4 ms·
Dumb Cuneiform
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- kuro-kuris 11y agoI love the idea, I think it would be sweet if you get a dictionary with your cuneiform so you can actually decode it.
- orthoganol 11y agoAs an archeology nerd, I appreciate this. However it feels like you're lying when you say "Just tweet or text us", when you actually need to manually type out the message on a field in a Gumroad checkout widget... I think you should add better tech integration, or drop the tweet/ text part.
- pp19dd 11y agoTheir choice of 'Old Persian cuneiform' is also ... weird. I don't know how to phrase it, but seems doubly misleading. The time period they're preferring by that choice is ~500-300 BCE, whereas my appeal of cuneiform is that it's one of the earliest systems of writing, going back as 35 centuries BCE.
- harel 11y agoI'm curious as to how the cuneiform is translated. Are they (or have access to) linguists who specialised in old Mesopotamian languages? Or do they use some freely available tools like this: http://www.paleoaliens.com/event/babylonian/ http://www.paleoaliens.com/event/babylonian/ ? Or in other words - is the translation legit? If I show it to the Sumerian god Gozer, will he laugh at me? I realise the translation is probably phonetic (i.e., written in cuneiform but would sound like English if Gozer read it).
- sbierwagen 11y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transliteration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transliteration They're just mapping the english sounds into cuniform. It's not a translation.
- mchaver 11y agoIt looks like a transliteration. Seems like they are using Cuneiform syllables to represent English. Quote from the webiste: "We take the letters from your message and transliterate by syllable, as nearly as we can, into cuneiform."
- gnoway 11y agoYou could pre-translate, but Gozer would probably still laugh at you because they use Old Persian cuneiform, not Sumerian. You might also risk your message exceeding 140 characters post-translation.
- benoliver999 11y agoCuneiform was used to write multiple languages, since it's basically a way to write syllables, so it's a decent choice for a project like this. You are basically writing English, but using different symbols (like IPA I suppose).
- rbobby 11y agoBabylonian business cards?
- cottonseed 11y agoOne of their two examples is cat calling? Classy.
- dubrocks 11y agoWhat's your age and gender? I'm geniunely curious what kind of person could possibly be "triggered" by this.
- twright0 11y agoNobody used the word "trigger". It's interesting to me that you're conflating pointing out a potential issue (their sarcastic "classy") with being personally upset ("triggered") - what's going on there? Also, why are age and gender the two attributes you want to learn about them as a result?
- jonsterling 11y agoUgh, Old Persian? Lame They should pay me the big bucks to translate tweets into Akkadian or Sumerian.
- kaonashi 11y agoWeren't most cuneiform tablets receipts anyways?