Why are the orthographies of Ancient/Proto Languages so Impractical?

Question

For example: In the Romanization of Sumerian, /ŋ/ is written as ⟨g̃⟩ or ⟨ĝ⟩ instead of ⟨ng⟩ or even ⟨ŋ⟩. Also in Sumerian /t͡sʰ/ is written ⟨ř⟩ or ⟨dr⟩. The list goes on with Sumerian.

In Proto-Indo-European (Which I know is technically not a real language) /kʷ/ is written as ⟨kʷ⟩ instead of ⟨kw⟩. This problem mostly applies to Proto-languages actually, but it also applies to some extinct semetic languages, like Ge'ez.

I'll admit I'm definitely a novice in Linguistics, so this could all make perfect sense. But I don't understand and would request clarification.

Answer 1

First, it's worth noting that these are transcriptions, used by linguists, not actual orthographies used by native speakers. The ancient Sumerians didn't write their word for "god" as diĝir; they wrote it as 𒀭. And the people who spoke something like Proto-Indo-European never wrote it down at all. It's only modern scholars who use the Latin alphabet for this.

And since these are modern transcriptions of extinct or reconstructed languages, we generally aren't sure how the sounds were pronounced! Some scholars think that Sumerian ř was pronounced like IPA /t͡sʰ/, but others disagree, and some argue that it wasn't a distinct phoneme at all (just an artifact of a sound change in progress).

All that we can be certain of is that certain words (like guř "ox") are sometimes transcribed with Akkadian phonetic signs containing /d/, and sometimes with Akkadian phonetic signs containing /r/. So if you want to talk about this new maybe-phoneme without getting into the weeds of how it was actually pronounced, ř or dr are reasonable names to pick.

Or, sometimes it's for reasons of typesetting (like Sumerian ĝ being much easier to type than ŋ until very recently), or to show that something is a single segment (PIE *kʷ is generally considered a single phoneme, rather than *k followed by *w). In the end, these transcriptions are mostly only used by specialists in specific fields, who quickly get used to all the idiosyncracies. With no native speakers using these transcriptions in day-to-day life, practicality isn't much of a concern.

Answer 2

There are numerous reasons specific to the language in question. Semitic transcription practices were established a long time ago before the IPA swept the field of linguistics (likewise Finno-Ugric, Bantu, and so on). The letters used are often deliberately vague because there is uncertainty as to the phonetic property of the sound in question (thus Bantu "c" in Guthrie's transcription). Most works before 1985 or so were prepared on a typewriter which had limited capacity for writing phonetic symbols. There is a strong tendency for the first works in a language family to be historical reconstruction (certainly the case in Bantu), so that a description of Sotho is driven by the desire to relate the sounds of Sotho to reconstructed Proto-Bantu – therefore, the same alphabet will be used for talking about the specific language and the proto-language.

In some cases, there is a deliberate choice, for example in IE kʷ, the point is to graphically distinguish the labiovelar from a sequence of velar plus glide. That notation is important in understanding the phonology of languages like Tigrinya, since "kw" is not phonologically a consonant sequence.