How the Hittite language was deciphered

How the Hittite language was deciphered
Source: The Secret of the Hittites, by C.W. Ceram
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[@HighlyEntropicMind]

DISLIKE. This is the official dislike comment. LIKE this comment to indicate you DISLIKE this video. Also, since this is my video I can see the dislikes, last time I updated this comment it was: 3 dislikes

[@HighlyEntropicMind]

@@iberianbeats The word "luzzi" is well attested in Hittite writings oi.uchicago.edu/sites/oi.uchicago.edu/files/uploads/shared/docs/CHDP.pdf

[@cutegamergrill5698]

Ich esse den apfel

[@kargaroc386]

I like this idea, but I don't want to like that comment because of what you said lol

[@JehovahsElijah]

@@HighlyEntropicMind kzbin.info/www/bejne/iJjClYN8eMSLnqc = forced service

[@JehovahsElijah]

@@HighlyEntropicMind i still dont know what lapis lazulli is and get the impression it's a blue stone?

[@Vielenberg]

Fantastic explanation. The most shocking for me was how Hrozny idenfied the "an" as Accusative by noticing it was similar to German Accusative. It was pretty much guessology - but it worked!

[@HighlyEntropicMind]

We often only know about the guesses that worked. I assume Hrozny went through many guesses until he arrived at this one

[@gabrielcastilho1879]

This guess was probably also based upon comparisons with other old IE languages. Come on, the guy knew Latin (accusative "-m"), Greek (accusative "-n") and Sanskrit (accusative "-am"). We are entitled to raise doubts about this guesseology.

[@georgios_5342]

Greek accusatives also end in n and Latin ones end in m. Maybe this similarity helped confirm it

[@NIDELLANEUM]

It reminded me of how Hungarian scholars thought that, in modern day Russia, there were people related to modern Hungarians, just because one of them was called Madjars (which is similar to their native "magyar"). The Madjars themselves had no correlation, but a nearby people was indeed related to Hungarian, so their guessology was proven right

[@SiqueScarface]

In general, it is quite unimportant how you come to your ideas. Throw dices, dream them up, go for a walk and let your thoughts wander - it does not matter. There is no right method to get ideas. There are only the ideas that work, and those which prove to be false.

[@avtaras]

It’s so sad that channels like yours barely get any views :( so informative

[@katmannsson]

Drowned out by the trash AlIeNs DiD iT channels >_>

[@HighlyEntropicMind]

I don't mind as long as people like you are enjoying my content

[@warrenbuffet5152]

Would've been a lot more popular 100-200 years ago. Today western media (mostly American) is more interested in making people ignorant by only talking about the colonization of the Americas and transatlantic slavery. Unfortunately the media is on the wrong side of history these days.

[@user-wz4hr5xu4k]

@@HighlyEntropicMind interesting information, for sure. Thanks :) i'm trying to learn more about the Hittites, as i'm wondering if they were Proto Polynesians, as the name Hattusa and Hattusasili are very similar to Polynesian names and words. I was also wondering how they pronounced Hatti - or the Place they were living in in Anatolia (ancient Turkey).

[@Usumgallu]

Some corrections: NINDA is a Sumerian logogram, not a borrowed word. It's just a sign depicting the idea of "bread" similarly to kanjis in Japanese. Also, the Hittites did not learn the writing from Sumerians, althought the cuneiform script was invented by them. The variant of cuneiform they used came from the Assyrians.

[@HighlyEntropicMind]

oops, you are right, thanks for pointing out my mistakes

[@ANTSEMUT1]

Akkadian not assyrian, the Assyrians were the iron age successors of the Akkadian as the dominant semitic power in the region.

[@Usumgallu]

@@ANTSEMUT1 No, Hittites precisely adapted the Old Assyrian cuneiform. Akkadian is just a very broad term that groups together 2500 years of East-Semitic dialects and their various development stages. Saying that something was borrowed from the "Akkadians" is very vague.

[@ANTSEMUT1]

@@Usumgallu don't you mean Old Babylonian then or Amorite.

