Dan (cuneiform)

The cuneiform dan sign is a multi-use sign found in both the 14th century BC Amarna letters and the Epic of Gilgamesh. Besides dan, (and tan), the following are its uses (from Epic of Gilgamesh):

As sumerogram GURUŠ, it is only used for its Akkadian language meaning "eṭlu"-("young man"). Half of the spellings of eṭlu use GURUŠ combined with other signs, and half spell eṭlu alphabetically/syllabically. The quantities used for specific meanings of the sign, in the Epic of Gilgamesh are as follows: dan-(27), kal-(23), lab-(19), lap-(3), lép-(1), líb-(7), líp-(3), reb-(7), rib-(2), tan-(10), GURUŠ-(23).

Amarna letter use and "dan-is"

Combined with is, (is (cuneiform)), the Akkadian word dan-is, "danniš", meaning "greatly", "strongly", "fervently", etc. is used in the Amarna letters, especially from Mesopotamia, of Mitanni (King Tushratta), Babylon, and others. Tushratta's letter to Pharaoh, Amarna letter EA 19, Love and Gold uses many examples of danniš; also from Tushratta, EA 26 and EA 28.

Dan.

Dan. may mean:

Dan

Dan is an old Scandinavian given name with disputed meaning. Dan is also a Hebrew given name, after Dan, the fifth son of Jacob with Bilhah and founder of the Israelite Tribe of Dan. It is also a given name or a nickname for people named Daniel.

Dan, or the acronym DAN may refer to the following:

People

People with the surname

Places

Dan (Chinese opera)

Dan (Chinese: 旦; Wade–Giles: tan), is the general name for female roles in Chinese opera, often referring to leading roles. There are a few different kinds of dan in Chinese opera. The commonly seen ones are 'Guimen Dan', 'Hua Dan', 'Daoma Dan', 'Wu Dan', 'Lao Dan' and 'Cai Dan'. Each different kind of dan has its own unique characteristics.

Guimen Dan

Guimen Dan (闺门旦) is the role of the virtuous lady. It is also known as Qingyi (青衣）or Zhengdan (正旦). Qingyi means 'green robes' in Chinese, although the term traditionally extends to the colour black. This kind of dan used to wear black robes. Qing Yi are normally mature and sometimes married women. They may be rich or poor, young or of middle age, but they have to be mature women to fall under this category. Qingyi focus more on singing and they have little movement. They sing in a very high pitched and piercing voice which many people who do not appreciate Chinese opera find difficult to like. Opera schools in China have difficulty recruiting students for this kind of role, since it requires a good voice, good looks and a good height. The most famous qingyi of the last century was Mei Lanfang. Examples of Guimen Dan are Du Liniang (杜丽娘) from The Peony Pavilion (牡丹亭) and Wang Baochuan (王宝钏）from Wujiapo （武家坡).

Ù (cuneiform)

The cuneiform ù sign ('u, no. 3'), is found in both the 14th century BC Amarna letters and the Epic of Gilgamesh. Its use is as a conjunction, (translated as for example: and, but, else, until, etc.), but rarely it is substituted for alphabetic u, but that vowel u is typically represented by 'u, no. 2', (u prime), ú; occasionally 'u, no. 1', (u (cuneiform)), , (mostly used for a conjunction, and numeral 10), is also substituted for the "alphabetic u".

The use of ù is often as a "stand-alone" conjunction, for example between two listed items, but it is used especially as a segue in text, (example Amarna letters), when changing topics, or when inserting segue-pausing positions. In the Amarna letters, it is also commonly immediately followed by a preposition: a-na, or i-na, used as "...And, to....", or "...And, in...."; also "...But, for....", etc. This usage with a preposition is also a better example of the segue usage.

Of the three u's, by graphemic analysis (Buccellati, 1979), the commonness is as follows:

Cuneiform (Unicode block)

In Unicode, the Sumero-Akkadian Cuneiform script is covered in three blocks in the Supplementary Multilingual Plane (SMP):

The sample glyphs in the chart file published by the Unicode Consortium show the characters in their Classical Sumerian form (Early Dynastic period, mid 3rd millennium BCE). The characters as written during the 2nd and 1st millennia BCE, the era during which the vast majority of cuneiform texts were written, are considered font variants of the same characters.

History

The final proposal for Unicode encoding of the script was submitted by two cuneiform scholars working with an experienced Unicode proposal writer in June 2004. The base character inventory is derived from the list of Ur III signs compiled by the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative of UCLA based on the inventories of Miguel Civil, Rykle Borger (2003), and Robert Englund. Rather than opting for a direct ordering by glyph shape and complexity, according to the numbering of an existing catalogue, the Unicode order of glyphs was based on the Latin alphabetic order of their 'main' Sumerian transliteration as a practical approximation.

Cuneiform (disambiguation)

Cuneiform (from the Latin word for "wedge-shaped") can refer to: