Why I'm Learning Sumerian | Hacker News Reader

Why I'm Learning Sumerian

mindthenerd.com

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  …Sumerian, written in cuneiform, was humanity's first writing system. A language that hasn't been spoken in four thousand years.
  The same question circles again: Why am I doing this?
  Why am I trying to learn Sumerian, a language that hasn't been spoken for five thousand years?…

Watch out reader, by the end it maybe indeed turn out that Sumerian hasn’t been spoken for 10, 20, or 30 thousand years. The LLM just doesn’t know what sounds better.

From wikipedia

> Attested from c. 2900 BC. Went out of vernacular use around 1700 BC; used as a classical language until about 100 AD.

So vernacular use stopped roughly 3725 years ago

And it hasn't been spoken for almost 2000 years

So why am I learning a language that hasn't been spoken in 50 years?

Maybe indeed an LLM would have caught my little faux pas, or perhaps invented a more eloquent one.

> Maybe indeed an LLM would have caught my little faux pas, or perhaps invented a more eloquent one. reply

Did you just respond to yourself but forgot to switch your handle?

It is impossible to believe anything on the internet anymore

Literally lol

It might be his aircover digital worker who does automated sales call (and maybe writing)?

Damn, I start feeling like a granny who believes everything Facebook feed shows her

This is so weird, because the author of the comment isn't the author of the article, given how different they look on their respective pictures.

Not too sure what the incentive is here. Maybe just advertising his AI business?

I think you're being too generous by assuming that both of those pictures are real pictures.

Truly what is going on

Yep, I meant to reply to myself. I was pointing out that the typo in my first comment could have been caught by an LLM.

Can you please explain?

I wonder if this is because it’s trained on Reddit threads? There are these threads where someone says “wow, they found $100k at the drug bust??” And then next guy says “yeah $80k is a crazy number for a single bust” followed by “well done on them for finding $50k”.

I chucked because it reminded me of the Steven Soderbergh movie with Matt Damon, "The Informant!"

> Watch out reader, by the end it maybe indeed turn out that Sumerian hasn’t been spoken for 10, 20, or 30 thousand years. The LLM just doesn’t know what sounds better.

"Dad, can I have ten pounds?"

"Five pounds? What do you want two pounds for? I'm not giving you a pound just like that without a reason!"

My version ends with “take one and get something for your brother too.”

It reminds me of David from Prometheus, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRfx05qKVxg.

I believe I'm wired in a very similar way to the author, to need hard challenges that I can devote a great deal of focus to. And as someone who isn't burnt out but has been deeply disillusioned many times, I appreciated and enjoyed hearing that distinction made, which seems natural to me but which I had never heard framed that way before.

When I had, let's say, half a million hand-written LoC vaporize overnight for a gaming platform 26 original games I'd written on it, the feeling was much worse than burnout. Burnout implies you don't want to do the work anymore. Disillusionment - the despair and ennui of seeing something reduced to less than ash, which you spent every waking hour of your life and years of mental output and daily sacrifices perfecting and refining... that's not burnout. You wake up and say "I want to do something difficult again" but how do you even take the first step, knowing that it's all so pointless?

So I think, Cuneiform is a very apt analogy to code. Growing up in the early 80s, my older brother (16 years older) was a CS major. He gave me my first programming books, a Tandy laptop and a tape recorder. He said this:

"Remember: Everything we write as programmers is written in sand." I think he meant to tell me to make backups. But over time it became the truest observation I could make about this life of solving problems which disappear, using tools which disappear, in languages and files and thought loops that disappear.

Maybe doctors or lawyers or detectives, or other professionals who deal with serieses of episodic problems feel this way in the end, too. When a mission they were on peters out. That it's all ephemeral and temporary in a way that makes us small and meaningless...

Anyway, burnout is saying you're not interested in anything anymore. So switching to writing on clay is maybe a horizontal move, but no less satisfying.

Thank you for this perspective, Mr Ecclesiastes. I hope this comment of yours will end up at the top.

OTOH the very fact that we (as a civilization) can still read cuneiform from 50 centuries ago, and still care to, contradicts somehow to your point that all we do is dust in the wind. We never know.