[@Usumgallu]

@@ANTSEMUT1 Why would I mean those?

[@Kyle-xk2rb]

Appreciated this video! Went down a rabbit whole from the ancient city of Tarshish to ancient civilizations and started learning about the Hittite language.

[@christopherellis2663]

Hole 🕳

[@TheMajor209]

People doing this work are named linguists, not archaeologists. And Bedrich Hrozny was professor in the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the University of Vienna. He was a semitic phillogist and cuneiform searcher. Czech was then a part of the Austro-Hungartan monarchy.

[@eh1702]

I really like how this guy takes time to explains the relevant basic linguistic concepts with economy and clarity for the general public - no talking down, no sensationalism. In my dialect of English (disparaged as “lazy” and “slang” since long before I first went to school innocently speaking it) the pronunciation of water is written watter and pronounced wattər/wattar (or alternatively with a glottal stop in place of the T). It is more similar to the Hittite word, the way I hear different scholars pronounce it, than any modern version of “water” I’ve heard. Teachers are still ridiculing this “faulty” and “wrong” speech out of children.

[@HighlyEntropicMind]

Thank you! Also, keep in mind that there is no "correct" way to speak any language. Languages and dialects are collections of rules humans invented to communicate, but there's no way to say that one set of rules is better than another What happens is that nations need to have standard dialect for official communication and that set of rules ends up being perceived as superior by others

[@eh1702]

@@HighlyEntropicMind In most countries, the speech of the region around the capital has been selected as a standard, unless some rational or political project has been set up to make a synthesis. But in the case of the UK, Received Pronunciation was quite far from what the majority of people anywhere spoke. It started life being presumed to be as superior only because of the power held by the tiny percentage of people who spoke it. They required it to be imposed and it was. The Norman invasion of 1066 actually erased and replaced Britain’s landed class (although the invaders often married the daughters of the conquered.) So for centuries England was governed by a culturally Francophile aristocracy whose first (sometimes only) language was French. The court spoke French, and so their upper echelon clergy and the retainers of the feudal landowners learned French. This went on for around three centuries until eventually it became a kind of Franglais that the French themselves found amusing. By then, this influence had changed the vocabulary used even by the commoners of south-east England. But the RP of England would probably have continued to be this Anglo-French but for the Black Death. At the time, to be literate was to be able to read and write in Latin (even terrible dog-Latin) or French. But the Plague caused such a shortage of literate people (cleric and clerk was still usually the same thing) that instead of speaking French and writing records, contracts, legal paperwork etc in French and Latin, they had to switch to using lower class people who could only speak English, and teach them to write it. But the upper classes, when they began to speak English amongst themselves, still had a radically different accent to almost any other. And then more recently, there arrived the Hanoverian kings, the first three of whom were each raised and educated in German states, in German, and barely spoke English, or refused to speak it publicly. Only Queen Victoria’s immediate forbear was actually raised in England in a partly English-speaking environment. In his restricted social world, raised in a largely German-staffed household, he had a lot of German influence on his English too, and the courtiers already had a couple of previous generations of German-accent imitation under their belts when that aged king died. And then Victoria married a German herself. This is where the “Queens English” comes from. The courtier class whose Francophone influence already gave English about a third of its modern vocabulary, imitating German accents for a century. This is the basis of RP, Oxford and BBC English. It was automatically presumed to be superior because the people who spoke it were in absolutely no doubt of their personal moral and intellectual superiority. And this is why ignorant schoolteachers in places like Scotland, where even the Old English and Middle English had a different mix of origal inputs - still assume to this day that what kids in Scotland speak is a faulty form of English - and they usually presume that it is derived from England’s upper caste and has degenerated locally.

[@georgios_5342]

Greek accusatives also end in -n and Latin ones end in -m. So maybe this similarity also helped. Hittite has many common things with Ancient Greek and Latin

[@alainjosearnaudbobadilla3608]

Por favor, más videos sobre el deciframiento del hitita. Este video te quedó muy bien.

[@basilisamelencion8496]

Thanks! You added more concrete research that proves Indo-European linguistics of the ancient was connected to ancient Hittites. In fact, authorities had proven these connection.

