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Comment by somecommit | Hacker News Reader

These cuneiform tablets are written in which dialect and which alphabet?

Cuneiform isn’t exactly an alphabet. It can represent sounds, letters, whole words, or broad ideas in single symbols. It true that it was used for many languages, but if this is a trove of documents from a palace or temple then many will likely be in Akkadian. Akkadian was the diplomatic language[1] of the region until the rise of the Achaemenid empire in 550 BCE.

Since the site is from Mitanni[2] then some will also surely be in Hurrian[3] and maybe Amorite.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkadian_language#Development

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitanni

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurrian_language

Semantics. Some people consider Runes alphabetic and some do not because it does not follow the order of ABC. Some consider the prominent Semitic scripts, Arabic eg.، not alphabetic but Abjad because it has no vowels, although phoenician is usually considered the first alphabet. Alpha is Greek. So I can guess there's a sense of classicist classism

> Some people consider Runes alphabetic and some do not because it does not follow the order of ABC.

Even in narrow contexts, that's not how linguists use the term. Futhark runes are pretty clearly alphabets, because consonants and vowels are treated as independent symbols.

In the narrower sense, some scholars distinguish "true" alphabets from two other types of segmental script, abjads and abugidas. These three differ from each other in the way they treat vowels: abjads have letters for consonants and leave most vowels unexpressed; abugidas are also consonant-based but indicate vowels with diacritics to or a systematic graphic modification of the consonants. In alphabets in the narrow sense, on the other hand, consonants and vowels are written as independent letters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet#Types

In this sense you're correct, but it is more often refered to as specificly futhark, outside cladistics, if talked about individually, in which case ''it'' may be a subset that would not be refered to in the definite as alphabets, not at all. There are strong arguments for some changes in the order that we see, but that's overall uncertain, so the cladistics argument would be shaky anyway.

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