[cpfohl]

6 years to master a syllabic alphabet seems like a stretch...They seem to be crossing learning the language and learning the writing system.

I studied Greek and Hebrew in college, Latin in high school. In each the very first night's homework was to memorize the characters and their pronunciation.

Multiple ANE cultures used cuneiform (Ugaritic, Akkadian, Sumerian, Hittite, and so on). The time to master each depends on your native language, the target language, and exposure to similar languages. The writing system is not the hard part.

[marc_abonce]

It's true that learning an alphabet shouldn't take as long as learning the entire language. However, there's still a difference with cuneiform:

All of the examples you mentioned are derivatives of the Phoenician alphabet, which have around 20 to 30 characters each. Even with case sensitiveness and diacritics, I think they still add up to under a hundred characters.

Cuneiform character sets are in the order of magnitude of the several hundreds or even thousands, depending on the language[1], so I imagine that the experience is closer to learning to read Chinese or Japanese and less like Hebrew and Greek.

That being said, I've never tried to learn neither cuneiform or hanzi, so I'm just guessing based on the number of characters.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuneiform#Sign_inventories

[beloch]

Another quirk is that much of it was highly contextual. e.g. Depending on context, the same numerals might indicate N, N x 60, N x 60^2, etc..

Cuneiform was also used over such a vast period of time that significant evolution took place. e.g. As numbers and mathematics evolved, there were sometimes different symbols for the same numbers depending on what was being counted. Scribes often had to learn several sets of numerals and when it was appropriate to use each of them.

The modern reader needs to learn, not only languages, but contexts and also be aware of how the script evolved over time.

Cuneiform generally evolved to become simpler and less contextual as time went by, but there remained a lot of characters to learn by the common era. The Phoenician alphabet was a huge step forward precisely because it was much simpler and easier to learn. Shaving years off of the learning process turns literacy into a common skill that many can obtain, rather than a select few whose families can afford to send them to a school for many years.

[efskap]

In addition, Akkadian used cuneiform not only for phonemic writing, but also had many signs borrowed as-is from Sumerian as logograms (sumerograms), e.g. for the words for sheep and king. So in that sense it is indeed very similar to Japanese.

[scroot]

The writing system is not syllabic. It uses ideograms, logograms, and yes syllables all together. It's also not one singular "writing system," as the set of symbols varied and changed in the context it was used (language or region) and over the two thousand years that people wrote in this style.

[cpfohl]

I was responding to the claim in the article:

> Like Japan’s kanji alphabet, the oldest writing system in the world is syllabic.

Memorizing thousands of characters is a lot more work, but the memorization isn’t the main part of learning a language…