Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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."

5 of 189 comments (clear)

  1. Uh...right. by piyamaradus · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Uh...right. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:Uh...right. by belmolis · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    3. Re:Uh...right. by piyamaradus · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

  2. Oh come on! by glwtta · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Hieroglyphs.

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

    --
    sic transit gloria mundi