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Sumerian dog jokes, or the difficulty of translating dead languages
- notamy 5y agoReading this thread and seeing the author complain about how ambiguous Sumerian is, I find it all the more incredible that we're able to figure out how to translate dead languages like this...
- bradrn 5y agoGenerally speaking, translation of dead languages is done via means of bilingual texts. The Rosetta Stone is the most famous of these; for cuneiform, the key was apparently a trilingual Old Persian/Elamite/Akkadian inscription (the ‘Behistun inscription’). In this case, Old Persian is an Indo–European language, and Akkadian is Semitic, so those languages have plenty of modern-day relatives with very similar structures, which helps decipherment. Once cuneiform was deciphered, Sumerian/Akkadian bilingual texts were sufficient to decipher Sumerian: again, the Semitic nature of Akkadian helped a lot here. It also helps that most languages use more or less similar techniques to express certain concepts and relations. The elaborate case system and verbal morphology, though ‘exotic’ for Europeans, aren’t necessarily all that different to those found in languages elsewhere. As for ambiguity… I’m not entirely sure how that particular problem is overcome, but the author mentioned duplicate manuscripts which together can remove some of the ambiguity. Beyond that, we just need to infer the missing pieces from the fact that languages are usually self-consistent to a large extent. (Disclaimer: I know very little about this area, though I do enjoy reading about linguistics!)
- thaumasiotes 5y ago> Once cuneiform was deciphered, Sumerian/Akkadian bilingual texts were sufficient to decipher Sumerian This isn't quite right; we didn't just find bilingual texts. We found curricular texts that were intended to train Akkadian speakers to be literate in Sumerian, which is obviously much better.
- bradrn 5y agoHuh, I had no idea! As I said, I’m not an expert.
- wl 5y agoSumerian was a dead prestige language used by scribes in ancient Mesopotamia. As such, there are parallel word lists and other such texts written in Akkadian (which is fairly well understood by modern scholars) meant for scribes learning the language.
- nerdponx 5y agoIt's wild to consider that, thousands of years ago, there were already languages that were considered old and dead.
- josefx 5y agoHere[1] is a video covering how cuneiform (the writing system) was deciphered, most of it was solved after they found an inscription in three different languages. [1] https://youtu.be/PfYYraMgiBA?t=1542 https://youtu.be/PfYYraMgiBA?t=1542
- xaedes 5y agoReadable link: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1505646738627088389.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1505646738627088389.html
- yreg 5y agoI'm always surprised the lengths some go to write on twitter instead of a blog. See this "thread of threads": https://twitter.com/LinManuelRwanda/status/1456281631602454536 https://twitter.com/LinManuelRwanda/status/14562816316024545...
- dexterdog 5y agoI'm always amazed that people read what is a short article broken into 25 parts.
- blamazon 5y agoCopy pasting the completed translation: "A friendly dog walks into a bar. His eyes do not see anything. He should open them."
- PixyMisa 5y ago4000 year old dad jokes. This is the content I come here for.
- singularity2001 5y agoWhy is it certain that this is a joke and not some kind of wisdom, charm or unknown literary category?
- spywaregorilla 5y agoFor starters, it looks, and quacks, like a joke
- hoseja 5y agoThat's because it had a very convoluted plastic surgery to make it so.
- blamazon 5y agoBecause it starts with "A dog walks into a bar"
- marginalia_nu 5y agoReminds me of a Starcraft joke: > A marine walks into a bar. He looks around and is confused, says "where is the counter?". I wonder if, in 3000 years, they'll be trying to figure that one out as well.
- _notathrowaway 5y agoPlease, do explain the joke for the rest of us.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- baq 5y agoThere’s no counter to marines
- Retric 5y agoWordplay on counter. It’s a PVP game where players are constantly complaining about balance and or counters.
- ChrisRackauckas 5y agoIt's not a PvP game, there's marines. (Now imagine 3000 years from now trying to unravel this joke without a bunch of cultural knowledge haha)
- marginalia_nu 5y agoYou pretty much get balance whine in any competitive game. Sometimes the communities mature out of it, but the scrub mentality comes very natural to a lot of people. I think it's a funny joke, though. Even though, when I've played Stacraft, I've been the one making marines.
- __s 5y agoMarines are the basic unit of Terran. Terran will build marines throughout the game (unless they go mech, but bio is the primary composition for all matchups). With upgrades marines have high dps & speed. They're a small unit which means you can fit more dps within a small area. They're ranged, unlike zerglings & zealots. Terran's drop ship, medivacs, can ferry around 8 marines while healing them on the ground In reality the counter to them is splash damage, though good micro can mitigate that somewhat, & Terran isn't going to stop building marines just because the opponent built some splash damage In some regards this can be rooted in people expecting StarCraft to be like Age of Empires, where as you climb the tech tree you discard previous tech. StarCraft instead prefers tech to fill out a composition & late tech often provides a support role to earlier tech https://tl.net/forum/starcraft-2/174912-the-problem-with-marines https://tl.net/forum/starcraft-2/174912-the-problem-with-mar... (2010)
- avsteele 5y agoTranslation is hard, for mostly-dead languages too. I recall this essay by Tolkien on translating Beowulf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Translating_Beowulf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Translating_Beowulf
- neaden 5y agoFor refference, here is the opening of Beowulf written in English about a thousand years ago: "Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon. Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum, monegum mægþum, meodosetla ofteah, egsode eorlas. Syððan ærest wearð feasceaft funden, he þæs frofre gebad, weox under wolcnum, weorðmyndum þah, oðþæt him æghwylc þara ymbsittendra ofer hronrade hyran scolde, gomban gyldan. þæt wæs god cyning. ðæm eafera wæs æfter cenned, geong in geardum, þone god sende folce to frofre; fyrenðearfe ongeat þe hie ær drugon aldorlease lange hwile." While you can kind of guess at some of the words and sounds, it's basically unreadable to a modern speaker. Now here is the beginning of Canterbury Tales, written about 600 years ago: "Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote, The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, And bathed every veyne in swich licóur Of which vertú engendred is the flour; Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth Inspired hath in every holt and heeth The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne, And smale foweles maken melodye, That slepen al the nyght with open ye, So priketh hem Natúre in hir corages, Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages, And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes, To ferne halwes, owthe in sondry londes; And specially, from every shires ende Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende, The hooly blisful martir for to seke, That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke." Still very difficult, but you can probably understand the gist of it.
- Namari 5y agoThe “pun” in Sumerian is centred on the fact that the verb “to see” also literally means “open (one’s) eye”.
- godDLL 5y agoKinda similar to "look out" in English.
- ajsnigrutin 5y agoEven live languages have words, that are often used in normal speech, but cannot optimally be translated to other languages, and carry no real meaning on their own, except in some cases set the tone. eg. "bre" in serbian is one of those words, where "nemoj da jedeš to" i "nemoj bre da jedeš to" mean basically the same thing ("don't eat that").
- daptaq 5y agoI always thought of it as a kind of more abstract "bro"?
- tomerv 5y agoAnother example: ¡Vamos! It's kind of like "let's go", but carries more weight than its English translation. Some other languages have similar idioms for hurrying people up, but some languages simply don't.
- imajoredinecon 5y agoIncluding the indispensable https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D9%8A%D8%A7%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%84%D9%87 https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D9%8A%D8%A7%D8%A7%D9%84%D9...
- contravariant 5y agoEven English has words with similar properties, compare for instance "don't eat that" and "don't fucking eat that".
- bradrn 5y agoI don’t know Serbo–Croatian at all, but Wiktionary suggests colloquial English interjections like ‘man’, ‘the hell’ as adequate translations: ‘don’t eat that, man!’.
- OJFord 5y agoIt sounds like what's called an 'emphatic particle', in Hindi at least (तो, 'to') which marks the topic or shifts emphasis in a sentence.
- teekert 5y agoForget language, I once asked a Taiwanese colleague to tell me joke that is really considered funny in Taiwan, his response: "For example this is funny, a Polar bear that is cold on the North pole." Ok... I wonder what our jokes sound like to him...
- tokai 5y agoOr some places on the internet where a joke can be the same meaningless word spammed for more that a decade. Jokes are weird desu.
- Asooka 5y agoIf you're referring to people spamming "desu" with a picture of Suiseiseki from Rozen Maiden, that's not meaningless. The original joke is that the character uses "desu" at the end of her sentences way more than is required by normal Japanese grammar. Other characters have similar verbal ticks, e.g. Kanaria with "de kashira".
- zeteo 5y agoI once played Taboo with a Taiwanese colleague. I still remember when he gave the clue "you get this if you're really lazy". The word was "beard". (BTW I had a beard at the time.)
- sir_eliah 5y agoFor anyone interested in learning Sumerian, there is really nice introduction "Learn to Read Ancient Sumerian"[0] by J. Bowen and M. Lewis, which gives you rough ability to understand some grammar and also read cuneiform. It's extremely niche topic and I can guarantee that you'll have absolutely no use for this knowledge[1], but if you're into learning exotic languages, this can be fun. At least it was for me. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Learn-Read-Ancient-Sumerian-Introduction/dp/1734358602 https://www.amazon.com/Learn-Read-Ancient-Sumerian-Introduct... [1] To some extent you can see the same cuneiform symbols in later Akkadian texts, but forget about the grammar.
- andi999 5y agoDo you know if the original of the joke can be seen in Sumerian writing? (some picture). Also, do you think it could have been a pun?
- sir_eliah 5y agoI don't know about original clay tablet on which this was written, but it can be found through the original publication I think: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1359157 https://www.jstor.org/stable/1359157, if someone has access to JSTOR. About the interpretation, I myself understand only the: /igi nu-mu-un-du[8]/ - "I don't see anything" The rest is a bit above my level. But check this alternative interpretation of this joke: https://twitter.com/abbyfheld/status/1501880993833054208 https://twitter.com/abbyfheld/status/1501880993833054208
- jtbayly 5y agoA friend of mine was taking Akkadian or Sumerian (I can’t remember which) and described the wide range of possible correct translations of a text with a story from class. One student said it was a receipt for the sale of a cow. The prof said that was one real possibility. Another said it was a love poem. Prof agreed again. :shrug: But my favorite translation disagreement is from the Epic of Gilgamesh, I think, where one man insists the proper translation of a line is “the lords of the land of the blazing rockets.”
- xkriva11 5y agoNeil Postman: "Puffs of smoke are insufficiently complex to express ideas on the nature of existence, and even if they were not, a Cherokee philosopher would run short of either wood or blankets long before he reached his second axiom. You cannot use smoke to do philosophy. Its form excludes the content.” Every time I see a Twitter post like this, I remember this quote.
- pxmpxm 5y agoThat is brilliant. My immediate response in this context is the back button - if you haven't given much thought to the medium, you likely haven't given much thought to the content itself.
- hobs 5y agoWhy? I must be missing something because Native Americans definitely had philosophy, oral traditions, and the like - smoke didn't change that and a vaguely racist comment about how they wouldn't be able to form thoughts because they didn't have some special medium for doing so just comes off as that. Socrates didn't really write stuff down...
- pxmpxm 5y agoThe point has to do with Twitter, sir. Nice Rorschach there with your quip about racism, however. You may want to think about that a bit.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- hobs 5y ago137 characters - too small to be considered as thoughts as your message would fit in a tweet.
- arcbyte 5y agoIt's an analogy.
- jcranberry 5y agoThis recently also had a post on the AskHistorians subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/tbgetc/this_bar_joke_from_ancient_sumer_has_been_making/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/tbgetc/this_...
- blamazon 5y agoFrom the linked set of proverbs: [1] "81-82. (cf. 6.2.3: UET 6/2 225) The dog understands "Take it!", but it does not understand Put it down!" This is ancient form of the modern "No take, only throw" meme! [2] [1]: https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/proverbs/t.6.1.05.html#t6105.p77 https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/proverbs/t.6.1.05.html#t6105.p... [2]: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/433/498/10e.png https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/433/498/10e...
- lleb97a 5y agoI must of really watched a lot of trash horror films as a teenager; I will forever associate the sumerian language with summoning demons.
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoOff topic to this interesting and really nerdy thread, but does anyone happen to know why, or does this show for anyone else, the "more tweets" segment below this one is a bunch of anti-trans rhetoric? I'm signed in but I only follow some software engineers, I don't follow these people, I've never interacted or liked any anti-trans sentiments. These are the tweets I'm seeing below the linked thread (TW: anti-trans sentiments): https://twitter.com/SethDillon/status/1505663712266493958 https://twitter.com/SethDillon/status/1505663712266493958 (Babylon Bee complaining about getting suspended after calling Rachel Levine "man of the year") https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1505670109809070102?s=20&t=-K89YXdIsQzPZNSn5jvX2g https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1505670109809070102?s=... JK Rowling pushing her "trans kids regret their choices" rhetoric https://twitter.com/RevengOfTheFlex/status/1505556313123790855?s=20&t=-K89YXdIsQzPZNSn5jvX2g https://twitter.com/RevengOfTheFlex/status/15055563131237908... Man going "May transition join a women's MMA league & win it all." etc etc etc; it's a heap of right-wing nonsense talking points, anti-Ukrainian sentiments crossed with anti-vaxxer posts, a comic claiming BLM embezzled money, a woman saying that if she cheated on a man it's the man's fault, Stonetoss, and even one claiming technology has made us all gay. What the fuck Twitter? This is not what I signed up for, this is not relevant to my interests, this is not in any way related to anything I've interacted with Twitter for. Is this what you're earning money from these days? If this happens again I'll close my account. That'll teach 'em.
- blamazon 5y agoI got the same results. (Not logged in) I'd guess that these things are "trending" in "engagement" today because they are controversial and antagonistic. My thinking is it is a problem of misaligned incentives. Twitter benefits from outrage through engagement. The perpetrators of hatred benefit from outrage through division. You and I, we do not benefit from this alignment.
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoThat's exactly what I'm thinking; these agitators generate tons of 'engagement' on twitter from both pro- and anti- whatever they're up for, which for Twitter translates to revenue. It's why they didn't ban Trump for all this time until he was no longer president. I mean sure, as president of the US he would get special treatment, but he didn't use the official twitter account of the US presidency, and he caused a lot of issues. But also a lot of engagement for Twitter; I wouldn't be surprised if all the reactions, retweets and responses to his tweets, and the fact half the world news media would jump on top of anything he tweeted, were responsible for a big chunk of Twitter's usage during that period.
- yeetard 5y agoI love this. Too bad it will be lost forever to the world when the guy deletes his twitter account.
- forgotpwd16 5y agoFortunately IA also archives Twitter. https://web.archive.org/web/20220321161743/https://twitter.com/LinManuelRwanda/status/1505646738627088389 https://web.archive.org/web/20220321161743/https://twitter.c...
- rappatic 5y agoFor what it's worth, I've also seen someone interpret this joke as related to prostitutes and windows (as Sumerian bars were apparently also brothels). I think this just goes to show how much one needs to understand about a society's culture to fully understand its jokes.
- lifthrasiir 5y agoFor the reference, a reply to this thread [1] discusses that particular explanation. [1] https://twitter.com/LinManuelRwanda/status/1505836278109061121 https://twitter.com/LinManuelRwanda/status/15058362781090611...
- kazinator 5y ago> dog jokes as an excuse to embark I see what he did there!
- simias 5y agoThese translation issues will be familiar to anybody learning a current, very much alive language, especially if you're reading informal forums (say, Youtube comments). You have the same types of abbreviations, more-or-less voluntary misspellings and jokes or references that only make sense from a certain cultural standpoint. I'm sure most foreign language students will sympathize with the very frustrating and demoralizing situation where you read a sentence, understand every single word but you still have absolutely no idea what it's trying to convey because you're missing some idiom, reference or alternative meaning of one of the words. For the English monolinguals reading this, imagine studying English and stumbling upon the sentence "I fell for her", except that you only know the literal meaning of the verb "to fall" so while you understand the words in isolation the sentence remains completely opaque and meaningless to you.
