XML for Ancients

Andrew writes: "More than 5,000 years ago, the very first information revolution occurred when some unknown research team in Mesopotamia found a way to download and store language through a killer application called "writing.". The cuneiform digital library will have 60,000 texts ready in a couple of years. Using SVG and XML to represent their documents. Similar efforts are underway for hieroglyphics."

Comments

Cunieform writing

[Alien54]

Slashed already

[smile]

Scientific American has this article on Information Technology, 2500 B.C. on what life was like for the information worker of that day.

As many as half a million cuneiform tablets, hand size up to book-page size, are now available around the world. Surely many more are waiting to be found. Those samples are of every quality: once prized accounts and receipts, schoolboys' lessons, litigation profound or droll, literary essays, erotica, mathematics--and entire ancient epics, centuries older than Father Abraham's. A mostly unread treasury, comprising the equivalent of tens of thousands of large printed volumes.

Looks like there could be a lot of fun and good stuff there.

Re:XML, Writing and Jabber

[instinctdesign]

Well, the best answer to this one was provided on the hieroglyphics page. I'm not sure if it was slashdotted after I got it (the UCLA one was down just after the first comment was posted) so I'll post the majority here.

XML is a format which allow both to describe an encoding and to write encoded files. It was chosen for a number of reasons. First, it's easy to extend an XML format. Second, it's easy to parse an XML file, an there are a lot of tools for it: people will be able to manipulate XMLMCD files without being graduate in Computer Science. Third, XML is being used for a growing number of applications --- for instance web browsers. Fourth, there's a user community for XML in the philological world : two interesting examples are the Text Encoding Initiative and the recent conference on XML and Ancient Near East.

Protocol implementation

[xant]

Clients would have to know and implement the protocol. But since XML always looks the same, implementing the protocol is just a matter of linking the standard XML library in the language of your choice and using the DTD to decide what you want your client to understand.

There's other advantages, but that's a big one.

Re:Will we have to revise unicode?

[hwilker]

See "Why Unicode Won't Work on the Internet: Linguistic, Political, and Technical Limitations" for more information on this. It argues that even Unicode 3.1 will not contain enough characters for just East Asian languages, never mind dead, Middle Asian ones.

The main reason seems to be that in East Asia, there are reduced character sets in daily use which contain only a couple of hundred or thousand glyphs, but to read and study classical texts, the number required quickly goes up into the tens of thousands, for each of a number of languages. Not having these glyphs in the Unicode set would be like asking English-speakers to use alphabets reduced by five or six characters (M and N are similar, X, Q, C and Z could be replaced by one character as well) and dictionaries from which three out of four words have been deleted due to redundancy or age.

The reason for this mis-design, the article argues, is political: the nationalities in question have never been asked how many characters they would need together -- for each single language, Chinese, Korean, or Japanese, a scholar would say "Sure! 50,000 characters is enough for us!"

Copyright is 70 years on books 8)

[da5idnetlimit.com]

So a 5000 years original text should be no problem.

The case will happen if you ask for the translation (What, you are not Cuneiform litterate ? Talk about education 8)