Are yet undeciphered languages / texts hopeless by 2022?

General discussion about learning languages
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luke
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Re: Are yet undeciphered languages / texts hopeless by 2022?

Postby luke » Fri Jun 17, 2022 8:22 pm

Isn't it common knowledge that when the AIs decipher the heretofore cryptic languages of the ancients there will be 2 primary themes?

1) Always Trust { Microsoft, Google, Bing, Yandex, DeepL }.
and
2) Big Brother is not watching. :shock:
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Re: Are yet undeciphered languages / texts hopeless by 2022?

Postby Ug_Caveman » Tue Jul 05, 2022 4:03 pm

Maybe someone will be able to use AI to finally decipher the Thomas Beale papers...

Which will reveal the whole thing was an elaborate hoax that trolled people for over 100 years :lol:

(Although I really would like to know if the papers are genuine encryptions of a real message)
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Re: Are yet undeciphered languages / texts hopeless by 2022?

Postby galaxyrocker » Tue Jul 05, 2022 4:15 pm

It's funny, as there was just a full decipherment of the Linear Elamite script announced this past week. Well, it had been announced before, but the full decipherment and paper of methodology was just published.

Now, we know Elamite and have some other stuff in Elamite from later with bilingual inscriptions, so it's not like deciphering Linear A or the Indus Valley script, but still another pre-2000 BCE script we can now read
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Re: Are yet undeciphered languages / texts hopeless by 2022?

Postby Lawyer&Mom » Tue Jul 05, 2022 4:43 pm

galaxyrocker wrote:It's funny, as there was just a full decipherment of the Linear Elamite script announced this past week. Well, it had been announced before, but the full decipherment and paper of methodology was just published.

Now, we know Elamite and have some other stuff in Elamite from later with bilingual inscriptions, so it's not like deciphering Linear A or the Indus Valley script, but still another pre-2000 BCE script we can now read


The Wikipedia article has a nice summary of the decryption process, and a truly stunning Elamite silver cup.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Elamite
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Re: Are yet undeciphered languages / texts hopeless by 2022?

Postby Querneus » Tue Jul 05, 2022 11:13 pm

Rongorongo remains to be deciphered, and here there might be the problem the texts are too few. But who knows, maybe what is known of the local language (Rapa Nui) will one day be successfully matched.

Harappan is another one...
Iversen wrote:In other areas modern technique used by humans has wrought miracles. For instance the Lidar system has demonstrated that there are far more Mayan ruins buried under the jungle than anyone in their wildest moments had expected,

This is the first time I hear of that, and that sounds fascinating!

zenmonkey wrote:When I bought my copy, the book was a misprint and the last half was missing. :o :lol:

The publisher clearly did not expect readers to get that far anyway.
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Re: Are yet undeciphered languages / texts hopeless by 2022?

Postby tangleweeds » Wed Jul 06, 2022 5:39 pm

OT: Does anyone know what the baked clay cones were used for?

I recently learned that the more humdrum administrative tablets were recycled by wetting them down and scrubbing off the no-longer relevant text, kind of like the beeswax tablets used in slightly less antique antiquity.
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Re: Are yet undeciphered languages / texts hopeless by 2022?

Postby lichtrausch » Fri Nov 11, 2022 4:16 pm

Ancient wisdom: Oldest full sentence in first alphabet is about head lice

“This is the first sentence ever found in the Canaanite language in Israel," said co-author Yosef Garfinkel, an archaeologist with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. "There are Canaanites in Ugarit in Syria, but they write in a different script, not the alphabet that is used till today. The Canaanite cities are mentioned in Egyptian documents, the Amarna letters that were written in Akkadian, and in the Hebrew Bible. The comb inscription is direct evidence for the use of the alphabet in daily activities some 3,700 years ago. This is a landmark in the history of the human ability to write.”

While early writing systems emerged in Mesopotamia and Egypt over 5,000 years ago, they used symbols rather than a bona fide alphabet, which appeared significantly later, around 1800 BCE. According to the authors, little is known about this first alphabet because so few inscriptions have survived that predate the 13th century BCE—just a few letters, maybe a word or two, usually lacking context. "Thus, it is very likely that most writing was carried out on perishable materials that have decayed over time," Garfinkel et al. wrote. Since the 1930s, the Lachish site has yielded a dozen or so inscription fragments from between the 13th and 12th centuries BCE, suggesting the city-state and surrounding region played a leading role in the alphabet's early history.
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Re: Are yet undeciphered languages / texts hopeless by 2022?

Postby emk » Sat Nov 12, 2022 11:41 pm

Iversen wrote:In cases where there are enough data to work on and some assumptions about the way languages work I could see AI play a similar role in code breaking.

If I had one thought on this subject, it's "Do not underestimate the work of generations of comparative linguists."

Every few years, we see a bunch of excited biologists who try to fancy apply DNA-inspired algorithms to construct family trees of languages. And every time, they get laughed at by linguists, because some those algorithms were originally inspired by comparative linguists. We don't need a computer to look at how languages change of time, because that analysis was done carefully, by hand, over more than a century, by a huge number of people. When every single world in your data set is the subject of academic papers, you have certain advantages over an algorithm.

And I suspect the same caveat applies to AI, or to any other kind of fancy statistical methods. For many of the really interesting untranslated languages, someone has probably picked over every single available text, and built a concordance. Once that much expert brainpower has been invested in a subject, AI really isn't going to buy you that much.

Out of all the untranslated languages out there, which ones have the most text? I mean, besides the Voynich Manuscript? (I was amused by the xkcd hypothesis.)
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