- monkeybutton 5y agoThis is one of the arguments against machine translation: one would first need to construct an AGI capable of observing and understanding the living cultural context that language is being used in. Without that, researchers are endlessly having to update the training corpus for the ML system to learn by example.
- Victerius 5y agoThe day a machine can make a meme is the day we reach the singularity.
- Ancapistani 5y agoWelcome, to the World of Tomorrow! https://imgflip.com/ai-meme https://imgflip.com/ai-meme
- slowmovintarget 5y agoIt sort of works... https://imgflip.com/i/69gjkt https://imgflip.com/i/69gjkt
- alexpotato 5y agoOf course, XKCD already has a comic for this: https://xkcd.com/794/ https://xkcd.com/794/
- emeraldunicorn9 5y agoI wonder what a Sumerian bar was like. Also, they must have had pretty lax public health rules if they let dogs go in. I can't take my dog to my local coffee shop!
- meetups323 5y agoYou're just in the wrong location -- every patio'd coffee shop and bar around me is dog friendly!
- godDLL 5y agoBack then dogs would probably be preferable over the kind of fauna that would impose on you, even in the city. Besides they are a walking hand-towel, are they not.
- smitty1e 5y agoWhereas I would have taken the choice of location and animal to be an ancient root of, e.g.: "They sent a sample of [SomeBeer] off to the state lab for analysis. The report came back: 'Shoot that horse, it suffers from diabetes.'"
- webmaven 5y agoThe variant I'm familiar with is "Congratulations, your rabbit is pregnant!"
- shantnutiwari 5y agoIt pisses me off people write long things like as a Tweet rather than a blog. I have to scroll over a dozen tweets before being hit by the "you need to login" popup. Serious question: Is there a reason for something like this to be on Twitter? This looks like the textbook definition of something that should be in a blog.
- throwntoday 5y agoI think a blog would be held to more scrutiny than a series of tweets. The latter seems to give authors a way to rant about a topic without providing much in the way of exposition.
- civilized 5y agoTurn off cookies for *.twitter.com and it'll stop bothering you. (You shouldn't have to, but take a minute to do this and Twitter links will be tolerable going forward.)
- forgotpwd16 5y ago>Is there a reason for something like this to be on Twitter? Easy to catch audience. Yes, you can make a blog post and tweet a link. But tweets without links get more engagement and reach. (Something that can be attributed to users or/and site's algorithm.)
- neaden 5y agoPeople don't owe you free stuff in your preferred format. It's on Twitter presumably because the author likes to put stuff on Twitter.
- Gupie 5y agoA man walks into a bar, the second ducks. I would imagine this would be difficult to translate, unless "bar" has the two same meanings in language it is translated to. There might also be confusion where aquatic birds fit in, or if there a reference to the passage of time?
- Lornedon 5y agoI first interpreted that as "...the second walks into ducks".
