Irving Finkel

It takes about five years to... You probably do it in about four, probably.

Yeah, and you have to choose the right sound.

And also, different meaning as well.

Because, for example, if you have a sign for word hot, you can't really have a picture sign for hot.

It doesn't make sense.

But what they did is they did a drawing of a kind of complex thing with a brazier inside another sign, which meant hot.

So that sign existed, but it also meant other things as well.

And you had to choose the right one for the context.

It's all a contextual matter.

I mean, it really is quite a matter for despair when you start cuneiform, because on top of everything else, they didn't leave gaps between the words.

Because they're all connected.

That's really mean.

Yeah.

So when you read, what you have to do, you start with the first sign and you think of the sign this and you go through the values in your mind and there's next sign.

And if one is bar and the next one is ab, among other readings, bar ab sounds like a syllable structure for a word and you go on like that.

So there are two things about it.

One is that if you want to, you can master it.

The other thing is that the number of variables was restricted.

They controlled it, so it wasn't insane.

In other words, if you learn the corpus, and you learn how the signs are composed, and you learn their different values, then you've got it down, and off you go.