Assyrian, Babylonian, Sumerian Translator Created

DrJackson writes "A new online translator that can translate Assyrian, Babylonian, Sumerian and Egyptian hieroglyphics (1 of the 3 types anyway) has been developed. This is the first time I ever saw a translator for cuneiform. Something like this would be great for translating interesting historical records like the Amarna Letters."

Comments

bo-ring

[heptapod]

wake me when they can do pnakotic

Re:bo-ring

[Anonymous Coward]

You fool, Pnakotic is a manuscript, not a language. And that was translated into English in the 15th century!

Anyway, in the real world... Wake me up when they translate Linear A!

Re:bo-ring

[comradeeroid]

Wake me up when slashdotters stop fighting over who's geekpeen is the biggest...
Wait, cancel that never coming wake up call... I'll just wake when the stars are right and devour you all.

I didn't think they'd cracked modern languages...

[Joce640k]

I didn't think they'd cracked modern language translation yet....I dread to think what these things'll output when you feed them a bunch of test.

Still this is slashdot and hardly anybody here speaks two languages so expect a bunch of gibberish.

PS: No, my everyday language isn't English. I hardly ever get to speak English with real people.

Oh Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

This will be most useful in my efforts to summon Gozer!

Re:Oh Great!

[skoaldipper]

Did someone say Sumerian?

I hear they recently translated a speech by some Governor, addressing a San Francisco parade during a recent California primary election stop...
[...]
Candidate - Open immigration, mass transit, relief of property taxes at your doorstep, and windmills instead of coal.
Mayor - Wrong! Governor! What is best in life?
Governor - To brush your enemies, see them drivel before you, and to wear the garmentation of the women.

yes, but

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it support UTF-8? :)

no unicode support?

[ILuvRamen]

I dunno unicode too well but heiroglyphics aren't in it, right? So...without being able to paste it in, it'd go REALLY slow. Like Stargate slow lol. Still pretty neat though

Re:no unicode support?

[ianare]

Not yet, though they are on their way to being in the standard. As far as sumerian cuneiform, they are already in utf-8, part of the ancient languages section.
"One character encoding to rule them all." ;-)

Uh...right.

[piyamaradus]

As a technologist who also reads ancient Egyptian (from college) as well as Akkadian (== Assyrian & Babylonian, with slightly different scripts over the years) and Sumerian, I can fairly readily call shenanigans on this one. The sophistication of translation here is about as deep as the 'your name in hieroglyphs' stuff you find in museum stores and the horrid Dover reprints of Budge's books.

And don't even get me started on Sumerian. Professional Sumerologists still can't render half of the agglutinative morphemes that appear in Sumerian verbs.

Re:Uh...right.

[Rebelgecko]

As a technologist who also reads ancient Egyptian (from college) as well as Akkadian (== Assyrian & Babylonian, with slightly different scripts over the years) and Sumerian, I can fairly readily call shenanigans on this one. The sophistication of translation here is about as deep as the 'your name in hieroglyphs' stuff you find in museum stores and the horrid Dover reprints of Budge's books.

And don't even get me started on Sumerian. Professional Sumerologists still can't render half of the agglutinative morphemes that appear in Sumerian verbs. I definitely agree with you on translating difficulties. When your last sentence was translated into English, most of it came out as gibberish!

Re:Uh...right.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll second that with the note that one should look at the sources that McCormack is using for his history of Sumer section. Citing Woolley is great, he is one of archeology's giants, but I must respectfully question drawing conclusions from Waddell for any language model / history. His model of hyperdiffusionism has been long discredited among scholars. I will also note the general lack of citation of recent scholarship in McCormack's pages or any recent work linguistic work by reputable scholars.
One should point out that our understanding of Sumerian history and language, especially, has changed extensively since the 1930's.
I think an online English -> Sumerian / Akkadian reference is a great idea. The EPSD from the University of Pennsylvania is a terrific reference along those lines, for example.
That being said, even if the scholarship in the engine were sound, machine translation is also in its infancy for languages that we _fully_ understand, let alone Sumerian whose grammatical structure is highly debated among scholars.

Re:Uh...right.

[SlowMovingTarget]

And don't even get me started on Sumerian. Professional Sumerologists still can't render half of the agglutinative morphemes that appear in Sumerian verbs.

Pffft. That's because they don't have DirectX 10 on Vista, which has had agglutinative morpheme rendering for like forever already.

Re:Uh...right.

[evil agent]

agglutinative morphemes

Uh, I think you forgot to translate this to English...

Re:Uh...right.

[alexj33]

Indiana Jones: Dad, Professional Sumerologists still can't render half of the agglutinative morphemes that appear in Sumerian verbs!

Jones Sr.: Indiana, let it go. By the way a big rock is rolling towards us.

Re:Uh...right.

[calebt3]

Agglutinative: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/agglutinati ve
Morphemes: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/morphemes

I think he is complaining that there are so many words that are actually complete sentences or parts of sentences.

Re:Uh...right.

[Tumbleweed]

"Must have used Budge; I don't know why they keep reprinting his books." ;)

Re:Uh...right.

[belmolis]

I can confirm this. I know Egyptian. If you enter single words, you may get a reasonable translation back, though in several cases what I got is not what I would consider the usual word or spelling. If you enter actual sentences, however, the result is in every case gibberish. This system has no understanding at all of Egyptian morphology (conjugation of verbs etc.) or of Egyptian syntax. The verbs are not inflected, the words are in the wrong order. This is not a translation system, it is a crude dictionary.

Re:Uh...right.

[El Torico]

Since you are an authority, I have a question. I'm about 2 miles from the Ziggurat of Ur and I'll be here for a while; do you have any suggestions on how best to appreciate it?

Re:Uh...right.

[Bastard of Subhumani]

there are so many words that are actually complete sentences

Ah. So it's like German, then?

Re:Uh...right.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're American, why don't you do what all Americans do in this situation:

1) Say 'gee, we have a bigger artificial hill at the ski-slope on my ranch'

2) stack some beer cans on it

3) open fire with AP and HE from an Abrams

4) Profit!!

Re:Uh...right.

[BluedemonX]

I agree, that last document made no sense. Something about keymaster, gatekeeper, and Zuul.

Re:Uh...right.

[wanderingknight]

I'm no linguist nor do I know anything of Sumerian language, but I think he's referring to an agglutination of morphemes at the end of words. Say you have the following: Verb X Now you want to give it past tense: Verb X + past tense morpheme Now you want to make it passive voice: Verb X + passive voice morpheme + past tense morpheme Now you want to give it a negative form: Verb X + passive voice morpheme + past tense morpheme + negative morpheme And so on. As I said, I don't know jack of Sumerian, but I know Japanese, which is supposed to be an agglutinative language, and that's the way it works. In Japanese, you've got tons of morphemes that can be used at the end of verbs, making them too damn long sometimes :)

Re:Uh...right.

