I kind of understand how we can figure out the meanings of the symbols, but idk how we know what they sound like. Is it just based off of cognates with known languages?
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We don’t really, not for certain; we can make a very educated guess though based on reconstruction. Sumerian in particular is tricky because not only has it been extinct for a long time, but there are no languages that are directly descended from it (like Italian is descended from latin for example). It did have a lot of influence on Akkadian, which is a semitic language, so a lot of the reconstructed pronunciation is based on what we know of Akkadian based on patterns in the semitic languages and comparing Akkadian cuneiform texts to Sumerian cuneiform texts.
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