5 ms·

A lost language encoded in Inca cords

66 points by mikemoka 8y ago

syastrov 8y ago
This data is begging to be analyzed by machine learning algorithms.
- flocial 8y ago
  I just happen to be reading Clive Cussler's Inca Gold (1994) where they use computers to decode a quipu cord from scratch in about an hour and a half. I'd love to see the spreadsheet used for the initial insight.
  - Latteland 8y ago
    This is truly brilliant work. There must be other clever potential rosetta stone potential as the smart people in the article figured out.
  - tragomaskhalos 8y ago
    I actually love these kind of trashy archeology-themed books, where the brilliant linguist decyphers the ancient writing system over his/her lunchbreak, but it's rather spoiled by the inconvenient fact that the actual process - mountains of data, years of slog - is so unsexy by comparison. Plus, there is never a Rosetta Stone (that would make it too easy!), whereas almost every real-world decipherment has needed something like one. The only exception I can think of is Linear B; I've always thought it'd be a fascinating exercise to repeat Ventris' painstaking cataloguing and cross-referencing on a computer to see if his breakthrough could be repeated more quickly, or automatically.
- YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
  I don't see how machine learning can be of any help here. Were would the training examples come from? To train a machine learning algorithm, presumably a machine translation system, you'd need examples of already translated khipu. It's clear from the artcile that we don't have anything like that. We know how to interpret numbers, we know where on a khipu they used to represent someone's clan, but we still can't read the things. What "data" will the machine learning algorithms analyse?
  - yorwba 8y ago
    A lot of the work the article talks about seems to involve manually recording features like the materials and colors used, the position and type of knots and so on, followed by searching for similar patterns in other khipus. Machine learning could conceivably speed up that encoding work. Given a large enough collection of transcriptions, one could use "sophisticated" techniques like counting ngrams to try and identify common Quechua words. Depending on the content of a single khipu, i.e. whether it's more like a sentence or a longer text, and how similar modern Quechua languages are, it might even be possible to leverage that into a somewhat usable (i.e. sometimes correct) machine translation system.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
      So you'll model the features. Then what? Counting n-grams will tell you nothing useful, unless the language is Quecuha, and a dialect that is well known, at that. But if it is such a dialect, why are we not any closer to understanding it? You don't need machine learning for that, or even a computer; it helps, but the work can be done by hand (see The Golden Bug: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gold-Bug https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gold-Bug). For khipu that are clearly not narrative, i.e. include mostly numerical, plus some other, possibly literary information, it would be even harder to pull off. You'd have to understand words out of context, including names etc. At best you might end up modelling the structure of an unintelligible language- like I think was done for the Voynich manuscript. You'd still not be any closer to undestanding it.
starbeast 8y ago
Is pretty lucky that us visiting Europeans didn't know there could be writing in them, otherwise we would have burnt the lot long ago, like we did with the written records of the Maya.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  Walking around on the surviving remains of Maya and Aztec cities is quite impressive. As European it saddens me how we almost wiped everything out back then.
  - starbeast 8y ago
    From what I have read, there are maybe 14 surviving books out of the hundreds of thousands that we took. Possibly less since that museum fire. We destroyed 2000 years of an entire continents written history. And many people simply do not give a shit. Was talking to someone who identifies strongly as Christian about this recently. She said that she didn't care what had happened to the Maya, because these people practiced human sacrifice. I had to point out to her that you do not get to complain about human sacrifice after committing genocide.
    - tragomaskhalos 8y ago
      Human sacrifice was practiced by the Aztecs too of course (don't know about the Incas, but it was clearly an accepted and unremarkable part of life for a large region of the new world); the revulsion that it provoked in the Conquistadors was surely a significant factor in enabling them to convince themselves that destroying these cultures was justified. But I suspect that the conquest would have played out very similarly even if the Europeans hadn't been confronted with pyramids caked in human blood.
      - empath75 8y ago
        Well just look at the Inca. They didn’t do human sacrifice.
aaron695 8y ago
LARPing is fun. These guys even went to ancient tombs (Which at a guess although fake, possibly hundreds of years old fake) As the histories and anthropologies seem to make the past more and more complex and interesting as they keep inventing new ideas, does it make the world a better place even if they are are nonsense? There would be untold true stories that are amazing and lost forever, so it's kinda not cheating and I really was sad having loved visiting the Derinkuyu underground city but finding out it was fake years later. Did I need to know the truth..... But I feel like supporting nonsense like this isn't good. Believing made up stuff creates dogma, and we kill each other over dogma. The Inca's were up there with ISIS, these fables tend to let us forget our default state as humans.
cultus 8y ago
The organization of the Incan Empire was really incredible. There really was nothing quite like it until modern times. The state storehouses alluded to in the article can still be seen all over on mountainsides in Peru (they were always built off the valley floor where humidity is lower). These stored so much grain that the Incan empire really didn't have famines. After conquest, the Spanish enslaved the Quechua and generally had them mine instead of grow food. The grain in the silos fed them for several years. I have to think that quipus can encode non-numeric information to make something like that possible.
lurquer 8y ago
>If we are to judge those people, it must be on their own terms. And on their own terms, human sacrifice and cannibalism was what their faith (and therefore, their morality) required of them. So, you're ok with the Spanish wiping them out? According to the mores of the time, Spain's actions were perfectly acceptable.
- marcoperaza 8y ago
  Thank you for identifying this most insidious of tropes: exculpatory relativism for everyone else, but harsh judgment for Western history. I can’t help but conclude that a profound Western self-loathing underlies it.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
    If that bit about "self-loathing" refers to me, you are way off the mark. I have no reason to feel guilty about collonialism. I am Greek and my people never egnaged in it. Instead, we were ourselves enslaved by the Ottomans during the time that other Europeans raided far away lands, killed their people and nicked their stuff. Put that in your assumption pipe and smoke it.
    - marcoperaza 8y ago
      To be fair, I omitted another thesis which on reflection actually seems more likely: a vilification of the victors qua victors. It seems that all else being equal, we will condemn one murderous conqeusting people while exculpating another, simply because the former triumphed over the latter.
      - YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
        Excuse me, but I am very confused. Which murderous conquesting people am I exculpating?
- YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
  >> According to the mores of the time, Spain's actions were perfectly acceptable. That is a deeply ahistorical statement. In their own time, the conquistadores were strongly criticised for their atrocities, particularly on the side of the church. For a most prominent example see the extensive Wikipedia article on Bartolomé de las Casas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartolom%C3%A9_de_las_Casas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartolom%C3%A9_de_las_Casas Also, try to think about it this way: if everyone was OK with collonialist era practices, why are we not OK with them today? What changed, and when did it all start to change? Do things ever change spontaneously, with out explicit criticism of current morality, and purposeful attempts to reform it? (No, they don't).