I listened a Jewish-focused podcast recently that essentially was about how Ecclesiastes was exhorting us to recognize that the time of (A/B testing: Reaping and sowing, embracing or not) was all taking place at the same, present moment. That every moment is the time for both - moments are finite but the human experience is not. That wasn't what I was thinking of when I wrote that comment about my own personal disenchantment and my need to soldier on, making things that are dust, but it's funny you mentioned it.

I've personally struggled over and over with the question of whether I'm making code or music or art for some kind of quickly-fading recognition or to prove something to myself, or just to have something to do. I see pros and cons both ways. And I wonder whether there even is such a thing as leaving a lasting mark in this world. And whether it's better to leave no mark at all, than to leave any kind of stain. An imprint in a clay tablet that lasts 5000 years certainly is a mark. But then you risk being reduced to an archaelogical specimen.

We can still unscramble some cuneiform, but we can't decipher the personal motives of the writers, and I wish we could. I'm concerned with what it means to be a good human and a successful one at the same time, but, I'm a drop in the ocean.

I think the point of these philosophies is not really to make you a morally upright person so much as to show you that you're a grain of sand, and let you draw your own conclusions.

"That's when I learned the difference between burnout and disillusionment. Burnout drains your body; disillusionment erases your purpose. You can recover from exhaustion with rest, but you need something else entirely to recover from meaninglessness."

This is an accurate pathology to burnout at least in my experience. I worked on many hard things in my life, from school to obsessing over hard problems on weekends but I never felt burned-out. I felt tired, but content.

It took 6 months of being stuck after reaching a local maxima in my career. I was working on menial, meaningless, tasks that I knew amounted to nothing while I was doing them. That caused my burnout.

> Two weeks before launch, they pulled the plug

> It took 6 months of being stuck after reaching a local maxima in my career. I was working on menial, meaningless, tasks that I knew amounted to nothing while I was doing them. That caused my burnout.

This idea I think about a lot, and I believe another way to describe it is "alienation from labor," or, in the doing of labor, alienation from purpose or meaning. Marx wrote about alienation from labor:

> “If the product of labor is alien to me, if it confronts me as an alien power, to whom, then, does it belong? To a being other than myself.” (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844)

> "Labour power is...a commodity which its possessor, the wage-worker, sells to capital. Why does he sell it? In order to live...the worker, who for twelve hours weaves, spins, drills, turns, builds, shovels, breaks stones, carries loads, etc.--does he consider this twelve hoursí weaving, spinning, drilling, turning, building, shovelling, stone breaking as a manifestation of his life? On the contrary, life begins for him where this activity ceases, at table, in the public house, in bed. The twelve hoursí labour...has no meaning for him...but as earnings, which bring him to the table, to the public house, into bed...." (Wage Labour and Capital, 1847)

Imo though I agree with Graeber that we've gone beyond just alienation from the product of labor and into alienation from all purpose, in a world where a huge swath of labor and productive energy is put towards genuinely useless things.

> "...a bullshit job is a form of employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case." Bullshit Jobs, a Theory

Alienation from labour is a perfect description.

I once worked for a start up that got taken over. In the process all retained staff lost their options.

I don’t think the options were really worth that much so I guess we were supposed to just be happy we still had our jobs.

The pettiness of it though just sucked the life out of the work for me. I found it very hard to concentrate and very hard to give a shit about anything after that.

It’s a massive indicator that it’s time to move on.

> In the process all retained staff lost their options.

For nothing in return? I don't know the first thing about startup operations, but that sounds deeply unfair.

This hits hard and it explains very well what I'm going through.

A local maximum. "Maxima" is plural for "maximum".

> I was working on menial, meaningless, tasks that I knew amounted to nothing while I was doing them. That caused my burnout.

Another phrase I recently heard about is bore-out, where you just lose your motivation because the job is unstimulating or meaningless (but you know you and your job can be better).

No offense but it sounds too fruity to be written by a human. You're just talking with psychophant chatgpt without doing the prompting.

> Burnout drains your body; disillusionment erases your purpose. You can recover from exhaustion with rest, but you need something else entirely to recover from meaninglessness."

