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The headline is technically correct, but quite misleading. The language in question, Ugaritic, was deciphered in 1932. As it was discovered in 1929, it can ha

The headline is technically correct, but quite misleading. The language in question, Ugaritic, was deciphered in 1932. As it was discovered in 1929, it can hardly be said that the decipherment was an arduous process. The significance of the computer program is along the lines of: > The key strength of our model lies in its ability to incorporate a range of linguistic intuitions in a statistical framework. As someone working in NLP, this is quite remarkable, and I don't mean to detract from it; but it should be noted that the model (like the linguists) relied on the fact that Ugaritic is closely related to Hebrew. It would be impossible to use such a model to decipher Linear A, which is probably not related to any known language. (But the model could perhaps be used to check if linguists had overlooked any connection between Linear A and another known language.)

anateus 16y ago
Exactly, hardly a lost language. I happen to have taken an Ugaritic class in college, and after a semester could read the texts without too much trouble. I am a native speaker of Hebrew, so the roots are similar, which made it not very hard. It used a novel alphabet (likely the first ever) that was a phonetic abjad (no vowels) derived from Akkadian cuneiform (in turn derived from Sumerian cuneiform). As far as "few tablets" goes, I happen to have used VERY thick books full of transcriptions of Ugaritic tablets. One of the advantages of knowledge about Ugarit (the city) being lost is that until the recent rediscovery of its ruins it lay mostly undisturbed. So, if we discover another language with close genetic ties to a known tongue and an alphabet that's different but similar, we'll have just the thing :) Of course, this is better than what we had before, my jest doesn't mean to detract! Onwards with Linear A :>
micheljansen 16y ago
Exactly, quoting the article: > We applied our model to a corpus of Ugaritic, an ancient Semitic language discovered in 1928. Ugaritic was manually deciphered in 1932, us- ing knowledge of Hebrew, a related language. They specifically used a well-known language to be able to test the effectiveness of their approach. Pretty cool nevertheless, but hardly "a dead language that mystified linguists" :)

anateus 16y ago

Exactly, hardly a lost language. I happen to have taken an Ugaritic class in college, and after a semester could read the texts without too much trouble. I am a native speaker of Hebrew, so the roots are similar, which made it not very hard. It used a novel alphabet (likely the first ever) that was a phonetic abjad (no vowels) derived from Akkadian cuneiform (in turn derived from Sumerian cuneiform). As far as "few tablets" goes, I happen to have used VERY thick books full of transcriptions of Ugaritic tablets. One of the advantages of knowledge about Ugarit (the city) being lost is that until the recent rediscovery of its ruins it lay mostly undisturbed. So, if we discover another language with close genetic ties to a known tongue and an alphabet that's different but similar, we'll have just the thing :) Of course, this is better than what we had before, my jest doesn't mean to detract! Onwards with Linear A :>

micheljansen 16y ago

Exactly, quoting the article: > We applied our model to a corpus of Ugaritic, an ancient Semitic language discovered in 1928. Ugaritic was manually deciphered in 1932, us- ing knowledge of Hebrew, a related language. They specifically used a well-known language to be able to test the effectiveness of their approach. Pretty cool nevertheless, but hardly "a dead language that mystified linguists" :)