneiform. Most broadly construed, the word itself just describes the stylus making wedge-marks in clay. The Ugaritic alphabet is a script that is materially cuneiform but graphematically alphabetic. Akkadian itself was mostly written like a syllabary with some forms functioning as logographs from time to time. The original Sumerian, a much more analytic language than its Semitic neighbors, was like Chinese arguably better suited for a purer logo-syllabary. Think about it like this: for half of its history as a technology, we were using cuneiform in some form or another. It got used as many different ways as it reached. Remsense 🌈 论02:55, 6 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
That is to say, I think the fact that cuneiform wrote many differently functioning systems is key, and shrugging with "mostly logosyllabic" is ignoring most of its history, like any other single choice would. Remsense 🌈 论03:06, 6 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for responding so quickly.
You have made some good point about the use of Cuneiform in its broadest sense (which is what the article is covering and what it should cover), as systems besides Sumerian where in most ways phonetic. I nonetheless think it is important to have some mention of the ideographic qualities of Sumerian. It could say something like: Cuneiform is a logo-syllabicwriting system that was used to write several languages of the Ancient Near East, it’s earlier forms used ideograms to supplement these other characters. I still think it’s a bit unwieldy but I think the information should be in the introduction.
But that's not right for the same reason. It's like saying the English script is logosyllabic because the ancestors of its letterforms originally corresponded to Egyptian words. For the vast majority of its history, in the vast majority of extant texts, cuneiform scripts were not mainly logosyllabic, and really were mainly syllabic for most of that time. Remsense 🌈 论08:48, 6 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
But Sumerian still did use them (especially in the earlier periods) nonetheless so it is important for it to be recognised in the introduction.
P.S. I think I noticed an error as the introduction calls ‘Cuneiform ...’ a ‘… writing system …’ which seems incorrect as cuneiform is a style? group? lineage? family? of scripts. It would be like calling every Egyptian hieroglyph derived script (including tentatively related ones like Cherokee and maybe Hangul) to be a script. Legendarycool (talk) 06:15, 7 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I wrote up how I would define cuneiform off the cuff, but in reality it's more prudent to consult sources first, since they're what matter here.
By the definition of writing system that's generally explicated in our sources, it would make sense to me to define cuneiform as a family of writing systems, related graphically, that wrote several languages of the ancient Near East according to various principles. Looking through my books, I can't immediately come up with any one source that states it like that, though. Remsense 🌈 论15:28, 10 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I would even contemplate going further that cuneiform isn't a writing system at all, but rather a technology and associated writing style used by several writing systems such as Sumerian, Akkadian, Old Persian, and Ugaritic. VanIsaac, GHTVcontrabout17:07, 10 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I checked out some other language and they might have a better structure?
but yeah it is an issue because this page exists, has a purpose but what is it. Has there been any study into this family??? Of scripts – does there need to be a page about Egyptian derived scripts if this page fills that niche, is it about merely about the method/characters used.
Given the current structure and what other pages have done I think this page should focus on the type of written script, base it off the structure of the French one.
P.S. would specific scripts be notable enough to warrant their own pages; given Old Persian has its own page I would say so.
P.P.S. Remsense since the source for the first sentence – the sentence that calls Cuneiform a script – only references a document pertaining to Sumerian grammar1,it is in effect not sourced
This interesting choice of source has another massive issue. The article talking about Cuneiform only sources the type of script from something talking about Sumerian grammar.
another random note: I think there would be sources that describe them as a group, due to mention of them being related to each other. Through that some sort of ‘family’ could be created through sourced ancestors and descendants, as in the articles pertaining to ‘ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and decedents’
Also the info-box is messed up as it treats cuneiform as a single
Writing is a bespoke enough technology that the impulse to impose consistency across articles here seems misplaced: we should treat hieroglyphs and cuneiform (and Chinese characters, ahem) differently because they functioned quite differently and had cross-cultural progeny that evolved quite differently as well. Again, our sources take priority, and enough of our sources treat cuneiform as an umbrella term emphasizing the material and conceptual overlap across what I would personally consider different systems that we should be careful here.
This has to do with material conditions to a significant degree as well. In Egypt and its neighbors, one had papyrus reeds to accelerate inexpensive experimentation with forms of writing, while clay from the Tigris and Euphrates remaining the writing material one had most immediate access to in Mesopotamia encouraged the comparative conventionality we saw there. Remsense 🌈 论07:15, 11 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
And on the separate-articles question: I don't think it best serves our readers to WP:SPINOUT unless there's a really clear idea of what goes there, keeping in mind Wikipedia is not a dictionary or any sort of glossary or reference guide for ancient languages. Cuneiform as an article is a bit of a dog's breakfast atm, but it's only 6k words in length – and the problem is emphatically not that it's overflowing with excess detail in areas that clearly could use their own articles. Remsense 🌈 论07:31, 11 July 2025 (UTC)[reply]
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