- jmyeet 5y agoThis isn't just a problem for ancient languages and modern foreign languages. It's a problem for languages you speak fluently. And the implications are a lot bigger than understanding a joke. Consdier a sentence like "Tim just squealed like a pig low key, actual" [1]. Throw in a few more choice phrases like "L plus ratio", "copium" and "dead ass" and someone from a few yers ago will have issues decoding all that. Many current people will be lost. Words also disappear (eg [2]). Old English is essentially a different language. Middle English can be hars to parse. ~230 years ago the Bill of Rights became part of the US Constitution. The Firs Amendment [3] includes this text: > Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion ... "Establish" here at that time had a very specific meaning that differs from the current vernacular. This sprung from Britain where the Anglican Church was the Established church. That means it was responsible for registering births, deaths and marriages. Catholics, for example, would often get married twice: once in a Catholic church and a second time in an Anglican ceremony so it was official. The framers here wanted to guard against there being an "official" religion in the nascent United States. All such official institutions were to be civil not religious. Knowing this history makes this language more understandable yet an established religion is not something we in the West have dealt with in some time so the meaning has changed to the more general sense. You can also have this discussion about the phrase "well-regulated militia" with respect to the Second Amendment too but that's a whole other topic. The point remains: language drift has and will affect legal meanings and interpretations. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/DrDisrespectLive/comments/sy26j7/tim_just_squealed_like_a_pig_low_key_bro_actual/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DrDisrespectLive/comments/sy26j7/ti... [2]: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/found-30-lost-english-words https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/found-30-lost-english-... [3]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/first_amendment https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/first_amendment
- russellbeattie 5y agoI love non-sequitur humor, so the idea of a Sumerian dog joke that (initially) makes no sense is already pretty hysterical. > Sumerian doesn't really have "tense" as such. Instead, it has two "tense/aspects" (because Sumerologists don't like to overcommit) The author himself has a pretty dry sense of humor as well. LOL. Edit: After reading some of the author's other threads, I actually wonder now if anything he said in this thread is true. He seems to be an overly cynical know-it-all and not particularly accurate in what he talks about (for the subjects I recognize). Oh well.
- peter303 5y agoPerhaps a sound-pun in there, not surviving translation.
- peter_retief 5y agoI thought the joke was quite funny, the barman opening one for the blind dog. Open an eye, see?
- hereforphone 5y ago"You’re unable to view this Tweet because this account owner limits who can view their Tweets". Unfortunately my Twitter account was deleted for no stated reason a couple of days ago (maybe I expressed a thought crime, though I never discuss politics there...)
- enw 5y agoCan someone share the tweet here? Unable to see it.
- JudgePenitent 5y agoA healthy chunk of the Sumerian texts we have today are training tablets. Scribes would copy these tablets much in the same way we copy sentences today to learn to write today, with more of an emphasis on hand writing. A small sample of the content of these include: "If a scribe knows only one line, but his handwriting is good, he is indeed a scribe!" "A scribe whose hand can follow dictation is indeed a scribe!" "What kind of a scribe is a scribe who does not know Sumerian?" Sumerian really was the Latin of its day; long after southern Mesopotamia succumbed, the northern Mesopotamian civs like Akkadia and Babylon still wrote Sumerian, much in the same way that medieval England still used Latin. On the topic of Sumerian translations, there is an unsolved mystery about UD.GAL.NUN text. UD.GAL.NUN is the modern name given to it, with UD meaning normal orthography AN, GAL meaning EN, and NUN for LIL. ("text of God?" enlil was the primary deity) This text is found randomly throughout Sumerian texts, sometimes changing context within a sentence; the practice died out within a few hundred years, maybe even 100. It's meaning and why its there is still debated, with some suggestions that it maybe was a scribal code or the first encryption system. From what I know it has not been cracked because there are no "Rosetta Stones"..yet Source: Jon Taylor, "The First Scribes"
- slim 5y agoI can't view this tweet. It seems this guy made his account private.
- Beltalowda 5y agoI could view them before dinner, but it's indeed gone now: "Only approved followers". Guess this relatively "obscure" account got some attention he didn't expect/desired(?) Anyway, can still read: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1505646738627088389.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1505646738627088389.html
- laughy 5y agoPut it here as well https://archive.ph/yuQyu https://archive.ph/yuQyu
- calibas 5y agoI'm amazed that "An X walks into a bar..." jokes have been around for over 4,000 years.
- tatrajim 5y agoOne of my favorites in East Asia, well-known to everyone in China and Korea 四面楚歌 = 사면초가 "Four sides, Chu songs" Refers to the conclusion of a bitter campaign in the 3rd century BCE for dominion in China. The famed general Xiang Yu (項羽) heard the singing of enemy soldiers of the enemy state of Chu and instantly grasped that he was doomed. The phrase, used with cheerful irony, is very useful in many contemporary situations!