[@janezjonsa3165]

Excellent! Thank you very much, for this informative upload.

[@MackerelCat]

Great video, I am also oddly into the Hittites. I’m not sure why I just love to learn about them.

[@bernardfinucane2061]

The S in essen is relatively new. The English T is the older form. And the -n as a marker of the accusative is only in a few declensions in older German forms. So it was pretty much a shot in the dark. The vocabulary was more suggestive.

[@HighlyEntropicMind]

good point

[@HannahHäggAutisticTransWoman]

Funny thing is that nu means now in Swedish as well which is so funny it still so

[@HighlyEntropicMind]

Interesting. Sometimes is not that a word doesn't change, but rather that the changes coincidentally take it back to some previous form

[@kargaroc386]

@@HighlyEntropicMind In PIE, water was wódr̥, which is similar to how some english people say it.

[@rdklkje13]

@@HighlyEntropicMind”Nu” means “now” in several other IE languages too, across a number of branches. And has been reconstructed for PIE as a result. So in this case chances are the word has been highly resistant to change.

[@ananjakaria712]

Top notch content. Highly informative. I learned a great deal about the Hittites.

[@yad-thaddag]

Just subscribed to your channel. Physics, history, archeology and linguistics (and science in general) are very interesting subjects imho

[@MiksMaTaunOlema]

This is a really cool video, not many go into the tidbits of the decipher, subscribed. I'm curious how we know what the corresponding sounds to all the symbols are in the first place. I understand that cuneiform came into Hittite from old-assyrian, does that mean it took the same pronunciation for those symbols? As an example just like Swedish has the same pronounciation for the symbol "a" as the Romans, from whom it was taken originally.

[@HighlyEntropicMind]

Now that you mention it I am not sure why archeologists were so sure about the pronunciation of the cuneiform chacracters, I'll look it up

[@MiksMaTaunOlema]

@@HighlyEntropicMindafter looking into it to no avail, I personally think that when they first started understanding cuneiform it was from old persian. Perhaps they just assumed the old persian pronounciation for all the characters in all languages.

[@electrictroy2010]

@MiksMaTaunOlema THE decipherimg history on Wikipedia says determining the sounds for Sumerian pictograms came from identifying the names of rulers (which were already known from Greek writings). So that identifies several sounds for multiple cuneiforms. The rest of the sounds were years of guessing & cross-referencing with known languages until they had a sound for each cuneiform .

[@MiksMaTaunOlema]

@@electrictroy2010 That is awesome, thank you

[@alainjosearnaudbobadilla3608]

Great video. Muchas gracias, me encantó.

[@hans5964]

Good job! It's necessary to say, that he was the first scientist, who started to think about Hittite language like Indo-european and not like semitic language. That was the key to solve this mystery. However, his ideas were completely refused by the then academic community and the scientists started to take it seriously a little bit later. Just out of curiosity, the name "Bedřich Hrozný" translated from czech 🇨🇿 to english 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 means "Frederick Horrible." 😃

[@rifqifawaz1347]

This video deserves so much more views!!

[@HighlyEntropicMind]

please share it with your friends!

[@IllidanS4]

With the almost flawless pronunciation of German, I cannot forgive the bastardization of "Bedřich Hrozný", especially considering the pronunciation can be found on his Wikipedia article!

[@HighlyEntropicMind]

I shall attend my flogging the public square to pay for my crimes

[@kuafer3687]

Oh man, I'm just in love with the old Indo-European languages

[@basilisamelencion8496]

In Bible of the Judeo-Christian religion, Isaiah mentioned Damascene in Damascus, Syria as the finest holticulturists of flowers and imported plants during his time. Historically, it was the ancient Hittites referred by Isaiah in Damascus, Syria when world record of ancient history wrote the exact years of existence of Isaiah (compare Bible true story of Isaiah's years of existence to history record) similar to the years of existence of ancient Hittites.