[wanderingknight]

Gah!! Forgot to preview it. Here's the text properly formatted:

I'm no linguist nor do I know anything of Sumerian language, but I think he's referring to an agglutination of morphemes at the end of words. Say you have the following:

Verb X

Now you want to give it past tense:

Verb X + past tense morpheme

Now you want to make it passive voice:

Verb X + passive voice morpheme + past tense morpheme

Now you want to give it a negative form:

Verb X + passive voice morpheme + past tense morpheme + negative morpheme

And so on.

As I said, I don't know jack of Sumerian, but I know Japanese, which is supposed to be an agglutinative language, and that's the way it works. In Japanese, you've got tons of morphemes that can be used at the end of verbs, making them too damn long sometimes :)

Re:Uh...right.

[Golthur]

I'll second the shenanigans (and I'm going to fetch my broom). I also happen to be somewhat fluent in reading Middle Egyptian, and I'll testify to the difficulty of translating all but the most simple of sentences. You need context, and lots of it - otherwise you won't even get the right verb form half the time (because Egyptian doesn't write down vowels, several of the verb forms are visually identical but have completely different meanings). Even in "beginner" texts, such as the Westcar Papyrus, there are chunks that translators disagree on, and translate in entirely different ways. Automated translators can't even get French right half the time, and there are plenty of living, bilingual French/English speakers who have extremely good understanding of both grammars. This is not the case with Egyptian.

Re:Uh...right.

[piyamaradus]

Well, the destruction of antiquities after the American invasion was a crime against humanity -- not just a crime against one people, but against all peoples. This is not meant to be a political statement or belittle what the folks there are trying to do, but a horror all the same.

So, as an archaeologist and historian, I would say:

1) Take nothing, damage nothing. Buy no antiquities -- the black market in looted antiquities has exploded from the war and whenever a tablet is illicitly dug up and sold, it's lost its provenance and a significant part of its value to historians. Remember -- there's a finite amount of archaeological material out there and whenever something is looted, humanity's story is diminished. There are huge amounts that we know about the beginnings of civilization from single fragments. When they're lost, they're gone forever.

2) Tell your comrades to do the same. It's not just the current generation that will thank you.

3) Realize that you are standing on a land older by far than anything we know here in the US. Ur was ancient when Rome was a collection of huts on a hill. And when Ur was built cities around it were already in ruins. Uruk (Unug in Sumerian) nearby was where writing seems to have first originated, and was a metropolis of 40-50,000 people five thousand years ago. And in those very first written texts, so early that they're entirely pictographic and are more encoded bookkeeping documents than language, one of the prominent signs is easily recognizable as the (known later) Sumerian word DUL -- a mound, a ruin -- in these texts, a place unsuitable for planting because it was a city site already, at what we think of as the beginnings of history, old beyond time.

3a) And you'll know the word DUL well. It survives, through Akkadian -> Aramaic -> Arabic, as the word Tell, which you probably hear every day in place names where a site is built on older ruins piled up over the plains.

4) Lastly, when the full moon is out and hangs over the ziqqurat of Ur, whisper a prayer to Nanna (Sin/Suen in Akkadian), the Moon god who was the patron of the place, and whose temple that once was, and beseech him once again to restore peace unto his land and his people.

Re:Uh...right.

[piyamaradus]

More or less. Turkish is usually used as a parallel for the agglutinative behavior of Sumerian (but n.b. there's no claim of a relationship between the languages -- despite many attempts (often on the fringe) to connect Sumerian with other language groups, it remains a strict isolate). Agglutinative affixes can go before or after the verb root, and vary based on which of the two forms roots come in (hamtu and maru, as defined by the later grammarians writing in Akkadian) as well as on the other parts of speech used in a sentence. Thus you get verbs like this (randomly opening a book on my desk):

ga-am(3)-ma-sig(3)-ge-en-de(3)-en, where 'sig' is the lexical element, the verb root, and the rest are affixes. (The #s indicate, basically, which sign is used of multiple homophonic signs)

This is more or less rendered as 'let us strike them down'

Then two lines down, the same sentence with negative force:

nam-ba-sig(3)-ge-en-de(3)-en

Different affixes used along with the negative affix, and it's not always possible to explain what these mean or why the choices are made. And since so much Sumerian that survives to us was written down when it was already a dead spoken language, it's unclear if the Akkadian-speaking scribes fully understood the verbal paradigms either.

(Source: Gilgamesh & Akka, Dina Katz, lines 8 and 14)

Re:Uh...right.

[Dolly_Llama]

I want to be in your field if only to be able to use words like "agglutinative morphemes."

Re:Uh...right.

[Gilmoure]

Professional Sumerologists still can't render half of the agglutinative morphemes that appear in Sumerian verbs.

I want this on a t-shirt.

Re:Uh...right.

[_Sharp'r_]

2) Tell your comrades to do the same.

I'm sorry, you seem to be confusing the US with the soviets....

(I know, I couldn't resist though.)

Re:Uh...right.

[Durf]

I suggest staying away. Ziggurats are bad for your health.

Monty Python

[JoshWurzel]

Now I can finally find out what the capital of Assyria is! I hope its not "aaaarrrrhhhh"

Re:Monty Python

[tepples]

Now I can finally find out what the capital of Assyria is!

The capital of Assyria is Addamascus.

Re:Monty Python

[Anonymous Coward]

Now I can finally find out what the capital of Assyria is!

The capital of Assyria is Addamascus.

In Soviet Russia, joke kills you.

Re:Monty Python

[Anonymous Coward]

The capital of ancient Assyria was Nineveh.

Re:Monty Python

[Anonymous Coward]

Shlamalokhoun. The capital of Assyria was originally Assur. The capital of Syria is Damascus. But that was pretty funny:-)

Oh yeah, Kheiya Atour!

Re:Monty Python

[Anonymous Coward]

I recognize the name from my civilization playing days...

Re:Monty Python

[Gilmoure]

Yeah, but Gaia's Landing used a computer probe team with mind control and took it over.

coincidentally

[WwWonka]

"Something like this would be great for translating interesting historical records like the Amarna Letters."

God, I was just telling my friend Akakakakallatatatmah the exact same thing today! weird.

I can not wait...

[orionop]

for the unfortunate translations of the Epic of Gilgamesh that rival the hilarity of the google translation of the japanese amazon site.

Re:I can not wait...

[jamstar7]

'All your ziggurats are belong to us'?

Re:I can not wait...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Today. The male be completed to look at the commodity, sign in please do. For the first time when it utilizes, this."

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F %2Fwww.amazon.co.jp&langpair=ja%7Cen&hl=en&safe=of f&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&prev=%2Flanguage_tools

Now that's what I call getting to the point.

Re:I can not wait...

[Minwee]

"Do not want!"

Only one problem...

[Virak]

Machine translation sucks. Among other things, idioms, set phrases, wordplay, and most importantly the fact that there is rarely a one-to-one mapping between languages (often resulting in either a loss of information or requiring missing information to be added, which often requires knowledge of the culture of the language's people) all present challenges that make it unlikely that anything short of human-like AI (or very close) will be able to do good translations. Or to put it more briefly, "Nothing to see here. Please move along."

