alt Hacker News> reconstruded a long-dead language well enough to read it
We "reconstructed" Sumerian through the fairly intuitive process of finding reference works describing the language, and reading them.
> reconstruded a long-dead language well enough to read it
We "reconstructed" Sumerian through the fairly intuitive process of finding reference works describing the language, and reading them.
That's cool isn't it? Even to the Akkadians, Sumerian was an ancient language (prehistoric!), that became sacred.
Aren't there also bilingual texts that are used for learning it? Or maybe I'm thinking of different versions of stories, in Sumerian and later Akkadian or Babylonian.
I'm curious how the modern pronunciation is arrived at. Is that a lot of convention and guess work or is it reasonably secure through knowing (approximately) Akkadian pronunciation via other Semitic languages?