[@chalinofalcone871]

"We have now to deal with the paradoxical fact that, whereas the Hittites appear in the Old Testament as a Palestinian tribe, increasing knowledge of the history of the ancient people of Hatti has led us even farther from Palestine, until their Homeland has been discovered in the heart of the Anatolian plateau. ..." [The Hittites, O.R. Gurney, 1966, p. 59]

[@User14949]

Thanks for sharing this great video. I am from North KURDISTAN Hetit language has more words that we use today in KURDISTAN. We believe that the Hatti - Hetit culture is the proto Kurdish culture - identity. If you want can I give you information about Kurdish Kurdish historical and ethnographic people.

[@johnsmith-ir1ne]

Linguistically, Kurd is Iranic language, not Anatolian like Hittite

[@faramund9865]

Great explanation, so cool to have a closely related Indo-European people with 3500 year old writing, living in Turkey!

[@christopherellis2663]

Anatolia.

[@christopherellis2663]

4:43 third person singular intransitive

[@pbaehr]

I love this! Can you make a video about how Hittite branched off from proto-indo-european? Could it possibly be a dialect of the original PIE, rather than a daughter language?

[@HighlyEntropicMind]

I am not sure how Hittite branched off, but I could look into it. What I am sure of is that Hittite was definitely different from PIE... although they could still be similar, like Latin and Spanish for example

[@Vielenberg]

The Hittite writings we have come from 1600-1300 BCE. The Indo-European expansion started at least 2 (possibly 3) thousand years earlier.

[@ami443]

P Baehr... PIE is many many thousands years older than the hittite language.

[@holdingpattern245]

Hittite is more like proto-Indo-European than any other recorded Indo-European language, but only because it is the oldest recorded Indo-European language.

[@nawzadsalih7472]

Interesting archeological development. I strongly believe that this was too late. The reason is no body knows the Kurdish Language. The Kurds are the oldest nation who inhabited the Asia minor, the whole mesopotamia and the fertile part of Lavant. After 2500 BC the indoarian & indoeuopian came to the mentioned area & integrated among the Kurds so did their vocaboleris preserved in the old Kurdish.

[@HighlyEntropicMind]

Kurdish and Hittite are both Indoeuropean languages, but there is no evidence that Kurdish is a descendant from Hittite

[@claymore9032]

Excellent! I love the history and languages of Ancient Sumer Akkad Elam ect

[@HighlyEntropicMind]

and I love you

[@rositaheri5451]

It's in cuneiform...eizaateni..sounds like "essen" in modern german ..."waddar" sounds like "water" .. it looks like the Phrase was made up to say there was the language..no, joke, also other writings were found.

[@JehovahsElijah]

I went to the oriental institute when i was 18 back in 1974. Would you like to come visit and go there?

[@HighlyEntropicMind]

Sure, as long as you are paying

[@spartakdauti9783]

As predicted, some of my beloved Albanian compatriots didn't waste time in coming up with the blatant "" everything was Albanian " theory 😂

[@noxiteprova8878]

Great video

[@YUGYWDASGOW]

Gracias. Buen video saludos desde Guadalabara, México.

[@sif_2799]

Very interesting!

[@armenuhigrigoryan2365]

I wonder,while using the comparative method of linguists between the Anatolian languages what on earth Armenian language is always off the attention of the linguists.

[@maciejsieracki2429]

I think its to much that it was a germanic language, its proto indoeuropen. I see more similarities to Slavs. Especialy chleb in Polish is even now chleb (bred) So its maybe one of the first indoeropens came to this region, more likely from steps and though the Armenia region.

[@JoseFernandes-js7ep]

That was the text translated in Czech, which is a sister language of Polish.

[@Yesimbroken]

I know this is an old video but you might find it interesting to know that the old understanding of British history is that Aeneas the trojan who escaped Troy had a descendant called Brutus who according to the old understanding of history was the ancestor of the Britons and so they are named after him. (The Brythonic Celtic tribes) see the book; our island story written by Henrietta Elizabeth Marshal published in 1905. Which helps ferment the link between the ancient hittites/ Anatolians within the proto indo-European languages.

