Dr. Irving Finkel

which when you read it and you're reading Babylonian, you have to have the Babylonian word, so you have to know that the sign gish also is itsu in Babylonian and supply that in the Babylonian text.

The only...

The only commonplace example that people encounter in the world is this, that if you write the dollar sign in a sentence, a hundred million dollars, when you put the S with two lines in it, no one says a hundred million S's with two lines through it.

They supply the word dollar immediately, largely because people are more interested in money than anything else.

But this is not an obstacle in reading when you have such a thing in English.

You just do it.

Well, in the cuneiform world, you do it all the time.

So these are the consequences that the sign for wood, which is gish in Sumerian, can be used to write itsu in Akkadian, but it can also be used to write as a syllable in Akkadian, not in a meaningful in its own way, but as a component writing something else.

where the sound is or its occurs within a longer word, which has nothing to do with wood.

So, for example, let's say you wanted to write the word miss when you were at school.

Miss, miss, like that.

So you have to have the sign me, M-I, and the sign is, I-S.

And the sign itsu can also be issu and etsu and etsu.

All the related sounds can be used with the sign which in Sumerian means wood, in Akkadian can mean wood, but also can be used just as syllables in a bigger word.

So you would write mi-is-su.

And when you saw this as a Sumerian, there are different ways you could interpret it.

I don't know if we're going to get into hot water here, but let's imagine that you're a

It can mean night or it can mean black, depending on how you pronounce it.

But if you had black wood in Sumerian, you'd have to have wood with black after it.

So it can't be me-is, it would have to be gish-me, so it's not that.