Archaeologists Unearth a Secret Lost Language From 3,000 Years Ago (sciencealert.com) 123
"And no, it's not COBOL," jokes long-time Slashdot reader schwit1, sharing this report from ScienceAlert:
A secret text has been discovered in Türkiye, scattered among tens of thousands of ancient clay tablets, which were written in the time of the Hittite Empire during the second millennium BCE. No one yet knows what the curious cuneiform script says, but it seems to be a long-lost language from more than 3,000 years ago.
Experts say the mysterious idiom is unlike any other ancient written language found in the Middle East, although it seems to share roots with other Anatolian-Indo-European languages. The sneaky scrawlings start at the end of a cultic ritual text written in Hittite — the oldest known Indo-European tongue — after an introduction that essentially translates to: "From now on, read in the language of the country of Kalasma"... Currently, there are no available photos of the newly discovered tablet with Kalamaic writings, as experts are still working out how to translate it. Schwemer and his colleagues hope to publish their results along with images of their discovery sometime next year.
Experts say the mysterious idiom is unlike any other ancient written language found in the Middle East, although it seems to share roots with other Anatolian-Indo-European languages. The sneaky scrawlings start at the end of a cultic ritual text written in Hittite — the oldest known Indo-European tongue — after an introduction that essentially translates to: "From now on, read in the language of the country of Kalasma"... Currently, there are no available photos of the newly discovered tablet with Kalamaic writings, as experts are still working out how to translate it. Schwemer and his colleagues hope to publish their results along with images of their discovery sometime next year.
They need to call (Score:4, Funny)
Dr Daniel Jackson
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Hittite and the language of Kalasma were written in Cuneiform, not in Egyptian Hieroglyphs.
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> the language of Ancient Egypt, which is a Semitic language and thus related to Hebrew and Arabic
No, Ancient Egyptian was not a Semitic language. It (probably) is remotely related to the Semitic and Berber languages of today (and to other languages from Africa, like Oromo or Luo), but the exact relationship is unclear.
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Re:They need to call ChatGPT (Score:2)
Cheyenne mountain (Score:2)
They should just ship it to Cheyenne Mountain, and let Daniel Jackson figure it out...
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There's just the pesky issue of trans-dimensional shipping to a fictional universe.
UPS probably has a prohibitively steep fee for that kind of delivery.
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But in this case, we are talking about the Hittite language and a related language, which are Indo-European languages and thus more closely related to Modern English than to Old Egyptian. And they are written in Cuneiform, not in Hieroglyphs.
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He also cracked the language of the Alterans, which is related to Latin. Just let him take a shot at it.
Pig Hittite (Score:3)
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I would surmise that in the past since reading and writing were specialized skillsets that required a separate profession [wikipedia.org], 6th grade gossip would be too costly to record. Mundane but important events like inventory and tracking debts were written down. However, that would not mean one rich woman could not write to her friend about their "slutty" mutual friend, Susan. :P
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It could still be gossip between those who had learned to read and write. I'd check if the tablet would, for one reason or another, have had to be discarded due to mistakes made, and they then used it for internal jokes.
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It could still be gossip between those who had learned to read and write. I'd check if the tablet would, for one reason or another, have had to be discarded due to mistakes made, and they then used it for internal jokes.
Possibly if the tablet was found in a school. If it were found with other "official" documents that is less likely.
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I think what you mean is that scribes weren't taught to read and write until they were adult. I think this is unlikely. Parents always want their children to be advantaged, and often what them to "follow in their parent's footsteps".
The other reading is even less likely, as clay was pretty cheap.
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I think what you mean is that scribes weren't taught to read and write until they were adult. I think this is unlikely. Parents always want their children to be advantaged, and often what them to "follow in their parent's footsteps".
No I mean is that the medium and process used to record something was not cheap back then and 6th grade gossip would not likely be saved. Remember the scribe was a profession meaning that the rich may not know or need to know how to read and write. That's why scribes were used. An adult corresponding about gossip is way more likely than a child.
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The idea that only the scribes could read or write at all is very strange. The merchants certainly had some capability, if not up to professional levels. And the materials were, literally, dirt cheap. You also needed to read and write at at least a basic level to be a tax assessor. Etc. The equivalent of "Ed luvs Suz" would not be beyond the capabilities of LOTS of people. But if you wanted a good copy, you'd hire a scribe.
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If that's like the boss who fancies himself a software developer because he once wrote "Hello world!" in BASIC...
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I remember seeing a video on teaching-level arithmetic for budding accountants, with practice tablets (be ever so glad we use Base 10), but hadn't heard of the delinquent story. Got a link?
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Hey! Don't slut shame Susan! She's a nice girl. All the boys say so.
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"He who reads this is stupid."
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I prepared Explosive Runes this morning.
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Going to be really funny when it just turns out to be some childish letter rearrangement "code" gossiping about which 6th grader has a crush on another.
Some of the oldest Greek we have - IIRC the absolute oldest not counting Linear B - is obscene graffiti high up on the remnants of the volcanic cone at Santorini. Obscene as in which boy was fucking which.