66 points by mikemoka 8y ago

syastrov 8y ago

This data is begging to be analyzed by machine learning algorithms.

flocial 8y ago
I just happen to be reading Clive Cussler's Inca Gold (1994) where they use computers to decode a quipu cord from scratch in about an hour and a half. I'd love to see the spreadsheet used for the initial insight.
- Latteland 8y ago
  This is truly brilliant work. There must be other clever potential rosetta stone potential as the smart people in the article figured out.
- tragomaskhalos 8y ago
  I actually love these kind of trashy archeology-themed books, where the brilliant linguist decyphers the ancient writing system over his/her lunchbreak, but it's rather spoiled by the inconvenient fact that the actual process - mountains of data, years of slog - is so unsexy by comparison. Plus, there is never a Rosetta Stone (that would make it too easy!), whereas almost every real-world decipherment has needed something like one. The only exception I can think of is Linear B; I've always thought it'd be a fascinating exercise to repeat Ventris' painstaking cataloguing and cross-referencing on a computer to see if his breakthrough could be repeated more quickly, or automatically.
YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
I don't see how machine learning can be of any help here. Were would the training examples come from? To train a machine learning algorithm, presumably a machine translation system, you'd need examples of already translated khipu. It's clear from the artcile that we don't have anything like that. We know how to interpret numbers, we know where on a khipu they used to represent someone's clan, but we still can't read the things. What "data" will the machine learning algorithms analyse?
- yorwba 8y ago
  A lot of the work the article talks about seems to involve manually recording features like the materials and colors used, the position and type of knots and so on, followed by searching for similar patterns in other khipus. Machine learning could conceivably speed up that encoding work. Given a large enough collection of transcriptions, one could use "sophisticated" techniques like counting ngrams to try and identify common Quechua words. Depending on the content of a single khipu, i.e. whether it's more like a sentence or a longer text, and how similar modern Quechua languages are, it might even be possible to leverage that into a somewhat usable (i.e. sometimes correct) machine translation system.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
    So you'll model the features. Then what? Counting n-grams will tell you nothing useful, unless the language is Quecuha, and a dialect that is well known, at that. But if it is such a dialect, why are we not any closer to understanding it? You don't need machine learning for that, or even a computer; it helps, but the work can be done by hand (see The Golden Bug: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gold-Bug https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gold-Bug). For khipu that are clearly not narrative, i.e. include mostly numerical, plus some other, possibly literary information, it would be even harder to pull off. You'd have to understand words out of context, including names etc. At best you might end up modelling the structure of an unintelligible language- like I think was done for the Voynich manuscript. You'd still not be any closer to undestanding it.

