Scholars of the ancient language of Babylon have recorded passages of the Codex Hammurabi and other writings from almost 4000 years ago, and posted them online. This article gives the news report of it. The recordings are here.
According to the article, Babylonian sounds like a mixture of Arabic and Italian. Now maybe we can find out the REAL meaning of “kalaka”!
Interesting. There seem to be a lot of long vowel sounds. Maybe that’s the reason for comparing it to Italian. Otherwise, I think it sounds like Hebrew and maybe Arabic except that I didn’t notice any guttural sounds. That’s the first thing you notice about Arabic.
It’s too bad the Egyptians couldn’t be bothered with writing vowels. In most cases we have no idea what a word should sound like.
I’ll have to look up cuneiform and see what kind of system it is. I guess I always assumed it was some sort of stylized pictographic form.
I believe it to be a syllabary.
You are correct, sir. It is a syllabary (even thought it also has some letters which function as ideographs and some which are more like our letters). Also the reason it sounds like Arabic or Hebrew is because all three languages are part of the Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic Language family.
Whelp, that’s my linguistic fix for the day. Carry on.