Re: Optimum number of symbols

Raymond Brown wrote:
>Yes, I've always entertained the idea at the back of my mind of using some
>sort of cuneiform script at sometime. Cuneiform scripts were around for
>well over three thousand years and were used for a variety of systems, so
>there must've been something going for them.
And that something was, to a large degree, cultural prestige. Well,
presumeably you know that. But I actually had something more interesting to
say (don't I always? :-) ).

In "Ancient Mesoptamia" (Revised Edition, 1977), Leo Oppenheim claims that
Cuneiform "fairly certainly" was invented by non-Sumerian people, despite
that the earliest intelligible texts are written in Sumerian. As anything
more known about this nowadays? I certainly have more than enough popular
science sources that state that Sumerian was the first language to be
written, but that does of course not necessarily mean much.

                                                Andreas

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