Dr. Irving Finkel

And then it can be used in a different way.

So for example, they have things called determinatives.

If you ever looked at anything about ancient Egyptian, you know that when they did the picture writing, they had special signs like for weapon or for person

or something like that, which they draw in front of the hieroglyphs for the word that follows.

So these are called determinatives, and they are not pronounced, but they are written with signs which have their other meanings, both in terms of sound and meaning.

It's ridiculous.

Let me explain.

There's a simple sign with two horizontals and then one vertical.

So that can be pronounced like this, gish.

So in Sumerian, the word gish means wood.

So if we're writing a Sumerian text and we're going to talk about a table made of a certain kind of wood, you write the sign Gish as a determinative so that the scribe reading out to the king about the new furniture, he would read the name of the table, but not the determinative because that's for the reader only.

So this sign Gish can be used in one particular instance to mean wood determinative silently.

Next thing is, it can mean wood, wood.

So you go into the forest and you cut down wood.

Here's your sign where it's the sign wood.

Then there's another side, as I explained, about the sound.

For example, because Sumerian and Akkadian use the same writing system, the two languages are in bed with one another in the most intimate fashion.

They are interwoven.

You have a bilingual intellectual relationship.

culture and the two things are interwoven so when we are writing we have the sign gish which can mean the next word is wood it can mean wood now sumerian gish wood in babylonian is itsu s with a dot so the word for wood in babylonian is itsu so you can write your sign sumerian gish in a sentence