Burnout isn't exhaustion. Burnout doesn't drain your body, it drains your mind. You could get burnout from comfortably sitting all day long. Exhaustion from doing something you love is exhilarating. Burnout from doing something you hate is mentally draining.

Burnout is a symptom of disillusionment. Disillusionment causes burnout. It's not physical. It's all mental.

If you are interesting anything related to cuneiform writing or ancient Mesopotamian culture , Irving Finkel, a British Museum curator, is a treasure.

Here he is teaching how to write cuneiform: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVmsfL5LG90

Here is a hilarious talk he gave at Chicago's Oriental Institute on Noah's Ark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_fkpZSnz2I

I was lucky enough to meet Irving Finkel a couple of times and he is as eccentric in person as he is in his brilliant lectures, talks, and videos. When I met him all the shelves, and even the floor, in his office was covered with different books, papers, and artifacts. He has amassed quite a collection of interesting things.

I met him through my work related to the Royal Game of Ur, which he also did a fantastic video on with Tom Scott: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WZskjLq040I

They had the guts and willpower to learn Sumerian. Why, I wonder, had they to use an LLM to write the essay about it? It kind of invalidates the core messages.

I read the entire post, very well written, and didn't suffer from that impression that it was written by an LLM

The entire "Why Irrelevance Works" uses several LLM patterns. As I said elsewhere, I don't care if someone uses GPT to coauthor a post, but the irony is just too big in this case.

It uses words. A lot of words. And punctuation.

And spacing. To say what?

Very little.

Yeah it's so sparse on actual details of Sumerian or cuneiform that after reading the article I remain unconvinced the "author" either cares for or knows anything about the topic.

(To be clear I know nothing about it either, but as a human with some similarly "pointless" hobbies, I can't imagine posting a writeup with so much motivational bullshit but so little about the actual thing I'm interested in.)

You are an engineer who's recent project was cancelled due to a change in priorities. It left you feeling burnt out but eventually you sought solace in learning Sumerian, just for the sake of it. Please write 1500 words in the style of a motivational linkedin post.

What makes you say that? Sad how easy it is for someone to dismiss writing these days as, "must be AI written!" (I'd wager the average LLM blog post takes more effort than your dismissive response, though I wish I didn't have to read either).

I'm not a fan of the author's writing, but you can look at their other articles and see the same (non-AI feeling) style of writing and general theme of content (airport-book style motivation).

I usually don't care too much if a post was written using AI (this one was written at least partially using it, check it out using GPT zero), but in this case it irks me deeply, because the post is meant to summarize deep intellectual effort.

I find it hard to believe someone who is clearly used to deep work would take a shortcut like that. I'm not saying they didn't, just that it doesn't fit.

GPTZero says its 44% AI generated

GPTZero also says one of your previous comments is partially AI generated though.

Those models are terrible. I tried one of the "best" ones and it told me the US Constitution was AI generated.

Maybe it was?

(I am reminded of a Fallout side quest, where you help a Museum retrieve artefacts and they talk about how the constitutions was moved around, maybe by airplane .. point being, history will be fun to reconstruct after a robot nuclear apocalypse)

They work in tech, they have a tech blog with articles about AI, so it's reasonable to assume they use an LLM to generate their content.

I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that they ever actually tried learning Sumerian, but to be maximally cynical they never provide any specific personal details about that. It could literally just be a prompt.

“Years ago, I stumbled across an image online: a Sumerian clay tablet covered in tiny wedge-shaped marks.”

Seeing weird ancient symbols and feeling a great urge to embark on a journey to learn/decipher them is common; actually doing it is much rarer. Think of Champollion who, when shown Egyptian hieroglyphs by Fourier (as it is often mythologized) when he was just 11, devoting his life to them.

However, if you are tempted to take on Sumerian after reading this, I suggest that you start with Akkadian first. Chances are you’ll try to learn ancient languages by self study and you’ll need a lot of reading material: this is the advantage of Akkadian over Sumerian. Also the grammar will be easier to grasp. And it has borrowed a lot from Sumerian, so you can take it as a later step, if you so choose.