Re:Only one problem...

[Anonymous Coward]

Idioms require prior knowledge. Machines deal in data.

Data != knowledge. Knowledge requires comprehension, and we haven't yet built a machine that comprehends.

Re:Only one problem...

[Anonymous Coward]

Precisely. For example, the translation of "go round the bend" would make no sense if translated literally. Even between native speakers of the same language there are mix-ups. How would you translate "I just smoked a fag"? Are you talking about partaking of a cigarette or shooting a homosexual?

Re:Only one problem...

[Anonymous Coward]

Machine translation sucks. Among other things, idioms, set phrases, wordplay, and most importantly the fact that there is rarely a one-to-one mapping between languages (often resulting in either a loss of information or requiring missing information to be added, which often requires knowledge of the culture of the language's people) all present challenges that make it unlikely that anything short of human-like AI (or very close) will be able to do good translations. Or to put it more briefly, "Nothing to see here. Please move along."

The translation of machine inhales. When to be number, idiom, to put in the phrase of the place, the game of the word, and in the fact that seriously and it is not 1 the 1 rare, (the information that is added frequently or in the loss of the thing that requires the information of whereabouts obscurity that it requires the knowledge of the culture of the peoples of the language that they finish frequently) the AI as human being (or is very the end) extracts the map between the current challenge all the language that makes thing that it loses suddenly the well is translated with the any thing first. Or the end to momentarily put in the place that, that "that it sees here. How much for the o movement "

Re:Only one problem...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's worse than this here. Idiom and usage changes drastically through the years as a culture develops. We find it hard to understand the words and mindset of a 13th century writer, and that's only 600 years ago.

Egyptian civilisation ran for around 2500 years. During that time written usage will have changed drastically. And yet the machine translation seems to suggest it can work without any data on the time/cultural area the input hieroglyphs are from?

I read Middle Egyptian a bit myself, having done pre-socratic philosophy at Uni, and the OP is rubbish. This is just a transliteration lookup - nothing more. There really is no reason to do something that simple on a computer!

Re:Only one problem...

[Durf]

No, these kinds of mindless tasks are best suited to computing. It's the really complex stuff, like, you know, translating from one language to another, that has to be done by a human being if you want it done well.

Goa'uld

[antarctican]

Great! Maybe now we can finally figure out where the Stargate, err Chapai I mean, is buried!

Re:Goa'uld

[Techno-Hat]

Well, it's currently under Cheyenne Mountain. ;-)

Re:Goa'uld

[RobertLTux]

Doctorate in Ancient Languages: US$100,000
A Library of reference books (including that moron Budge): $200,000
Plane ticket to [redacted]: $500
Knowing that you are the only one on the PLANET that can read this tablet (and you have to save the world AGAIN):

PRICELESS

Now if only...

[Jon.Laslow]

...they could make a 'Streets-to-English' translator, we'll be set. I really don't want to 'shizzle' anyone's 'nizzle' until I know what I'd be doing to what.

Re:Now if only...

[Anonymous Coward]

Snoop-speak isn't that complicated, it's like pig latin. Basically for certain nouns and other key words, take the first word sound and put "izzle" on the end, the remainder is in standard ebonics. Therefore "Fo' shizzle ma nizzle" means "For sure my nigga". Of course there are numerous possible mappings, but only a few standard ones and you can figure out which from context. E.g. "hizzle" usually means house but "This shizzle be off tha hizzle!" means "This shit is off the hook!"

For slang in general, UrbanDictionary is full of crap but you can generally trust the top-rated definitions.

Re:Now if only...

[TheRaven64]

It seems to be a fairly lossy encoding, since just from your examples you have the following mappings:

• -ure to -izzle
• -gga to -izzle
• -ouse to -izzle
• -it to -izzle
• -ook to -izzle

This being the case I'm surprised it has the expressive ability to represent non-trivial concepts. Or do I mean this bizzle the cizzle I'm surprizzle it has the exprizzle abizzle to reprizzle non-trizzle cizzle?

Re:Now if only...

[Weedlekin]

If you think that's bad, then you haven't encountered any of Britain's various "F" dialects, where the entirety of the human condition is expressed by combining fuck, fucked, fucking, or fucker. These may be used in combination with each other, and no more than two other English words which may only have one syllable each. A major difficulty is that much of the meaning of these dialects is contained not in the words themselves, but the way that pitch changes, varying loudness, and pauses are used to emphasise various parts of the phrase.

As an example of the above, consider "Fuck off", which can mean "please go away" or "I do not wish to do that" depending on whether the two words are pronounced monotonally as "fuckoff", or as "fu uckoff", with a rapidly lowering pitch before the pause (fu ), which is maintained throughout the "uck" part, and then rises again or the "off".

The above has led to a special set of F emoticons that help to distinguish between various forms of the same phrase when F is being written. A capital Y is used to indicate a British three-fingered salute, so "fuck off Y" would mean that the writer was telling the reader to go away, something that could also be signalled by a knee in the groin emoticon (""), while combining both after the same phrase indicates extreme prejudice (fuck off Y), or as the British sometimes say "in spades".

Re:Now if only...

[Weedlekin]

The preceding was fucked up. A knee in the groin emoticon is a less-than sign, so the last part should read:

"Something that could also be signalled by a knee in the groin emoticon ("<"), while combining both after the same phrase indicates extreme prejudice (fuck off Y<)"

One way translation FROM English

[Dan East]

This translates only from English to those languages, making it far less valuable than the other way around.

I have visited a number of websites over the years which did something similar, if perhaps not as accurately or to as many languages.

Also, this caught my interest:
The website translator engine took approximately an hour to create, with the language database occupying two hundred hours to line up cuneiforms and hieroglyphics with text descriptors and make a hierarchy to prioritize the information.

So the complexity lies completely within the database, and thus only requires some basic code to look up into the database and spit out results.

Dan East

Re:One way translation FROM English

[SEWilco]

But because it translates from English, they just have to add text-to-speech so we can talk to the Sumerians.
I'm not saying they're in any condition to respond.

Re:One way translation FROM English

[khellendros1984]

I've actually been looking at a grammar parser for English (just the basics...I'm not getting incredibly deep into the language), and most of the work seems to be coming up with tables of words, their parts of speech, etc. The rest is recursive matching of categories, which isn't that hard to write.

I haven't done any work on machine translation, but I'm thinking that it has a similar starting point.

But does it

[Anonymous Coward]

do Åncient? If so then Daniel Jackson is out of a job...

Re:But does it

[Anonymous Coward]

I was disappointed that the Asgard left their entire repository of knowledge to the Tauri! It should have gone to the Furlings, dammit!

Re:But does it

[TheRaven64]

Åncient is meant to be semantically equivalent to Latin, with a different symbol set. Translating the symbols into the Latin alphabet is trivial for a machine to do (1:1 mapping). Doing the translation depends on the dialect of Latin. Medieval Latin is one of the easiest languages to machine-parse, due to its very strict and regular grammar rules. Roman Latin is a bit harder, since it was more fluid.

