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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."
wake me when they can do pnakotic
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.
Now I can finally find out what the capital of Assyria is! I hope its not "aaaarrrrhhhh"
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
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I've been meaning to write a 'Hello world' Nam-shub...
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.
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...
"Hannibal's plans never work right. They just work." Amy/A-Team
"It says, 'bird, camel, Horus, snake, bundle of reeds!' "
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
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.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
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."
What do you mean? I can speak fluently in several ancient languages. I happen to be an expert at COBOL.
It doesn't even have a translation for "cheezburger", let alone "bukkit"...
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.
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Bird bird eye feather snake bird squiggly, you insensitive clod!