[@HighlyEntropicMind]

What you describe is the Aeneid and it was invented by the roman poet Virgil by commission of Augustus Much later, in the 1800s, nationalistic movements in Britain popularized the idea that british people had some mythic origin that made them superior to others, much like the "Aryan race theory" that would later be popularized by the nazis What you describe is a branch of one of those movements In reality the ancient germanic peoples and the hittites probably split from a single group thousands of years ago, and by the time the Hittite civilization was destroyed the proto-germans were still nomadic tribes, thousands of years away from forming settled kingdoms or ever cities

[@avtaras]

Amazing video!!!

[@malku65]

Great video, thanks!

[@marvinmartian6516]

The ninda glyphs looks like Olympus mons and the three small volcanos on mars

[@sebastienlopezmassoni8107]

Amazing video

[@HighlyEntropicMind]

thank you

[@sebastienlopezmassoni8107]

@@HighlyEntropicMind This is the first that I can see a great analysis with concrete explanations because most o the time there are non sense theory like Hittite is a basque language with a lot of weird stuff.

[@jout738]

It seems the sentence order is like: Now bread that eat will you water then drink will you. Sounds like very religious sentence for me, where old man is trying to help some younger guy by saying you must do these things. Diffrent languages have diffrent sentence orders, while in english language there is the one sentence order you most follow, but it seems its not the case in the Hittite language, so it sounds diffrent. Im not sure does te mean will or you and same with with ni does it mean will or you.

[@jout738]

In my native language it dosent matter which sentence order you have, so its easier to speak, while in english you need to have the correct sentence order or you will lose points in english tests.

[@HighlyEntropicMind]

Very good analysis, it's also cool your language has free word order. Is it a slavic language?

[@richarddr1234]

Hittite must have been very close to Proto-Germanic.

[@HighlyEntropicMind]

They were close, but not very close, maybe like Spanish and Latin, or even Spanish and Greek. Of course this is subjective since there's no way to measure how similar languages are (but there should be)

[@konplayz]

Good video

[@fantomaz1408]

[@JehovahsElijah]

what language are you, the voda (is it Russian? German) In Genesis is Abram's father who dies at the end of 205-year Mars (whether he is 205 or 145). In Latin it means earth but in Semetic they argue over two opposite words (to be stationed) versus wanderer. You wander or journey across the earth to find a resting place to fix and station yourself. So while they say wanderer and loiterer, they put him on journey across the earth to be stationed. How this relates to Mars is Mars makes a 780-day journey to station itself behind the sun which is calculated by its station west-set and its stationed east-rise. My point is that Jewish Seer Olam Terah dies in 1738bc (though 145 it ends a 205-year Mars from 1943bc; whose previous cycle is 2148-1943bc /JW WatchTower). Follow this back with the added 600 years of six generations and you get Noah's grandson born off the ark as the FIRST earth (an Assyrian Arpaxad) in 2968bc (instead of 2368bc). This would mean they thought Mars must count from Arpaxad to Terah as "earth". What i found is a 60-day shift if Terah is the Tau behind the sun, but Babel is the rising Mars 60 days after Tau. In this case 360-day new years of Mars every 13 years is not the same as Babel whose rising Mars on new year will be seen as always 2 years before Tau on new year. Thus 2150-1945bc that counts back to Arpaxad 2368bc. THIS is deduced by language word meanings. And in that case the city Ur not Hattusa. In 1991-1943bc king Shulgi of Ur was called Dungi as in bull crap. So again English developing at Ur, as it did in Hattusa. His son Amraphal or AmarPal is Amar Sin (son of sin), now used as Amar-Suen from Amar-enSu. AmarPal to age 215 in 1902bc was the homo, not Nimrod age 500 in 1770bc. Shem-Ramis and Greek Semi-Ramis are Venus 251-year and 235-year not the wife of Nimrod who never married. AmarPal married his mother in 1943bc so she could keep temple rights and her name changed from Shulgi-Simti to Abbi-Simti. Sodom had no homos until AmarPal's soldiers raped them in 7th year 1936bc.

[@cutegamergrill5698]

It's not really about the notes. I want them to find the music and make it their own.