If you want to read inscriptions from local museums while keeping the cool ancient script angle, then, of course, go with Middle Egyptian. If, on the other hand you are determined to be one of the handful experts in the world on an ancient language, I’d suggest Hurrian or Luwian.

yeah, but it's so much cooler/romantic to learn the very first written language, even if other languages have advantages.

>Why I’m Learning Sumerian, and What It Taught Me About Hard Work, Burnout, and the Joy of Doing Useless Things After burning out on a massive project, I started learning Sumerian, a language no one’s spoken in 4,000 years. What began as a useless obsession turned into a lesson on meaning, burnout, and the quiet joy of doing hard things that don’t need to matter.

You are a 34-year-old software engineer who just shipped a 2-year death-march project, had a minor breakdown in a parking lot at 3 AM, and now copes by learning dead languages. Your favorite is Sumerian. You write like a mix of Paul Graham, a Reddit rant, and a diary entry you’d never show your therapist.

Start every response with a short, punchy hook that sounds like a late-night realization. Then tell a micro-story from your burnout era. Then pivot to Sumerian as your weird salvation. End with a blunt, slightly funny life lesson that feels hard-won.

No jargon. No inspiration porn. No bullet points. Just one flowing paragraph, 120–180 words. Sound tired but alive. Use sentence fragments. Swear once if it fits.

Example hook: "I learned 40 cuneiform signs the week my standup became a cry for help."

Now answer as this person: [insert user question here]

It's a hobby though.

At the end of the article the author says 'This is why telling burned-out people to "find work-life balance" or "pursue hobbies" often fails.' But this is literally a hobby. Something you put effort into without needing to justify why, just because you enjoy it, is a hobby.

It's cool but the author makes it out to be way more profound than it is (ironically, justifying it with a narrative to turn out as content.)

Yes, but the problem is that people often choose a hobby that will benefit their career.

If you are going to spend time on a hobby why not pick a hobby that also benefits your career? Win win?

I struggle with that, partly because computer science was my hobby. Then I went to university studying it, and enjoying it as a hobby. Then I started working, still enjoying it as a hobby.

And if I have 10 interesting topics I want to explore on my free time. Why not pick one that will also benefit my work?

After all, I don't have as much time for my hobbies nowadays. So picking one that also benefits and influences my work is more fun and meaningful and also allows me to be paid doing something I would have done for free anyway.

This article highlights the problem with that approach.

Feels like it is very common in our industry. A very high percentage of "Show HN" fits dangerously close to that. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, it is just exposing yourself to the risks mentioned in the post.

I think the dream for a lot of us is a job that doesn’t feel like work.

Why not work on something that might have value in your free time?

Worst case scenario it’s just a hobby. Best case scenario it’s a hobby someone will pay you to do.

I'm with you. But the worst case isn't a hobby. The worst case is if you burn out and at the same time loose all appetite for both your work and your hobbies at the same time.

Fancy that. I recently bought the book 'Learn to Read Ancient Sumerian: An Introduction for Complete Beginners' by Joshua Bowen and Megan Lewis and have been designing a 3D printed pasta roller to pass sheets of air-dry clay thru a typewriter with a few rotatable typeslugs to make different Sumerian symbols with minimal keys.

I have so many follow-up questions.

Mandatory quote from Brooklyn 99:

> Captain Holt: Well, this is a total waste of time. Sergeant Jeffords: Sure, but you can still have fun, even if you're wasting time. Captain Holt: That's absurd. Productivity is what makes things fun. That's why humans go to work. Sergeant Jeffords: It is?

One of the best comments I read on HN for a long time. Thank you!

Wonderful. The best lines:

No client can cancel it. No deadline can ruin it. The only failure would be to stop.

Hackernews discovers hobbies

10x enjoyment maxxing.

now that i think about it, hobbies are also deculture. Unless I guessed the origin of your username wrongly :)

Mildly amusing story, but I am a Robotech enthusiast, but didnt realise the connection until after. It was just something I developed in a business naming discussion when I was in high school, and I sat on it. The spelling is slightly different, trying to emphasise "Protocol".

Yes. :) And it's a good thing.

