The headline has nothing much to do with the article, but never mind.
I presume the logical extension of this is to include cuneiform in Google translate...
Pagé-Perron is coordinating a project to machine translate 69,000 Mesopotamian administrative records from the 21st Century BC. One of the aims is to open up the past to new research. “We have information about so many different aspects of the lives of Mesopotamian people, and we can’t really profit from the expertise of people in different fields like economics or politics, who if they had access to the sources, could help us tremendously to understand those societies better,” says Pagé-Perron.
“We have more sources from Mesopotamia than we have from Greece, Rome and ancient Egypt together,” says Jacob Dahl, a professor of Assyriology at the University of Oxford. The challenge is finding enough people who can read them.
Pagé-Perron and her team are training algorithms on a sample of 4,000 ancient administrative texts from a digitised database. Each records transactions or deliveries of sheep, reed bundles or beer to a temple or an individual. Originally impressed into the clay with a reed stylus, the texts have already been transliterated into our alphabet by modern scholars. The Sumerian word for big, for example, can be written in cuneiform signs, or it can be written in our alphabet as “gal”.
The wording in these administrative texts is simple: “11 nanny goats for the kitchen on the 15th day”, for example. This makes them particularly suitable for automation. Once these algorithms have learned to translate the sample texts into English, they will then automatically translate the other transliterated tablets.
“The texts we’re working on are not very interesting individually, but they’re extremely interesting if you take them as groups of texts,” says Pagé-Perron, who expects the English versions to be online within the next year. The records give us a picture of day to day life in ancient Mesopotamia, of power structures and trading networks, but also of other aspects of its social history, such as the role of female workers. Searchable translations would enable researchers from other areas to explore these rich facets of life in the ancient world.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20181207-how-ai-could-help-us-with-ancient-languages-like-sumerian
Do you watch NewEarth's YouTube channel at all? She has had some interesting things to say about language. Much of the ancient writings, especially hieroglyph based, aren't so different. There are many similarities.
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