starbeast 8y ago

Is pretty lucky that us visiting Europeans didn't know there could be writing in them, otherwise we would have burnt the lot long ago, like we did with the written records of the Maya.

pjmlp 8y ago
Walking around on the surviving remains of Maya and Aztec cities is quite impressive. As European it saddens me how we almost wiped everything out back then.
- starbeast 8y ago
  From what I have read, there are maybe 14 surviving books out of the hundreds of thousands that we took. Possibly less since that museum fire. We destroyed 2000 years of an entire continents written history. And many people simply do not give a shit. Was talking to someone who identifies strongly as Christian about this recently. She said that she didn't care what had happened to the Maya, because these people practiced human sacrifice. I had to point out to her that you do not get to complain about human sacrifice after committing genocide.
  - tragomaskhalos 8y ago
    Human sacrifice was practiced by the Aztecs too of course (don't know about the Incas, but it was clearly an accepted and unremarkable part of life for a large region of the new world); the revulsion that it provoked in the Conquistadors was surely a significant factor in enabling them to convince themselves that destroying these cultures was justified. But I suspect that the conquest would have played out very similarly even if the Europeans hadn't been confronted with pyramids caked in human blood.
    - empath75 8y ago
      Well just look at the Inca. They didn’t do human sacrifice.

aaron695 8y ago

LARPing is fun. These guys even went to ancient tombs (Which at a guess although fake, possibly hundreds of years old fake) As the histories and anthropologies seem to make the past more and more complex and interesting as they keep inventing new ideas, does it make the world a better place even if they are are nonsense? There would be untold true stories that are amazing and lost forever, so it's kinda not cheating and I really was sad having loved visiting the Derinkuyu underground city but finding out it was fake years later. Did I need to know the truth..... But I feel like supporting nonsense like this isn't good. Believing made up stuff creates dogma, and we kill each other over dogma. The Inca's were up there with ISIS, these fables tend to let us forget our default state as humans.

cultus 8y ago

The organization of the Incan Empire was really incredible. There really was nothing quite like it until modern times. The state storehouses alluded to in the article can still be seen all over on mountainsides in Peru (they were always built off the valley floor where humidity is lower). These stored so much grain that the Incan empire really didn't have famines. After conquest, the Spanish enslaved the Quechua and generally had them mine instead of grow food. The grain in the silos fed them for several years. I have to think that quipus can encode non-numeric information to make something like that possible.

lurquer 8y ago

>If we are to judge those people, it must be on their own terms. And on their own terms, human sacrifice and cannibalism was what their faith (and therefore, their morality) required of them. So, you're ok with the Spanish wiping them out? According to the mores of the time, Spain's actions were perfectly acceptable.

marcoperaza 8y ago
Thank you for identifying this most insidious of tropes: exculpatory relativism for everyone else, but harsh judgment for Western history. I can’t help but conclude that a profound Western self-loathing underlies it.
- YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
  If that bit about "self-loathing" refers to me, you are way off the mark. I have no reason to feel guilty about collonialism. I am Greek and my people never egnaged in it. Instead, we were ourselves enslaved by the Ottomans during the time that other Europeans raided far away lands, killed their people and nicked their stuff. Put that in your assumption pipe and smoke it.
  - marcoperaza 8y ago
    To be fair, I omitted another thesis which on reflection actually seems more likely: a vilification of the victors qua victors. It seems that all else being equal, we will condemn one murderous conqeusting people while exculpating another, simply because the former triumphed over the latter.
    - YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
      Excuse me, but I am very confused. Which murderous conquesting people am I exculpating?
YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
>> According to the mores of the time, Spain's actions were perfectly acceptable. That is a deeply ahistorical statement. In their own time, the conquistadores were strongly criticised for their atrocities, particularly on the side of the church. For a most prominent example see the extensive Wikipedia article on Bartolomé de las Casas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartolom%C3%A9_de_las_Casas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartolom%C3%A9_de_las_Casas Also, try to think about it this way: if everyone was OK with collonialist era practices, why are we not OK with them today? What changed, and when did it all start to change? Do things ever change spontaneously, with out explicit criticism of current morality, and purposeful attempts to reform it? (No, they don't).