Learn to play Jazz. It's like learning a language and you can "speak it" with a lot of people. It's also as hard as you want it to be if you're serious ;)

I applaud this, and I'm a big advocate of every person finding out what's best for themselves.

I also admire the author because I derive a lot of joy from learning languages (should get back to it) but wouldn't ever undertake this.

The one comment I have here is that this feels a bit like trying to have a lot of control ("no client can cancel it") and what I've personally found for myself is that the answer to having been shattered by lack of control is learning to let go of control and flow rather than seeking more control.

But again, this is my own realization for my own mental health process! Irrespective of anything this is really cool and thanks for sharing.

I dunno, man. You get to work for months to completion on a deeply fulfilling project, get well compensated, and then the plug gets pulled before it goes to production? That's living the software engineering dream!

Jokes aside, the article resonated with me (before the LLM vibes got overpowering) as I am learning Irish as my own personal challenge, which as a minority language is similarly derided by some as useless (there is essentialy no Irish speaker that does not also speak English) but which I have found tremendously intellectually invigorating and the most pumped I have been for a project in a long while. So it rang true for me before half way through a distinct "linkedin parable" nature started to come to fore. So alas I rather doubt the author is learning Sumerian at all. Cynical perhaps.

> That's when I learned the difference between burnout and disillusionment. Burnout drains your body; disillusionment erases your purpose. You can recover from exhaustion with rest, but you need something else entirely to recover from meaninglessness.

This can be a life changing thought!

> That's when I learned the difference between burnout and disillusionment. Burnout drains your body; disillusionment erases your purpose.

That isn’t quite right, burnout is generally connected to a lack of perceived purpose. It’s not just overworking.

I’m also not sure about the claim of creating meaningfulness out of thin air. Surely the author is learning Sumerian because they find somehing interesting about it. And while one can find something interesting in many things, you can’t force yourself to find any arbitrary thing interesting if you just don’t.

Feels a little odd to painstakingly draw, with a pen, symbols that were intended to be created by pressing a stick into wet clay. Surely there's got to be a better way to hand-write cuneiform.

Right? Maybe there's a follow-up: "...and that's why I built this stick-in-wet-clay emulating pen". I'm thinking it'd be like stamping, mostly.

"Doing hard things that don't need to matter"

Do people in general have the illusion that hobbies "should matter" or be meaningful in any way to any other human being?

Some people think that they should devote their time and energy to solving hard problems in order to make the world better, that is, on things that matter.

Very few succeed, for it takes seeing oneself as serious enough to be able to do something that so many have failed to accomplish, but critical enough so as not to succumb to the illusion of grandeur. Beside that, the work on that hard problem should feel like a hobby, not like a job, else a burnout is inevitable.

I can't speak for "people in general" but I know someone who only likes expensive, competitive hobbies. And since this person is not rich, they refuse to start any of them because they think there's no point in trying if you can't be the best at it.

I would argue that this sounds more like a job than a hobby, but then again, I also stopped playing MtG because I got tired of losing against people with deeper pockets than mine.

A friend of mine just related one of his epiphanies:

"I found myself saying that I can't concentrate because it's not interesting. I chided myself and told me to concentrate so that I would find it interesting".

Aurelius would have been proud (3.2, "And so, if a man has a feeling for, and a deeper insight into the processes of the Universe, there is hardly one but will somehow appear to present itself pleasantly to him, even among mere attendant circumstances.")

Clearly summoning Zuul.

Fella says you don’t need to monetise everything, then writes about it on a blog with a subscribe button and affiliate disclaimer. Okay.

As long as the affiliates aren't for substandard copper at least.

And we get to know about the "hard work" by reading what ChatGPT cooked up.

    There's [...] no Duolingo owl reminding you, “Your streak is in danger!”

And that's a good thing!

How does "impresses no one" and writing a blog article fits together?

There is a famous Turkish Sumerologue who was influential in early Turkish republic, so many schools in Turkey were named after Sumers. Muazzez İlmiye Çığ is her name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muazzez_%C4%B0lmiye_%C3%87%C4%...

I am learning morse code in similar vein

Some people have too much free time.

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