I can't believe I just answered that question seriously.

Re:But does it

[HTH NE1]

But does it do Åncient? If so then Daniel Jackson is out of a job... He'll make his money on the ad impressions on the page. Did you not notice that the summary started with, "DrJackson writes"?

This could really hurt...

[WormholeFiend]

Zecharia Sitchin's money making scheme...

Re:This could really hurt...

[Anonymous Coward]

He's probably laughing his ass off. It only took him good 50 years or so to drill through that language to make some sense out of it.

I hardly ever get to speak English to real people

[Anonymous Coward]

Insert slightly racist xenophobia joke about English/non-English speakers being real/non-real people here.

Submission is completely bogus and hasn't read TFA

[sbjornda]

Read the article, then go to the web site. The web site translates FROM English TO the other languages. So there are no secrets revealed here. Unless you plan on revealing your personal secrets to someone from 3000 years ago by sending them through some sort of time machine.

-- .nosig

Tag this

[Anonymous Coward]

slownewsday

Translation Test

[eric2hill]

Will it translate casting liquified limestone correctly?

I swear, that was the funniest damn thing I've seen on slashdot.

Bad Translation

[Propaganda13]

There must be no good articles today.
Assyrian translation - translated words/letters in ()
there must be no (good) (a)rticles (to)day

Oh yeah.

[Anonymous Coward]

Unbelievably geeky.

Re:Oh yeah.

[e4g4]

...says the AC reading (and commenting on) Slashdot.

Re:Oh yeah.

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, it's a perfectly respectable hobbby, like making games for the Atari 2600 or collecting boogers.

Oh good!

[Chairboy]

I've been meaning to write a 'Hello world' Nam-shub...

Re:Oh good!

[427_ci_505]

How about one that instructs people how to bake bread?

If I had a time machine

[Anonymous Coward]

Please if I had a time machine I'd use it to send back goats.ex images.
And you wonder where the god Marduk came from.

Re:Submission is completely bogus and hasn't read

[Anonymous Coward]

IMPORTANT, can somebody translate this for me, A.S.A.P.??

"Good evening. As a duly designated representative of the City, County, and State of New York, I order you to cease any, and all, supernatural activity and return forthwith to your place of origin, or to the nearest convenient parallel dimension."

Re:You Idiotic American Bible-Belt Pussy!

[AgentOJ]

You idiotic anonymous coward!

The Pnakotic Manuscripts were an invention of H.P. Lovecraft and factor into the Cthulhu Mythos. Besides, everyone knows the origin of Mankind lies within the information from the Elder Gods.

Obfuscated C Contest

[Frumious Wombat]

And the OCC just got a little more interesting to judge.

This program reads itself in from stdin(claytablet), compiles a compiler, then writes itself back out to stddout(claytablet). User is required to ensure resulting program is properly baked to prevent data loss.

Re:Obfuscated C Contest

[jamstar7]

This program reads itself in from stdin(claytablet), compiles a compiler, then writes itself back out to stddout(claytablet). User is required to ensure resulting program is properly baked to prevent data loss.

As opposed to politicians who are half-baked at best?

Personally, I'm waiting for the Sumerian to English version of this turkey so we can read their political speeches & see we really haven't made that much progress after all...

It says...

[Tablizer]

"There's a place in France where the na..."

Re:Submission is completely bogus and hasn't read

[cashman73]

Too bad there's no translation in sumerian for "marshmallow man." ;-)

booooooring!

[zeromorph]

The whole page is total crap:

The Only thing the "translator" does is taking an English word and match it with lemmata in a lexicon then it takes the first hit and then it goes on. Try typing "I have seen you" you'll get "[I] [have] [see]n [you]" it simply cuts of the "n" of seen and leaves it there because it can only find uninflected forms. This is less than nothing.

And by the way the statement "For best results, use simple words as language has developed a lot since the time of this ancient language." under translation is one of the most stupid things I have read on an academic page language dedicated to some aspect of language. They should just take a Sanskrit dictionary (or whatever ... Maya ... Classical Chinese). Language then and now is pretty much the same, but apparently in some places technology hasn't developed that much, grumblegrumblegrumble...

Now I can send my Christmas cards out!

[noewun]

"It says, 'bird, camel, Horus, snake, bundle of reeds!' "

Not really, but....

[Joce640k]

Not really, but my gf's a language teacher and you wouldn't believe the amount of "homework" she gets which looks like a robot translated it from Hieroglyphics.

Some people just don't get it.

Re:I didn't think they'd cracked modern languages.

[Anonymous Coward]

> Still this is slashdot and hardly anybody here speaks two languages so expect a bunch of gibberish.

Hey! I know PHP, Javascript and HTML!!! I think most other dudes here know that too!!

Test with simple phrases yield poor results

[Darth_Keryx]

I tried a few basic phrases where I know (from graduate school) what the Akkadian should be. "If a man kills..." (shumma awilum idak, if I recall) from Hammurapi's Code. "For the gods" (ana ilani). "An adoption tablet" (tuppi maruti, all over the place especially in Nuzi tablets). Only a few words were represented correctly, and surely through the simplistic "this English word matches" method. I was shocked that even "kills" and "gods" were not rendered correctly. The script on the site tells me that terribly outdated sources were used. Tried the same for a few very simple Egyptian phrases. "The city is in joy" (all over the place in Gardiner, 3rd ed) (result not too bad on this one). "The priest hears the god". What? No flag (n-ch-r, sign for deity)? Few years ago I researched how to write out "God is Love" and "God loves you" (for Vacation Bible School, the theme was archeology-past), and I scoured Gardiner to make sure I got the grammar just right. Oh heck not even close - only correct part was mr for love, but should be mrwt for the noun. Don't get me on the Sumerian tests. Really disgustingly simple stuff from temple dedicatory inscriptions (I had just one semester of Sumerian). Well... got dingir for "god" but that's about it. Sorry. 10/10 for good intentions... but minus several million for the results. Sorry. 10/10 for good intentions... but minus several million for the results.

Re:Test with simple phrases yield poor results

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey Mr. Pope...there's nothing on the site for doing Akkadian like you mentioned, at least that I could find so I'm not suprised it's not doing translations for that. The sumerian I could not tell you about but really who honestly can read all sumerian texts and evolutions it accumulated over time? Who knows maybe the language timeframe you "mastered" was more recent in the B.C. scale than what is on that site. I'll give god a call as he'll know for sure.

Re:Test with simple phrases yield poor results

[Anonymous Coward]

+5, Informative for information, but -1, Redundant for repeating yourself. +5, Informative for information, but -1, Redundant for repeating yourself.

Re:I didn't think they'd cracked modern languages.

[megaditto]

I hardly ever get to speak English with real people.

Welcome to slashdot. Do not worry, you'll fit right in here.

Who cares about the others...

[Bluesman]

The Assyrian is the only one I care about, since their tool age archer rush is one of the most unstoppable forces in the history of man.

Good news and bad news.

