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Assyrian, Babylonian, Sumerian Translator Created

Posted by samzenpus on from the what-does-the-clay-tablet-say dept.

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."

4 of 189 comments (clear)

  1. Submission is completely bogus and hasn't read TFA by sbjornda · · Score: 4, Informative

    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

  2. Test with simple phrases yield poor results by Darth_Keryx · · Score: 5, Informative

    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 The script on the site tells me that terribly outdated sources were used.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.

  3. Re:no unicode support? by ianare · · Score: 4, Informative

    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." ;-)

  4. Re:Uh...right. by calebt3 · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.