Cuneiform translator

Cuneiform has no sign for a consonant on its own. Every sign is a vowel, a consonant with a vowel after it, or a vowel with a consonant after it, so a word is written in syllables. Mark becomes ma-ar-ak, three signs. Under the result you'll find each word's spelling, so you can see which sign stands for which sound.

Where English has two consonants together, one of them has to borrow a vowel. That's why Mark ends in ak rather than a bare k. A doubled letter is split across two signs instead, so Anna is an-na.

What you get is English sounded out in cuneiform signs, not a translation into Sumerian or Akkadian, which were languages with their own words and grammar. Think of it like writing your name in another alphabet, except that the units are syllables rather than letters.

Signs and sounds both come from the syllabary of Hittite cuneiform, which used four vowels (a, e, i and u) and the consonants b, p, d, t, g, k, ḫ, l, m, n, r, š and z. Hittite scribes dropped the separate s signs of Akkadian, so s is written here with the š signs. They also used the b and p signs, d and t, g and k fairly loosely, so in this list one sign often covers both.

On screen, the sign shapes come from a modern font, Noto Sans Cuneiform. Scribes made the real signs by pushing a wedge-tipped stylus into clay, and the script changed a great deal over more than 2,000 years, so no single font matches every tablet.

Paste cuneiform into the box and swap the direction, and each sign is read back as its sound, with hyphens between the signs of a word. Some signs had more than one value. One sign wrote bi, pé and pí, and the one for ab also wrote ap, so the reading back gives the first value in the list, and Mark comes back as ma-ar-ag.