Here I present: Denise Schmandt-Besserat, “How Writing Came About”, 1992. PART TWO (II).
INTRODUCTION.
There are eight (8) parts of speech in the English language: noun, pronoun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, conjunction, and interjection.
The English language is part of the Nostratic language superphylum within the Indo-European phylum. Within the Indo-European language phylum are both the languages of English and German. The grouping of Germanic languages includes: English, German, Dutch, Danish, Icelandic, Swedish, Norwegian, and others.
Charles Follen, “Practical Grammar of the German Language”, 1837 begins with German language “Parts of Speech”. I quote as follows: “There are ten (10) parts speech, viz. Article, Substantive or Noun, Adjective, Numeral, Pronoun, Verb, Adverb, Preposition, Conjugation, and Interjection.
Denise Schmandt-Besserat, “How Writing Came About”, 1992 is a book about the application of writing to the Mesopotamia’ language of Sumerian’. Sumerian’ is written in cuneiform’ script, and grammars of the Sumerian’ language include “Numeral” as a “Part of Speech”. English language grammar does not have “Numeral” as a “Part of Speech”; but, the Germanic language group has other languages (example German) for which “Numeral” is a “Part of Speech”.
Denise Schmandt-Besserat, “How Writing Came About”, 1992 is a book about “arithmetic”. The “clay tokens” in Mesopotamia’ for the linguistic “Numeral” as a “Parts of Speech” is how its population of Uruk’, Mesopotamia’ grew with the introduction of the cuneiform script writing system.