[WK2]

The good news is that we can translate from Assyrian using a web site*. The bad news is that the Assyrian's used a proprietary document format, and the original program can not be found.

* Yeah, I know we can't actually do that. The article summary is bunk. It's just that I had this joke prepared as soon as I saw it.

Oh come on!

[glwtta]

Hieroglyphs.

"Hieroglyphic" is an adjective. Is that so hard?

Re:Oh come on!

[photomonkey]

Somebody mod this guy up.

Re:Oh come on!

[Anonymous Coward]

Merriam Webster lists hieroglyphic as both an adjective and a noun. So does dictionary.com.
Though http://dictionary.cambridge.org/ doesn't find it in the American English dictionary.

Re:You Idiotic American Bible-Belt Pussy!

[Anonymous Coward]

My GRANDADDY weren't np ASSYRIAN!

To Sumerian

[Steve Furlong]

How do you say "ba ra so na me ka me te ra" in Sumerian?

(Yah, someone already got a Snow Crash joke in. But this is a different Snow Crash joke.)

Re:To Sumerian

[Dusty101]

Dead easy:

"Zuul!"

(I'll match your "Snow Crash" & raise you a "Ghostbusters")

Re:I didn't think they'd cracked modern languages.

[Cheapy]

English speakers are a myth created by the Illuminati.

Re:You Idiotic American Bible-Belt Pussy!

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck you!

The "Elder Gods" just confirms that you are classic "Bible-Belt" Pussy!

Re:I didn't think they'd cracked modern languages.

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you mean? I can speak fluently in several ancient languages. I happen to be an expert at COBOL.

Cthulhu is real!

[Steve Furlong]

You insensitive clod! All I wanted for Christmas was for Cthulhu to awaken and eat my boss. I didn't get it, and now you call Him a myth!

Re:Cthulhu is real!

[RDW]

You fools! Great Cthulhu is the least of our problems here! Now that this thread has the attention of millions of helpless Slashdot readers, all it would take would be for some idiot to post a link to the original Sumerian text of the Nam-shub of Enki:

http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi?tex t=c.1.8.2.3&display=Crit&charenc=j&lineid=c1823.13 4#c1823.134

and another to a popular text to speech translator:

http://www.research.att.com/~ttsweb/tts/demo.php

and countless minds could be permanently re-programmed! Goatse and the Shining Trapezohedron have got nothing on this!

Re:Cthulhu is real!

[Anonymous Coward]

I écouté aan vostro ligações!

Re:Cthulhu is real!

[Anonymous Coward]

My PC snowcrashed when I clicked that first link!

if only...

[huckda]

they could come up with a translator for freshman chicken-scratch...
school districts could actually spend their money on some worthwhile software!

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:I didn't think they'd cracked modern languages.

[impleri]

I'm learning my third modern language currently (English, German, French). I'm on my second and third dead language as well (Latin, [classic] Greek, [classic] Hebrew). But I agree with you. Modern translators suck horribly. I'm tempted to throw in a few things to this to see what pops out... I do have my Biblia Hebraica around here somewhere...

Completely useless

[davidc]

It doesn't even have a translation for "cheezburger", let alone "bukkit"...

Re:Completely useless

[FoamingToad]

(insert sound of coffee spraying across room)

Well played.

F_T

Various Iraqi tribes can now talk to each other?

[AHumbleOpinion]

This will be most useful in my efforts to summon Gozer!

I was kind of hoping it would be useful in getting the various tribes in Iraq talking to each other.

Re:I didn't think they'd cracked modern languages.

[Arterion]

The sad thing is that, just from looking over your post, it's easy to tell you probably speak it (or at least write it) better than most natives. Kudos. What is your everyday language, just out of curiosity?

The Nature of Dead Languages

[photomonkey]

As a person who studied Latin at the high school and collegiate level, I know that much of what is 'worth' translating academically has already been translated by other academics. Sure, a scholar might be able to come up with his own unique translation, but that is not something that can be done by a machine.

A dear friend of mine is an Egyptologist, and I know his struggles in translating writings from different regions of the empire, let alone differences dynasty to dynasty.

Since even the best computer translators (and I mean the corporately deployed ones, not just freebie Web stuff like BabelFish) mangle all but the simplest Spanish, French and German (I can't say anything about Asian languages, as I can't speak or read any) phrases, how can we expect any level of reliability in translating languages that even leading scholars struggle with?

Besides, the most difficult part of translating anything stems from the fact that any person seldom speaks or writes as he should. The rules of language are bent, twisted and altered into regional dialects and strings of ethnic and cultural phraseology. In the Spanish language, a word may take on one meaning in Mexico, and entirely another in Spain. Nevermind the fact that, at least in my experience, Spanish Spanish is significantly different from Mexican Spanish. And those are two languages that diverged only a matter of hundreds of years ago, as opposed to the thousands often seen in dead languages.

This is very interesting to me, but until we have widely-available computers that can understand the subtle nuances of tone, inflection, humor and colloquialisms, the computer translation will never best, or even come close to a careful academic translation, or a translation done by a human fluent in both languages, if not academically trained in both languages.

Re:The Nature of Dead Languages

[Anonymous Coward]

"Spanish Spanish"
Spaniard Spanish, you mean.

Re:The Nature of Dead Languages

[baruz]

"Spanish Spanish"
Spaniard Spanish, you mean.

Castilian Spanish, probably.

Re:The Nature of Dead Languages

[jdjbuffalo]

While I'm sure it's probably true that most of the translations have been done for most Egyptian texts, it's not necessarily true for things like ancient Babylonian texts (clay tablets).

I did some college work with a professor that translated ancient Babylonian astronomy to modern astronomical notations. There are less than 50 people in the world who spend anytime researching (able to read) these ancient texts and they have a wealth of information in them. For the research it required reading small detailed photographs of ancient Babylonian clay tablets and putting the information that I found into a database that the professor had created. It was very interesting work but was quite difficult to make out small symbols from one photograph of a tablet that often had pieces of clay missing.

There are several thousand clay tablets that have yet to be translated (astronomical, stories and other important subjects). Most of them were recovered from the Iraqi region about 100 years ago and are currently stored in the British Museum.

Re:The Nature of Dead Languages

[photomonkey]

OK, I agree. From a philosophical standpoint there is nothing written that is unimportant to understanding the ways and means of a society and its culture.

In fact, my buddy spends most of his days happily locked away in a basement at his university translating scribal notes on crop yields, trade reports, magisterial rulings, and even the somewhat racy records of royal courtiers.

Most of these writings (and I would suspect the same to be true of your professor's Babylonian astronomical records) are obscure, hard-to-find and in private or university/museum back-room collections not generally publicly available.

Beyond that, I suspect that most laypersons would much rather (and would more greatly benefit from) read mythology or history from texts written thousands of years ago.

It's interesting that you worked with databasing photos of objects of antiquity. I am a professional photographer, and for years have been interested in photographing all manners of antiquity for both research purposes, and making the photographs available to the world. After all, we can't all get to the Louvre or the Ashmolean museum for a weekend. Hell, I can't.

