“The syllable in a syntagmatic and paradigmatic perspective: The cuneiform writing in the II millennium B.C. in Near East and Anatolian”.

The ideal way to define the concept of syllable both in the languages and in the writing systems of the second millennium B.C. is to start from Sumerian. In the third millennium B.C., Sumerian had a complex writing system, logographic and syllabo-/morphographic, where the “syllable” may coincide with the lexical morpheme and/or with a bound (grammatical) morpheme. Due to the process of development, the Sumerian cuneiform writing system ended up with large phenomena of polyphony and homophony, providing, in turn, a fertile ground for allography. This complex system was used in other languages, mostly Semitic (like Akkadian) and Indo-European (like Hittite). For this reason, during the second millennium B.C. we observe the emergence of a number of different ‘cuneiform’ traditions with individual peculiarities. About the end of the second millennium B.C. we also find the foundations of Semitic semi-alphabetical writing systems, which will eventually spread all over the Mediterranean in the first millennium. We must however start with the prehistory of writing, starting from the evaluation of those artifacts understood as symbols or marks affixed to surfaces for communicative purposes, which did not yet constitutea writing system and yet confirm the conventional nature of the relationship between sign and language.