#orthographies

What if writing didn’t exist? 

An interesting blog post about writing systems and archaeology in linguistics, from the blog of Contexts of and Relations between Early Writing Systems (CREWS). Excerpt: 

Why do people stop writing in a particular script? It’s a simple question but one that’s received surprisingly little academic attention, perhaps because almost by definition, evidence for why something stops happening will be scarce. This is true with any tradition or cultural practice, and relates to a broader discussion of how we conceptualise and reconstruct ancient social change. But since writing is one of our key sources of evidence as well as the practice we’re investigating, the problem of evidence is particularly acute there.

The first thing we need to be sure of is that a script really has died out, rather than people merely changing what they use it for or the materials on which they write it. The ancient East Mediterranean offers a good example of this with the case of hieroglyphic Luwian. In the Late Bronze Age, this seemed like a script (and associated language) on the rise. It was widely spoken in Anatolia and seemed to be gaining ground, perhaps even among the Hittite royal elite by the end of the thirteenth century BC. The Hittites used Luwian writing alongside their usual cuneiform script, and it’s best preserved now in monumental rock-cut inscriptions, such as those from the capital, Hattuša. As CREWS Visiting Fellow Willemijn Waal has argued, it may also have been written on wooden tablets.

But with the collapse of the Hittite Empire at the beginning of the twelfth century, Luwian inscriptions entirely vanish from the archaeological record. There are no attestations anywhere in the region. And yet, we know that people were still using the script because it reappears around two centuries later in the Iron Age Syrian successor states that arose out of the old empire. For the script to be preserved, it must have continued to be used during the intervening time on perishable materials. What we see at the end of the Late Bronze Age is not the death of Luwian hieroglyphs, but a change in how they were used that renders them invisible to us for around two hundred years.

Heaven’s Vault is a videogame about deciphering a forgotten language which looks very linguistically interesting! I still have not played it yet, but here’s a description from Wired: 

Heaven's Vault is about the thrill and uncertainty of lost knowledge—about connecting to the past and to other people. It's also about something I've never seen a videogame tackle in such detail before: the art of translation, of deciphering old languages and actually listening to what they tell us.

The first artifact you receive in Heaven's Vault is a broach. It has a brief inscription in a long-forgotten tongue. Protagonist Aliya Elasra specializes in the study of this language. Reaching into her knowledge, you're given an opportunity to translate it, choosing between a handful of words for each part of the inscription to try to find the most coherent answer. There's no win or lose here, just your best guesswork. Later, more complex translations will be influenced by your past work, already-translated words appearing whenever you see them. Context you get later on can convince you to retranslate these, and over time, as you discover more artifacts, a more coherent understanding of this old language emerges from your corpus of translated texts.

Here’s a screencap of what the language looks like. 

The World’s Writing Systems is a website presenting one symbol from each of the 292 currently-known writing systems in the world, which you can sort in various ways, such as by name, time period, region, or Unicode support (whether you can view it on a computer without needing to use clunky workarounds). From the project description: 

Unicode 11.0 (June 2018) covers exactly 146 writing systems. That’s an important milestone for worldwide communication and typography. But what about the missing scripts? How many of them are still out there? What do they look like?

This web site presents one glyph for each of the world’s writing systems. It is the first step of the Missing Scripts Project, a long-term initiative that aims to identify writing systems which are not yet encoded in the Unicode standard. As of today, there are still 146 scripts not yet encoded in Unicode.

They also have a cool-looking poster to bring attention to how many writing systems exist and which of them aren’t encoded yet. 

This silkscreen poster presents one glyph for each of the 292 known writing systems of the world, together with their names, regions, and timeframes. A four colour code indicates living / historical scripts and Unicode encoded / not yet encoded scripts. 

What's the World's Oldest Language? A video from Dr. Word Person unpacking the hidden assumptions in this question.  

A fascinating article in the BBC about using machine translation to decipher ancient cuneiform tablets. Excerpt: 

Broken and scorched black by fire, the dense, wedge-shaped marks etched into the ancient clay tablets are only just visible under the soft light at the British Museum. These tiny signs are the remains of the world’s oldest writing system: cuneiform.

Developed more than 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, the land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers where modern-day Iraq now lies, cuneiform captured life in a complex and fascinating civilisation for some three millennia. From furious letters between warring royal siblings to rituals for soothing a fractious baby, the tablets offer a unique insight into a society at the dawn of history.

They chronicle the rise of fall of Akkad, Assyria and Babylonia, the world’s first empires. An estimated half a million of them have been excavated, and more are still buried in the ground.

However, since cuneiform was first deciphered by scholars around 150 years ago, the script has only yielded its secrets to a small group of people who can read it. Some 90% of cuneiform texts remain untranslated.

That could change thanks to a very modern helper: machine translation.

“The influence that Mesopotamia has on our own culture is something that people don’t know much about,” says Émilie Pagé-Perron, a researcher in Assyriology at the University of Toronto. Mesopotamia gave us the wheel, astronomy, the 60-minute hour, maps, the story of the flood and the ark, and the first work of literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh. But its texts are mainly written in Sumerian and Akkadian, languages that relatively few scholars can read.

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.

Apart from the clay tablets, there are also more than 50,000 Mesopotamian engraved seals scattered in collections around the world. For millennia, the people of Mesopotamia used seals made of engraved stone that were pressed into wet clay to mark doors, jars, tablets and other objects. Only some 10% of these have even been catalogued, let alone translated.