[@JehovahsElijah]

Hattusa dates biblically as 1640-1630bc foundation; 2240bc Babel outpost tower of city Kish 600-year Babylon (half-cycle 1200-year Venus pentacle) to 2030bc inaugurated Memphis 365-day calendar on Pamenot 1 (July 17) as Year 340 (being 400-year Egypt Gregorian loss of 3-day sun; solar leap days). They migrated thru Germany so that German stonehenge is older than 1554bc England stonehenge and carried the word water; versus the other Greek Roman route that evolved the verb Agua to be noun Aqua. The 76-year from 1630-1554bc england is the lunar calendar of 19 leap days. While the date Kayak 25 moves from 2029bc May 6 back to 1554bc Jan 8. It is in 1498bc that Greeks claim Kayak 25 is Dec 25 two solar cycles of 1508 years (twice12 solar leap days drift) to Cortez 1519AD. While Izapa planet Mars and winter solstice has mid-tzolkin in 1400bc Jan 2 as day 1:Chen (Chinese and Mayan). The ratio of chinese is 10:12 while Mayan 13:20 for every 780-day Mars. This is then twice 1460-year sothic from 1401bc to 1520AD Cortez. Other videos are stupid to claim english went TO Hattusa.

[@thamielglaoui2595]

🤓👍 very interanste wow

[@slorrin]

Your video displays neo-assyrian cuneiform and says "the hittites learned cuneiform from the sumerians." My man...

[@HighlyEntropicMind]

May I ever outlive this shame

[@shapasha6266]

Luwians or sound\Lovi\ too are Kurdish now!!! Those employers as Hittites Sobarto Gouti Babylon Media Hurries Amazons and more all of theme kurdish people now!! They dont mantion kurdish name because political UN case..

[@chalinofalcone871]

""... its striking resemblance to the 'Theogony' of the Greek poet Hesiod. There the Earth (Gaia) gives birth to Heaven (Uranos); then Uranos and Gaia together become the parents of Kronos and the Titans. Uranos hates his children and seeks to prevent their birth, but Kronos, incited by Gaia, emasculates his father with a sickle, and out of the blood which flows comes forth the Erinyes (Furies), the Giants, and the Melian nymphs, while Aphrodite is born from the foam what's arises when the severed member falls into the sea. Kronos and his wife Rhea then beget the Olympian gods, foremost among whom is Zeus. Kronos swallows all his children except Zeus, who is saved by the substitution of a stone which Kronos swallows instead of him. Zeus, on growing to manhood, forces Kronos to spit out the gods whom he has swallowed, and the stone, which comes out first, is set up as a cult-object at Pytho (Delphi). The poem ends with the Battle of the Gods and Titans and the final victory of the Olympians. Hesiod's sequence Uranus-Kronos-Zeus is matched in the hittite version by the sequence: Anu (Sumerian 'an'= heaven)- Kumarbi, father of the gods,- Weather-god, though Alalu in the Hittite version represent a still older generation unknown to Hesiod. The emasculation of the Sky-god occurs in both myths, though the motif of the swallowing and spitting out seems to have become attached to a different incident. In the broken part of the tablet there is some reference to Kumarbi eating and to a stone which may possibly correspond to the Pythian 'omphalos' of Hesiod's version; & it is probable that the Hittite myth ends with the victory of the Weather-god. These points of resemblance are enough to establish a strong probability that both versions derive ultimately from the same Hurrian myth. The 'Song of Ullikummi'..."" [The Hittites, O. R. Gurney, 1966, Ch. VIII. LITERATURE; §. Myths, Legends, & Romance, p. 190-191]

[@nebitno5054]

E iz za at te ni whould be too similar to serbian izedeni which means eaten, something that already has been eaten possible IE connection Voda is in modern south slav but in old church slavonic its udar and here its waddar 🤔 more IE

[@SlaviSokol]

The translation is illogical. No bread. you will eat. Watter later drink. What kind of information does this hold ? -an is a suffix also -ar. how about : Nu Nindar Eissatt eni. Waddaar ma ekuutt eni. Nu - our . Nindar - breadgiver. Eissatt - eating, food. Eni - there is not. Waddar - watterer, river of rain. Ma - have, has. Ekuutt - flow,stream. Eni- is not, has not. "Our Breadgiver has nothig to eat. River has no flow." Im surprised thad Hrozný as a slavic speaker did not recognize it. Or maby he did but lived in bad times.

