
How AI could help us with ancient languages like Sumerian - nkurz
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20181207-how-ai-could-help-us-with-ancient-languages-like-sumerian
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acheron
I tracked down a book earlier this year (via inter library loan) called
_Archaic Bookkeeping_ about some of the oldest engravings found, mostly pre-
cuneiform. This was essentially the invention of arithmetic, accounting, and
writing all at once. It’s amazing stuff. The book was written in the early 90s
and touched on the earliest attempts to have computer assistance in
translation, done throughout the 80s. It would be great to see what today’s
techniques could do.

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sakri
People use the 'set in stone' phrase all the time, it puts a different spin on
it when 6000 years later, we are still analyzing some poor guys tax returns.
This is fascinating stuff, too bad data mining the mundane lives of social
media users pays better.

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barrow-rider
Can't sell a Sumerian a new model iPhone.

And to play devil's advocate here, what does this old data potentially get us?
Like OP said, it may just be some dude's tax info. Nice to have, and maybe
useful for painting a picture of day-to-day life, but that's not going to do
anything for climate change, stagnant wages, or Mutually Assured Destruction?

~~~
nf05papsjfVbc
If I'm not mistaken, generalising your question leads to: "What is the use of
studying history?"

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minikites
Attitudes like the one expressed in the comment you're replying to is exactly
why STEM majors should have a required humanities/liberal arts component.

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johan_larson
I'd be more enthusiastic about such requirements if humanities/lib-arts
courses actually provided a solid answer to how one should live and what one
should want. But they don't. They provide lots of different answers, with no
great way to choose between them. Going through a mass of required reading
only to reach the conclusion that living for bling+bitches is actually a
pretty OK idea doesn't seem like a good use of time.

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mcguire
" _...only to reach the conclusion that living for bling+bitches is actually a
pretty OK idea._ "

Actually, essentially all of the suggestions agree that living for
"bling+bitches" is a pretty poor idea. For different reasons, of course.

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johan_larson
Hedonism is respectable enough that textbooks in ethics keep presenting it.
The other ethical approaches kick it in the shins pretty hard, but no one
seems to have a decisive refutation. Ethicists from other traditions just
think hedonists are punks.

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mcguire
This is true. On the other hand, many of the approaches that get kicked around
as "hedonism", like Epicurus, are pretty far from "bitches+bling".

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KasianFranks
NLP(NLU, NLI, NLG) is the tip of the spear when it comes to AI and has its
roots in the study of Epigraphy [1] which is essentially the study of ancient
inscriptions and symbols. Analyzing human language and thought surrounding
objects is key to advances in AI.

The study of epigraphy is the microscope while the study of human aging,
extending human lifespan is the telescope that lets us see the stars in the
future. With Epigraphy you can change dates in human history which changes a
lot of what we thought we knew about ourselves.

The best NLP is based on principles that underpin epigraphy combined with
neuroscience and research in cognition. The interesting part is that
unbeknownst to most, the study of the past (epigraphy/NLP) is being used to
solve for the future (space biosciences - LET radition, DNA repair, extending
human lifespan making real space travel possible for the purpose of inhabiting
other planets). Sounds out there, but this is what we work on at
LBNL/DOE/DARPA/NASA related to predicting new interactions between proteins,
genes etc.

Fun fact: Epigraphy, ciphers/deciphering, info security, cryptography are all
related [2]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigraphy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epigraphy)

[2] From the epigraphy mailing list:

"Georges Depeyrot <Georges.depeyrot@ehess.fr>

To: epigraphy@yahoogroups.com

Sep 20, 2003 at 10:28 PM

Dear List members, We are publishing books on numismatics and economy (see
Moneta <[http://www.cultura-net.com/moneta/content.htm>](http://www.cultura-
net.com/moneta/content.htm>)). I just want to inform you that one of the books
in press is devoted to "coins, money and epigraphy, 1st - 3rd c." (author, Pr
St. Mrozek, Uty of Gdansk, Poland). It will concern the Roman Empire."

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vectorEQ
cuneiform has a lot of data, i would be more interested though in things that
people claim to have translated already, like for instance Egyptian
hieroglyphs where theres a solid body convinced it's all correctly translated
,but some parties dispute some basic symbols which change the meanings of
texts dramatically.

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davidw
Skynet trained on ancient Sumerian texts... I like the potential storyline.

~~~
airstrike
Neal Stephenson is proven right one more time...

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nmstoker
This is partially what it was implied David from Prometheus was doing at the
start of the film (although he appeared to be working back from modern
pronunciation to earlier proto-languages too)

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cronix
Yes! I'm pretty sure it was based off of Sitchin's translations of the
tablets, and David was looking for the alien race that created the human
hybrids (us). It's actually very close to the Adam and Eve story, like how the
flood tale in the tablets mirror the Great Flood in the Bible.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zecharia_Sitchin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zecharia_Sitchin)

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harveywi
How AI could help us with anything, really.

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thebooktocome
AI approaches to "reading" the Voynich manuscript have not been terribly
successful.

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ahje
In this case, the script is not a problem. The article is about bulk machine
translation of a lot ancient texts.

~~~
rvense
And unlike the Voynich manuscript, here we have known good translations to
start from.

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mcguire
In addition to the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative, there is also the
Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature,
[http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/](http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/). (A nice
example: "The advice of a supervisor to a younger scribe", transliteration:
[http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-
bin/etcsl.cgi?text=c.5.1.3&...](http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-
bin/etcsl.cgi?text=c.5.1.3&display=Crit&charenc=gcirc), translation:
[http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-
bin/etcsl.cgi?text=t.5.1.3](http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-
bin/etcsl.cgi?text=t.5.1.3) .)

There are three problems with machine translation of cuneiform texts (Problem
0 is accumulating enough pieces of a text to make it worthwhile[1]):

The first is reading the signs on the tablet, which is probably incomplete and
damaged. Further, some scribes weren't all that spectacular; IIRC, the early
stages of Assyriology benefited because of the early discovery of
Ashurbanipal's library at Ninevah, where he'd put some money into ensuring the
tablets were good quality.

I believe there has been some work on 3D scanning of tablets, but I haven't
found any major collection of them. Or of high quality photos, for that
matter.

The second is transliteration of the signs into usable text. The article
mentioned image recognition for cylinder seals, but I'd be interested in any
significant success at recognizing text.

The third is translation, described in the article. This is probably the
easiest; Akkadian (used in Assyria and Babylon) and Sumerian are both
understood reasonably well.

I think there's two useful results of this research:

The general "digital humanities" giant database of people/places/things:
transactions, prices, names, etc. It's possible with that to understand
Mesopotamian civilization better than we do Greek or Roman.

And identifying, of the giant mass of archived tablets, those that really do
deserve a closer look. Like Irving Finkel's translation ("discovery" isn't the
right word) of another copy of Atrahasis' flood story.

[1] There's a cute story about Cyrus the Great's cylinder, I believe; one copy
of it was broken either in antiquity or around the time of discovery and
transportation. The two pieces wound up in Europe and America (Penn State?)
until somebody very observant realized they were two parts of the same
cylinder. And I'm given to believe that the British Museum has employed people
to re-jigsaw the gravel at the bottom of the incoming crates of tablets back
into something useful.

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gaius
Maybe Sumerian and Enochian are best left unspoken.

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krapp
Enochian isn't a real language, though, it's just something John Dee made up
while tripping on mercury or something.

