-->Hallo, @JeFra, besten Dank für die interessanten Vinca-Links. Es ist gar keine Frage, dass zumindest in Mesopotamien Schrift zuerst eine „Buchhaltungskonvention“ war. Das ist aber bei den meisten Schriftsprachen wohl so gewesen: erst die Zahl, dann das Wort. Auch die homophonische Ausgestaltung (siehe Kopie unten) erfolgte ja erst viel später und erlaubte dann die Transformation verschiedener Sprachen in das Keilschriftformat.
Ob nun Vinca früher oder spatter entstand ist für mich eigentlich nicht so interessant. Spannender ist die Frage der Verwandtschaften und der Entwicklung.
Gruß & Dank!
Auszug: Gwendolyn Leick, Mesopotamia, The invention of the City, 2001, S.65ff
Why Sumerian came to be the language represented by writing is still uncertain. Mesopotamia was never linguistically or ethnically homogeneous and the personal names in the early texts clearly show that languages other than Sumerian were spoken at the time. Much has been written about the apparently 'sudden' appearance of the Sumerians in Mesopotamia and their possible origins.6 They were thought to have come from the mountains because of their predilection for ziggurats, and were seen to have been engaged in rivalry and conflict with the people who spoke Semitic languages. None of that can be substantiated. Linguistically, Sumerian is not related to any of the known groups of languages and attempts to link it to Ural-Altaic languages, because of a shared characteristic of adding syntactic elements to the main word - agglutinating them -have proved fruitless.
The question of the origin of the Sumerians remains intractable and all we can state is that, at the beginning of the Early Dynastic period, this language was chosen to be rendered in writing. Perhaps the Sumerians did become politically dominant and exercised control over the scribal centers in the early cities. It is also possible that it was even then a prestige language reserved for written communication irrespective of whether or not the 'Sumerians' were politically powerful. Some of the earliest royal inscriptions, for instance, were commissioned by kings who bore Semitic names. Whatever the motivations were originally, once it was adopted Sumerian remained the foundation of Mesopotamian writing, even when, in time, other languages were rendered in the same system. Knowledge of Sumerian was still considered a sign of true learning and wisdom nearly three thousand years later.7 Like Sanskrit or Latin, it acquired a cultural value as the link to an old and still vital tradition. Even among modern Assyriologists, those mastering Sumerian have an unofficially higher status than those dealing with 'easier' languages.8
The process of adapting the writing system occurred towards the end of the Uruk period and is conventionally designated as Archaic Level in.9 Let us consider how the 'archaic' system of word signs was converted to writing Sumerian. The principle by which a form of writing based on symbols without phonetic characteristics may be converted into a system of writing that can also reflect parts of sounds (phonemes) is quite simple. It is based on the fact that, in every language, there are words with different meanings that sound the same, such as 'bee' and 'be' or 'dear' and 'deer' in English. In Sumerian, many words were apparently monosyllabic, and quite a few consisted of just one vowel sound. The word for 'water' was a.10 In a grammatical context, the syllable 'a' could stand for a whole range of syntactical functions, depending on whether it was put before, between or after a chain of semantic elements. The archaic sign for water consisted of two parallel wavy lines. If one works within an existing repertoire of signs that refer to objects that can be represented in a standard form (a type of drawing), such as the wavy lines, then there will already exist quite a number of such signs for a large variety of concrete things (types of vessels, animals, buildings and so on). When these signs are taken to represent a word in a particular language, as, for instance, when the stripy insect is recognized by an English speaker, he will read 'bee'. In English the sound 'be' can also be an infinitive verbal form, or a syllable within other words, as in 'be-lieve'. By drawing a 'bee' in all cases where a 'be' sound is wanted, the functional possibilities of the sign multiply since it can refer to the primary, pictorial referent, the 'bee', or stand for the sound in a variety of contexts.
In Sumerian, any time the sound 'a' needed to appear in writing, two wavy lines were used, and context would make it clear whether it was meant to be read as 'water', a grammatical component or a syllable in a compound word. This principle, known as homophony, was the main structural device in the adaptation of the archaic cuneiform system for specific languages.11 The disadvantage was that the script became a hybrid of pictographic and phonetic signs that had a much greater potential for confusion than the purely pictographic one. Writing became more complicated, special markers had to be introduced to signal that a group of signs referred to a specific category of words, such as personal names, or stars, or animals, or whatever. In practice, scribes developed professional expertise tailored to suit the type of work they were engaged in: bureaucratic, legal (recording of court cases or drawing up of contracts) and communication (missives or public inscriptions). All these types of written tasks had their own special features and scribes relied on a limited repertoire of signs. Only the advanced scholar would have complete command over all the possibilities and intricacies of the script and vocabulary.
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