Re:You Idiotic American Bible-Belt Pussy!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait - the bible belters believe in an ancient starfaring race of extradimensional telepathic squid monsters? Perhaps I should give this fundie thing a try.

Re:I didn't think they'd cracked modern languages.

[Nazlfrag]

Bird bird eye feather snake bird squiggly, you insensitive clod!

Coolio - this will come in handy

[STDK]

in my everyday life. Now if they one day invent one that can translate nonsense english into real english I'd be in heaven.

Cool idea though. Wonder if it works, all my texts are in living langaguges. STDK

Re:Various Iraqi tribes can now talk to each other

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah, that one's coming out later this year owards the end of December. Look out for the fat guy with the white beard and the red suit - he'll be presenting the abstract!

Re:I didn't think they'd cracked modern languages.

[Tumbleweed]

> I happen to be an expert at COBOL.

Wow, not only that, but you're a dinosaur that can *TYPE*! Awesome. :)

I'm just glad I finally forgot all that Fortran 77 I was force-fed in college. *shudder*

Re:Submission is completely bogus and hasn't read

[Starfleet Command]

He will come in one of the pre-chosen forms. During the rectification of the Vuldronaii, the traveler came as a large and moving Torb! Then, during the third reconciliation of the last of the Meketrex supplicants, they chose a new form for him: that of a giant Sloar! Many Shubs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Sloar that day, I can tell you!.

One way translation

[pontifier]

Here I was, hoping to upload pictures I took of some untranslated clay tablets, and then I find it only goes the other way! That doesn't help me very much :(

Learning Sumerian to impress chicks

[billstewart]

Actually in this case, it's the chicks who learned enough Sumerian to impress other people - they're a local women's choral group who perform in something like 17 languages, because it's just not enough to do several different Gaelic-family languages and Bulgarian and Seneca or have the main dead languages you perform in be Latin and classical Greek. (I forget whether the Hebrew they do is ancient or modern, or whether Ladino counts as a dead language yet, but it's a relatively recent language either way...)

Error, translater seems to have snow-crashed

[billstewart]

I just *knew* that feeding it the nam-shub of Enki was going to be a bad idea....

Re:You Idiotic American Bible-Belt Pussy!

[cathector]

Iä, Iä, Shub-Niggurath !

Egyptian Civil Engineering Spammers

[billstewart]

While the posting you're pointing to is funnier than this posting of mine (:-), what your comment reminded me of is the spam that I used to get lots of for some training company in Cairo that mostly does civil engineering. If I need to know the *current* regulations for casting liquified limestone in Egypt, they might be the people to go to, but they were so persistent for such a long time that I'd really have liked to cast their mail server in the stuff, and their ISP was the monopoly telco which had no interest in stopping spammers.

Actually, that makes me wonder

[Moraelin]

Actually, that makes me wonder about an extra technical aspect. AFAIK, writing in Egypt wasn't left to right, same size. They sometimes wrote left to right (with the faces of the hieroglyphs pointing that way), sometimes right to left (ditto), sometimes vertically, and, here's the kicker, sometimes just turned it all into a sort of a painting. I.e., sometimes the symbols were rearranged, and some some made bigger, some smaller, to get an aesthetic picture.

So I'm really curious how they'd help a totally clueless guy like me input the last case.

Not saying it can't be done, so hold your horses with the "OMG be sure they already thought of everything" posts, folks. Just asking how. Would I be able to just run it through a scanner and upload the image? If I was smart and learned enough to figure it out on my own, which is kinda a pre-requisite to inputting it then with a keyboard, I wouldn't need an online translator.

Also, would they include a dictionary of the common phrases, metaphors, etc? Remember, I'm a guy who can't even read it (or I wouldn't need an online translator), so any cultural references would go even higher over my head.

E.g., AFAIK, 110 being a perfect number in their numerology, it also ended up the perfect lifespan of a human, so phrases like "he lived 110 years" were a metaphor for "he was a perfect guy" (or really really liked, at least) or "he lived a perfect life." You can find that kind of stuff about people who actually died in their 30's (which was actually the peak of the gauss curve for males in the Old Kingdom, so 110 would have been an _extreme_ improbability) or 40's.

E.g., some addressed letters "to your scribe" or complimented said scribe, which would seem a bit bizarre. That is, unless you figure out it was a fancy way of saying "I know you can read and write, and you're reading this yourself, as opposed to having a scribe read it to you", which, apparently, was something appreciated.

Giggle all you like !!

[steveoc]

A lot of people here are having a good giggle about how lame this translator is ..

But keep in mind a simple fact before you laugh too loud :

- If the Mars explorer missions find artifacts of a prior civilisation on the face of the red planet ... then they are most likely to be culturally similar / identical to Sumerian culture found here on Earth.

Ruins of temples, memorials, grand stadiums, works of art and science - if such things are soon found on mars, then the chances are that they wont be enscribed in modern English, or Chinese, or even Latin .. they will be in formal Sumeric Cuniform, using the full range of all of the agglutinative morphemes that
continue to baffle scholars of linguistics today.

There is also a relatively high probability that many of the scrawlings and scratchings enscribed upon artifacts found on the surface of mars may also conform to ancient Tibetan/Sanskrit writings .. and equally so with the major languages of pre-flood Mesoamerian lost civilisations.

However, Sumerian would be the most probable find.

So go ahead and have a good giggle at the lame translator, but in the back of your mind .. you should seriously be asking yourself whether it is time to start learning Sumerian !!

Dont come crying to me when its all too late !!

Re:Giggle all you like !!

[TheBig1]

Wow. This is hilarious! Kudos for making me laugh on a Thursday morning!

Re:Giggle all you like !!

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah....ok....

Re:Giggle all you like !!

[whitehatlurker]

No, the Martian language is very different from Sumerian - please re-read the authoritative text for more information.

Age of Empires

[MLS100]

Sweet! Now I can finally find out what my villagers have been saying all this time.

Is word substitution translation?

[ElectricHaggis]

Yet to look at the live site, but slashdot is all about immediacy isn't it?

From reading the article linked from slashdot it looks like the thing just substitutes words. Reminds me of my belief as a young kid that to learn a foreign language all I had to do was learn the corresponding words to English...and voila!

Also, there is infinitely more to a translation than merely word substitution & grammar. Translator's often can't agree to how a text should be rendered in another language, & I suspect that the subtleties of language will be a challenge for computer translators for a long time yet.

Translators are great

[TheSciBoy]

I translate all my witnesses with the aid of google. It works large! I do not see that what the problem is. Nobody can dreaming that I am using a translator less that says they.

Re:Translators are great

[Gilmoure]

Wants pawn term, dare worsted ladle gull hoe lift
wetter murder inner ladle cordage, honor itch off
lodge, dock florist. Disk ladle gull orphan worry putty
ladle rat cluck wetter ladle rat hut, and fur disk raisin,
pimple colder Ladle Rat Rotten Hut.

Wan moaning, Ladle Rat Rotten Hut's murder colder
inset.

