“The lost language of Ugaritic was last spoken 3,500 years ago. It survives on just a few tablets, and linguists could only translate it with years of hard work and plenty of luck. A computer deciphered it in hours.
The computer program relies on a few basic assumptions in order to make intuitive guesses about the language’s structure. Most importantly, the lost language has to be closely related to a known, deciphered language, which in the case of Ugaritic is Hebrew. Second, the alphabets of the two languages need to share some consistent correlations between the individual letters or symbols. There should also be recognizable cognates of words between the two languages, and words that have prefixes or suffixes in one language (like verbs that end in “-ing” or “-ed” in English) should show the same features in the other language.
That might seem like a lot of information for the program to require, but even all that is no guarantee of decipherment. After Ugaritic was first discovered in 1929, it remained untranslatable for years. It finally revealed some of its secrets to German cryptographer Hans Bauer, who was only able to make substantial headway when he guessed the drawing of an ax was next to the Ugaritic word for “ax.” Even this breakthrough wasn’t a complete success, because although Bauer’s guess was correct he matched the wrong sounds and letters together, resulting in a mistranslation.
So, the question for the computer program wasn’t just how quickly it could translate Ugaritic compared to its human counterparts; there’s also whether it could avoid the mistakes and pitfalls that had slowed down the initial decipherment. The program worked by looking for correlations and correspondences at the various levels of languages described above – individual sounds and letters, different segments of the word, and cognates between languages. It then mapped the similarities between Hebrew and Ugaritic, starting with the sounds and then bringing in the other aspects to figure out the most probable matches. By cross-referencing these different parts of language and repeating the process hundreds of thousands of times, the program arrives at a fully deciphered Ugaritic.
The results were stunning. Of the thirty letters in the Ugaritic alphabet, the computer correctly identified twenty-nine of them.”
Read more at io9 (thanks DG)
Dude.
That’s awesome…except…
WTF did it SAY???
Wow that is so cool! The thing is where did they get the idea to call it Ugaritic from lol?! And has anybody ever thought that maybe aliens taught us languages? Ah, me and my open mind!
And how can a language become ‘dead’? Did people just wake up one day and decide they couldn’t be bothered to speak it anymore?
“Of the thirty letters in the Ugaritic alphabet, the computer correctly identified twenty-nine of them.”
How did it get the last one wrong?
That’s interesting. I wonder what they said. Hopefully after all that work it wasn’t just a shopping list. Imagine the disappointment if in thousands of years people discover a long lost language called English, spend years translating it only to find someone wanted to get some tomatoes.
I think this is actually bad news for scientists. Like everyone else in this day and age, they’ll now be made redundant, and replaced with computers.
The machines have their flaws, though. For example, it could only translate 29 of the 30 letters of their alphabet correctly. And one letter can make ALL the difference! (For example, you wouldn’t want to write to someone ‘I want to kiss you’, and have them read it as ‘I want to kill you’…or have everyone thinking your name’s Darren when it’s actually Derren.
)
it said, “send more chuck berry.”
Did it read “Will you please stop letting your pet pigeon walk all over my clay tablets!!!”
Wow, a computer programmer created a program that can decipher difficult languages? that IS amazing!
tss, i think my comments are stuck in the filter
*sniggers*
the language is called Ugaritic because the city in which the tablets were found was known as Ugarit (now Ras Shamra in Northern Syria), and it became ‘dead’ because the town was destroyed c. 1200 BC, probably by the invasion of those commonly known as the ‘sea peoples’. no shopping lists have been found, and whilst some of the tablets are slightly tedious things such as adminstrative lists, others are wonderful works of mythological literature which have contributed hugely to the worlds of theology and mythology in Old Testament and Ancient Near Eastern studies.