수메르문자의 생성 발달과 아카디아어 표기에 관한 연구

Abstract

Sumerian script appears to be the oldest known ideogram writing system in the world. As soon as the Sumerian script was first used, the signs were changed 90⁰ backwards. At the same time the change from a pointed stylus to a blunt stylus took place. The impression made by new blunt stylus was shaped like a wedge, so called the script as Cuneiform. Sumerian individual graphs did not have unique phonological values. So many graphs depicting concrete objects were extended to express similar concrete concepts and analogous abstract conceptions. These deficiencies had introduced the phonographic principle into the script. As soon as Sumerian words began to be strung together in sentences, the device to indicate grammatical relations must be sought. Most Sumerian roots are monosyllables, of consonant+vowel or consonant+ vowel +consonant shape, so individual graphs represented syllables. The phonographic principle had solved the problem of writing foreign words of places and proper personal names. A proper name is a meaningless sound sequence, it can be written only phonographically. Sumerians had little need for signs representing syllables, not only because those which they were using had been designed to represent their own names of common objects in daily use, but also because their own words were largely monosyllabic and underwent no internal alteration through inflection. The adoption of cuneiform to write Akkadian is still poorly understood. This adoptation of cuneiform to write Akkadian originated in northern Babylonia. Akkadian verbal root has tree radicals that can be modified by consonantal reduplication. Akkadian has no syllables that start or end with more than one consonant. But Sumerian verbal root was monosyllabic and could not internally altered. Akkadian scribe needed an essentially phonetic syllabic system in order to convey the semantically important structural characteristics of the language. The transition from logograms to syllabograms played an important role in the adoptation of cuneiform to write Akkadian. How cuneiform was adopted is uncertain, but there were some clues to understand the adoptation. The important clues of the adoptation of cuneiform came from Ebla in Syria. At this site some lexical lists of Uruk period included Sumerian words with their Semitic translations. These lists were the first examples of the systematic use of cuneiform signs for the syllabic representation of both Semitic and Sumerian. The phonetic rendering of Sumerian in Ebla was done because in Syria Sumerian was a foreign language that scribes had to learn in order to adopt the writing the system for which it was created. So later scribes provided the Semitic translation of Sumerian words. Also Babylonian scribes had discovered the advantages of syllabification, because syllables allowed them to assign phonological values to logograms and to convey the inflexions of Semitic language. The adaptation of all the necessary syllables from the Sumerian system to write Akkadian may have caused many problems. Since Akkaadian is Semitic, Sumerian is an unrelated Agglutinative language. So each language had a different phonemic inventory. So adjustments were necessary to convey more accurate phonemic information. For example, the phoneme 'ṣ' is part of the Akkadian inventory, but it did not exist in Sumerian. This problem can be solved to assign new values to existing signs by applying the rebus principle phonetically. For example, Sumerian ḠEŠ(wood)means iṣum in Akkadian. The base of the Akkadian noun, iṣ was adopted as one of the syllabic values of the sign ḠEŠ to write the syllables Iṣ, iz, is.