"Ladle Rat Rotten Hut, heresy ladle basking winsome
burden barter and shirker cockles. Tick disk ladle basking
tutor cordage offer groin-murder hoe lifts honor udder site
offer florist. Shaker lake! Dun stopper laundry wrote! Dun
stopper peck floors! Dun daily-doily inner florist, an yonder
nor sorghum-stenches, dun stoper torque wet strainers!"

"Hoe-cake, murder," resplendent Ladle Rat Rotten, and
tickle ladle basking an stutter oft.

Honor wrote tutor cordage offer groin-murder, Ladle Rat
Rotten Hut mitten anomalous woof.

"Wail, wail, wail!" set disk wicket woof, "Evanescent
Ladle Rat Rotten Hut! Wares are putty ladle gull goring wizard
ladle basking?"

"Armor goring tumor groin-murder's," reprisal ladle
gull. "grammar's seeking bet. Armor ticking arson burden
barter an shirker cockles."

"O hoe! Heifer gnats woke," setter wicket woof, butter
taught tomb shelf,"Oil tickle shirt court tutor cordage offer
groin-murder. Oil ketchup wetter letter, an den -- O bore!"

Soda wicket woof tucker shirt court, an whinny retched
a cordage offer groin-murder, picked inner windrow, an sore
debtor pore oil worming worse lion inner bet. Inner flesh,
disk abdominal woof lipped honor bet, paunched honor pore oil
worming, an garbled erupt. Den disk ratchet ammonol pot honor
groin-murder's nut cup and gnat-gun, any curdled ope inner
bet.

Inner ladle wile, Ladle Rat Rotten Hut a raft attar
cordage, an ranker dough ball. "Comb ink, sweat hard," setter
wicket woof, disgracing is verse.

Ladle Rat Rotten Hut entity bet rum, and stud buyer
groin-murder's bet.

"O Grammar!" crater ladle historically, "Water bag icer
gut! A nervous sausage bag ice!"

"Battered lucky chew whiff, sweat hard," setter
bloat-Thursday woof, wetter wicket small honors phase.

"O Grammar, water bag noise! A nervous sore suture
anomalous prognosis!"

"Battered small your whiff, doling," whiskered dole
woof, ants mouse worse waddling.

"O Grammar, water bag mouser gut! A nervous sore
suture bag mouse!"

Daze worry on-forger-nut ladle gull's lest warts. Oil
offer sodden, caking offer carvers an sprinkling otter bet,
disk hoard-hoarded woof lipped own pore Ladle Rat Rotten Hut
and garbled erupt.

MURAL: Yonder nor sorghum stenches shut ladle gulls
stopper torque wet strainers.

Re:Translators are great

[NotTheNickIWanted]

Your real name is Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz, isn't it?

Re:Translators are great

[fritsd]

Good grief! Did the farmer who told that fairy-tale to Charles Perrault have a severe head-cold, or something?

Or is this the version Rab C. Nesbitt tells his kids to put them to sleep?

BTW can you do the same to the Gilgamesj epos now?

Re:Translators are great

[Gilmoure]

It's from a 1956 book called Anquish Language. Check it out. Lots of cool stuff there. No idea how the author came up with it though.

Internet sites

[trondotcom]

Next time, if I see an Internet site in Babylonian I will be able to read it :-)

Re:I didn't think they'd cracked modern languages.

[quintesse]

You were right in expecting gibberish, just read here for example: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archive s/004867.html

Re:I didn't think they'd cracked modern languages.

[Daniel K. Attling]

On the contrary. I do belive that most people here speak a number of languages such as asm, c, pascal, cobol, java, and basic. All with their own regional distinctions and oddities of course.

Scholarship is lacking, this is junk

[kahei]

I was very excited to read the /. headline but honestly, this is rubbish. They've just got a big file in which each row is an English word and an image location -- it doesn't translate at all, it just looks up some *extremely* dubious images based on grepping for an image that matches each word in the input.

I don't read cuneiform but for hieroglyphs I swear it's as if they scanned in the pages of some 'The Wonder Of Ancient Egypt' type book and cut them into individual gifs. They didn't even start with a proper dictionary; there's really nothing going on here at all that'd be of any use to anyone interested in ancient egyptian.

The level of scholarship and indeed of coherency in the myspace-style notes plastered all over the page is also pretty darn tragic.

In short, I CALL SHENANIGANS. Heh, never said that before.

Re:Scholarship is lacking, this is junk

[Anonymous Coward]

Seconded. Anyone interested should read the Language Log article written this morning about it.

This is pure hype; it's not even close to a legitimate attempt at the imperfect machine translation systems that are already in use, much less a step forward in research.

Mormons...

[Notquitecajun]

There's a Joseph Smith, the high authority on Egyptian, line here somewhere...

Re:I didn't think they'd cracked modern languages.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm still waiting for a good translation to the hieroglyphs:
folded cloth, curl, fire drill, vulture, stick.

Re:You Idiotic American Bible-Belt Pussy!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, they just believe in one.

Re:I didn't think they'd cracked modern languages.

[virgil_disgr4ce]

"...cat head, cat head, cat head... read that back to me."

I'm sure this works perfectly

[bcmm]

What is the Sumerian for "You have no chance to survive make you time"?

Ia! Ia! Cthulu phtagn!

[Loosifur]

Now all that is left is to feed Travelocity through this translator so that the Elder Gods can find a good deal on a flight to Dulles. One way of course!! Mwuahahaha!!!

Cue the Snow Crash reference

[dpilot]

It's been over 12 hours, and no Snow Crash reference, yet?

Re:Cue the Snow Crash reference

[bobdobbs3]

Here you go... This will come in handy when I need to compose a Nam Shub. That'll be 5 clay pots filled with monetary tokens, please.

Re:Cue the Snow Crash reference

[Anonymous Coward]

Look harder!

Re:Cue the Snow Crash reference

[dpilot]

Yeah, guess I missed that one. You can only check out so much while short-run stuff is running.

finally..

[Anonymous Coward]

now i can finally get a translation from my native babylonian to my neighbours in Assyia and egypt
maybe now we can all learn to get along and bring peace to our region!

Re:I didn't think they'd cracked modern languages.

[Khammurabi]

Still this is slashdot and hardly anybody here speaks two languages so expect a bunch of gibberish.

I only speak one language, but I can code in ten.

Wait, what?

[Orgasmatron]

I was trying to read the history narrative under the translator.

Sadly, I lost interest at "Ancient Sumeria". Sumerians lived in Sumer, not Sumeria.

Re:I didn't think they'd cracked modern languages.

[ashpool7]

Good old Desert Falcon.... although I think your sequence isn't Hold Sphinx & Warp.

Re:You Idiotic American Bible-Belt Pussy!

[Magada]

It is not dead which can forever lie.

Re:I didn't think they'd cracked modern languages.

[MindKata]

Just be thankful they can't (yet) translate COBOL into English and back again.

