Let’s say you have text in front of you written in a language you don’t read–worse, no one has understood the language for thousands of years. How can you begin to understand it? MIT researchers have created a way to for a computer to decipher Ugaritic in a few hours without knowing anything about the language besides its general similarity to Hebrew.
One of the researchers says:
The decipherment of Ugaritic [in the mid-twentieth century] took years and relied on some happy coincidences — such as the discovery of an axe that had the word “axe” written on it in Ugaritic. “The output of our system would have made the process orders of magnitude shorter.”
I love that someone felt the need to write “axe” on an axe. Maybe it was the original brand name.
I’m most curious whether the program can help crack the Minoan language on Linear A.
Incidentally, the article What’s Ugaritic Got to Do with Anything? explains why Ugaritic is important to understanding the Hebrew of the Old Testament.
Via.