[@HighlyEntropicMind]

Look dude, using this translation they were able to translate all other Hittite texts into texts that made sense, they told stories, laws, recipes... How could these texts made sense if they are based on a mistaken translation?

[@SlaviSokol]

@@HighlyEntropicMind Yes, I would like to see rest of the text. My atemt isnt far away from official.

[@HighlyEntropicMind]

@@SlaviSokol I don't mean they translated one text, they translated thousands of texts, perhaps tens of thousands

[@SlaviSokol]

@@HighlyEntropicMind I know. I would like to see how it continues so we can get context and verify if my proposition fits better or not.

[@ozkang654]

But how did they decide that sembol gives an " an" sound ? Obviously İts not like even letter its like sembol How they know that letter has what sound ?

[@HighlyEntropicMind]

Maybe I'll make a video about this. The key is that no language exists in a vacuum. The rulers of ancient nations used to send each other letters with translations in the language of the other ruler, and many of those letters survived. There were also documents displayed in public written in many languages, usually codes of laws. This meant that even if one language was lost we could see all these translation and start to figure them out. Sometimes languages would use different writing systems, which also helps... In the end, this is a long process that takes very hard work, and indeed sometimes we are not sure how to pronounce every single symbol, but we are sure of how to pronounce most of them and we have pretty good guesses for the few others. Scientists, and in this case archeologists and linguists are not trying to fool anyone, they want to find the truth, and if any of them claims something without evidence then all the rest will be the first ones to criticize them. The point is that, yes, when linguists say that symbol sounded "an" you can be pretty sure it sounded like that or at least something incredibly close to that

[@Usumgallu]

Because there are multi-lingual inscriptions that explictly tell us so. The cuneiform script was deciphered from Behistun inscription, which recorded the same event in three languages (Akkadian, Old Persian, Elamite) and two scripts (Old Persian cuneiform and Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform). At the time the scholars knew how to read Old Persian, because some closely related languages such as Avesta was already known, and many Old Persian names were also recorded by the Greeks. There are even short inscriptions in Akkadian and Sumerian transcribed by ancient Greek scholars in Greek alphabet from the Mesopotamian Hellenistic/Seleucid periods. Look up Graeco-Babyloniaca. There are also some texts that mention same personal names in cuneiform and Aramaic. Thus, the syllabary of the later cuneiform is practically 100% deciphered. Of course we cannot know all the minute phonetic and allophonic details of the languages, but if you'd read that sign "an" for a Hittite or Assyrian, they would understand it for sure. They could maybe correct that its [ɑn] and not [an], or something like that. It is true that in Sumerian, the pronunciation is still not very clear. For example, a sign that we normally transliterate as was probably pronounced /ju/ during the earliest stages of Sumerian. Similarly was maybe pronounced /haj/ and was pronounced /ˀaj/. The biggest problem with Sumerian is that we don't have any related languages, unlike with Hittite and Akkadian that we know many related languages for. Also the Sumerian cuneiform script was not originally even designed to indicate sounds. Syllabic values were just taken from signs that depicted words that were pronounced somewhat similarly. For example the syllable /ra/ developed from the sign RA, which was likely pronounced /raḫ/ and meant "to beat". A full syllabary developed about 1000 years later than the script itself. So, if you'd go to 3000 BC and read the sign AN for a Sumerian scribe, they would probably not understand it and tell you that it should be read /ˀaˀam/ "sky" or something like that, aside several other readings such as /dingir/ "god".

[@KingDexter999]

HAHAHA "doesnt essen look like eizzateni to you?" lol no. It literally shares only two letters

[@IllidanS4]

-en and -teni are inflectional affixes. Those are generally the first to change significantly between languages. You have to compare the roots.