When they create a translator for C++ to and from English, I'm out of a job. (Either that or the bosses will finally find out what the hidden Hex codes mean in our source code).

int gVeryImportantInt[]=
{
0x49206861
0x74652074
0x68697320
0x6a6f622c
0x20737475
0x70696420
0x626f7373
0x2e00
};

yawn. when they can do manuals, let me know.

[swschrad]

nobody's got the modern online manual figured out yet.

Huh?

[SnarfQuest]

All I get back is "My hovercraft is full of eels".

Re:You Idiotic American Bible-Belt Pussy!

[Anonymous Coward]

That is not dead which can forever lie, and with strange aeons, even death may die.

Get it right, n00b.

Re:You Idiotic American Bible-Belt Pussy!

[OverlordsShadow]

Does not Niggurat mean house? So what does Shub-Niggurath mean?

What's Hieroglyphics?

[Komarosu]

Wow, does it do Egyptian Hieroglyphs as well?

Hey, do you want to try some snowcrash?

[Plazmid]

Hey, do you want to try some snowcrash?

01111001011011110111010101110010001000000110001001 11001001100001011010010110111000100111011100110010 00000110011001110101011000110110101101100101011001 00001000000111010101110000001000000110111001101111 01110111001011000010000001001000010000010010000001 0010000100000100100000010010000100000100100001

Significant Point

[Nom du Keyboard]

So how do I enter the hieroglyphics for translation in the first place?

Ob_Chant

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

wake me when they can do pnakotic Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn

Re:I didn't think they'd cracked modern languages.

[Kahlua]

Forget a C++ translator, 2 lines of interpreted Ruby will do it...

$ irb
irb(main):001:0> hex_lst = %w(0x49206861 0x74652074 0x68697320 0x6a6f622c 0x20737475 0x70696420 0x626f7373 0x2e00)
=> ["0x49206861", "0x74652074", "0x68697320", "0x6a6f622c", "0x20737475", "0x70696420", "0x626f7373", "0x2e00"]
irb(main):002:0> msg = hex_lst.join.gsub("0x", "").scan(/../).map { |x| x.hex.chr }.join
=> "I hate this job, stupid boss.\000"

All I have to say is:

[Anonymous Coward]

bird bird pyramid pharaoh

Re:You Idiotic American Bible-Belt Pussy!

[Gilmoure]

Man Cave.

Re:I didn't think they'd cracked modern languages.

[Gilmoure]

I thought T-Rex's couldn't reach the keyboard?

Re:You Idiotic American Bible-Belt Pussy!

[ultranova]

It is not dead which can forever lie.

That can't be true, many politicians are dead.

Learning Egyptian

[piyamaradus]

BTW, in case anyone wants ACTUALLY to learn egyptian hieroglyphic, Gardiner, as someone mentioned above, is the place to start, despite being 50 years old. All the 'idiot's guide to egyptian' type books, or the dover reprints, are crap and totally obsolete. And fresh from my mailbox, here's Gardiner on super discount (in college, I had to pay $100 for it and go without sunday dinner for a month):

http://www.eisenbrauns.com/wconnect/wc.dll?ebGate~ EIS~~~~NEWSLIST

I'm Assyrian

[KinakeM]

Anyone else Assyrian?

This is pretty novel. But I can't stand how people like to separate Assyrians, Babylonians etc. In our culture we laugh at all that. It's the result of several thousand British and German PhD's over the centuries justifying to themselves that there is some vast difference in Near-East civilizations.

This is like future archaeologists finding the ruins of L.A. and some others finding the ruins of San Francisco and claiming that the people were distinct empires and cultures etc.

We still speak Syriac!

Khool ishkati! Translate that.

Oblig. Firesign

[HiggsBison]

Babe: No, no! Heiroglyphs! That's it! Do you remember any? Will they help? Anything at all!
Bill: Of course! Of course, it was a jackal-headed woman with her eyes akimbo, a King sitting sideways on his throne, adrip with gold, chipped nose up-lifted--thusly! All engraven on a Pyramis of Massey size, with the body of a Lion, paws that refreshes, a tale told by an idiot, and the head of a Fox!
Sound: Chanting and strange music.
Babe: That Pyramid is opening!
Old man: Which one?
Dr Dog: The one with the ever-widening hole in it!

Re:I didn't think they'd cracked modern languages.

[MindKata]

I knew someone would have to translate it. :) ... its like waving a red rag in front of a bull ;)

Re:You Idiotic American Bible-Belt Pussy!

[Some_Llama]

I know it's not true.. I blew him up with my rocket launcher in the last level of Quake. All you had to do was time it with the purple spikey thing which handily he had one flying around..

i guess he never thought that one through

Yes, right.

[Khopesh]

I've been a fan of Ancient Egyptian language and religion for 20 years now. I know a few words off the top of my head, and it correctly translated them from English. This is far more sophisticated than "your name in hieroglyphics" tricks. For example, the word for "sand" can be transliterated as "sh-ah-y." ... were it simply transliterating into Egyptian (as the "your name in hieroglyphics" mechanisms do), it would come out as "s-a-n-d" using the either Egyptian alef (hawk) or ayin (arm) for the A.

All he really did was the tedious work of lining up the flashcard translations with known translations and pump it into a database. This is a significant load of work, and he should be thanked for it. This isn't a new translation method, it doesn't use fancy new algorithms, but it does make the previously inaccessible conversions readily available to inquiring minds. I've been waiting for something like this for many years.

Unfortunately, the site doesn't talk about pronouncing the words; the alphabet chart doesn't cover biliterals or triliterals (2 or 3 characters compacted into one), the absence of vowels (like Hebrew) isn't mentioned, and determinatives (placeholders indicating meaning or part of speech, like a jug ending a word describing beer*) aren't discussed, either. I'd also like hitting [enter] to submit the form, but I'm happy enough with the current system.

* Yes, the Egyptians had beer long before the Christian monks "invented" it.

Re:I didn't think they'd cracked modern languages.

[mistahkurtz]

real people. what?

Translator

[r1n530uT]

Well, seeing as most web-based translation services can barely render a legible sentence in modern languages, how can they expect to have anything but rudimentary success with languages (particularly cuneiform) that have long since slipped out of common usage and into academia. I am all for services like this, but the value of this for me is merely as an academic/programming excercise. I am currently working on a biography of L.A. Waddell who was amongst the first to translate cuneiform and although one man's translation is not entirely reliable, I would hazard his efforts are a quantum leap ahead of any output from this bot... not that i have the cuneiform language pack installed to be able to try it ;)

Dear Toethan Achnon

[PermanentMarker]

Clay tablet from the wife of Toethan translated after about 4000 years

Hunny could you get me please :
- 10 aples
- 7 bananas
- some wine
- chips
- cola
- bear
- some Donuts
- chicken meat
- olive oil
- Oh and dear dont forget the toilet paper

And i'be back from earobics at about 16:30
So make yourself a diner and have something left when i return.

(remember they didn't got paper in those days..)
I wonder if woman be like that in those days..

Re:You Idiotic American Bible-Belt Pussy!

[Magada]

Noob? Heh. I was there when he said it.