Early South Indian Palaeography c8.s2.t3.2

c8.s2.t3.2

"The use of Sumerian characters to write Semitic names may have accelerated the conversion of ideographic into phonetic signs. But it complicated the result. A given sign is now liable to stand for one or more concepts, the sound of the Sumerian name of the concepts and the sound of the corresponding Semitic word. The complexity is much greater, since the same sign even in Sumerian might stand for several words, and so for several sounds. Probably Sumerians and Babylonians never felt any difficulty here, but for modern scholars the transliteration of Sumerian names into European alphabets is always difficult, and readings change. Within the last ten years, for instance *ur-nina* has been changed to *Ur-nanshe*, *Ur-engur* to *Ur-nammu* and so on". (Gordon Childe, *Man Makes Himself*, p. 183.)