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It's a record of religious rites. The Hittites would take the idols of defeated nations from their temples to the Hittite capital, but they'd get the priests to teach them the correct way to worship them and they wrote down the rituals so that they could keep following them accurately.
Re: Pig Hittite (Score:2)
Well, sort of. I have seen the translation and it says: This is the year of the Linux desktop
Grammar Nerds, Assemble (Score:2)
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Quenya or Sindarin?
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Klingon is already there, but elvish its supposedly to incomplete.
Just like the Land of Punt (Score:3)
Everyone knew where Punt was located so no need to give directions or identify any landmarks.
The same with this language. Everyone knew how to read Kalasma so just read it.
This is why documentation is so important (looking at you, programmers).
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Programming documentation is the code itself.
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It's just assembler, you can just read it. Where exactly is your problem?
Re:Just like the Land of Punt (Score:5, Insightful)
Programming documentation is the code itself.
A finished car is the documentation to its construction. See how ridiculous that sounds?
Being able to read the code does not in and of itself explain why the code is the way it is. Why does that function do that? Why is it in this place? Why is there a picture of a coconut in the code [thegamer.com]?
I know what you're going to say. If you can read the code you can understand what it does so there's no need for documentation. Which is incorrect. You may be able to read the code and understand it, and I may be able to read the code and understand it, but the new guy might not, and if you want them to update and/or maintain the code that becomes all the more difficult when there is no sense of why things are the way they are. What if the new guy is good at Rust but only basic in python and your code is in python? Without documentation how would you like them to do what is asked of them?
Documentation exists for a very good reason. Everyone is on the same page in understanding what is taking place. As I have told my teams, it doesn't need to be War and Peace. It just needs to be something coherent that someone else can use if the need arises.
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That's why I learned PERL. There's no point to documenting it.
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Agree. I have inherited sites that were spaghetti code. To grok it, I had to learn how to think like 5 different coders who provided bandaids and shortcuts to coding they didn't understand. I straightened all of it out over several months and provided documentation.
Heirs could change whatever they wanted but they understood what was going on and why. And where.
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No, it's not. There is no such thing as self-documenting code. That's complete nonsense.
To illustrate this, consider a program written in assembly. What each line does is perfectly obvious. It doesn't get much simpler, but I'll bet the very first thing you'd do when given a program written in assembly is add a ton of comments. "But wait!" I hear you cry, "just because ... " Whatever your objections, those are all reasons why self-documenting code is a nonsense concept.
The same is true for higher-level
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That's not what we're talking about at all.
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We don't have that problem, thanks to good policies. The rule we use is that comments are always primary. When code and comments disagree, comments win. They're also checked as part of the normal review process. Your code won't pass if you're missing comments or your comments don't match the code. We encourage comments to be written and updated before code as well, which we've found has other benefits.
Writing good comments is just as important as writing code, particularly in a professional context.
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That's complete nonsense, as I've already explained. There is no such thing as self-documenting code. Again, code alone can not capture intent.
And I'm pretty sure if we do not talk about disassembled machine code, but assembly source code: it is super simple to make it self documenting, too.
The only significant difference between an assembly source listing and a disassembly will be the labels. Labels certainly help, but that just makes my case stronger. The label names can hint at intend which is obviously not contained in the code alone. labels, variable, and function names can give you some information, but not nearly enough to carry the develop
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Hey, everyone knows how the 3 seashells work.
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And yet, it did not matter for the people who wrote it. I doubt "making sure someone can read this in 3000 years" was high on their priority list.
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Open science (Score:2)
We know the reason there are no photos of the tablet is that the people who discovered it don't want anyone translating it before they do. Same reason they don't provide a real-time feed from James Webb Space Telescope.
Fair or no fair? Ethical? The argument is that their funders/institutes want credit so they can fund more expeditions.
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We know the reason there are no photos of the tablet is that the people who discovered it don't want anyone translating it before they do.
And your reason is? My understanding is the word "yet" in the article means they have no provided photos of something was just discovered. The word "never" was not used.
Same reason they don't provide a real-time feed from James Webb Space Telescope.
Please enlighten us on why you do not think JWST images have a live feed? Are you saying this tablet is at Lagrange 2 (1.5 million km away) and that linguists need a worldwide network of antennas to keep contact with the tablet. Considering an assignment for JWST may require hours of observation time, your proposal is to have the telescope
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Show you know squat about telescope data. It has to be highly processed before you can see anything you'd recognize.
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hobbyists have processed raw Webb data and in some cases surpassed the pros.
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Another question of fairness is how reliable and fact-based your guess is.
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1
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For hours on end.
Secret? (Score:3)
Why "secret"?
Undiscovered yes, but "secret" is just clickbait.
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I'm there with you.
If my wife finds a scribbled note in a sock drawer, she's not going to claim that it's a secret. She's just going to know that I have occasional lapses of unstupidity.
On naming countries (Score:3)
They can ask to be called Türkiye, but I think it's stupid to accommodate that request in English when it goes outside the standard Latin alphabet that English uses.
It's OK to translate - we don't live in Turkey, and we don't speak Turkish nor use the modified Latin alphabet that they do.
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They're not mandating that every single mention ever of the country in text should be spelt that way. You can even spell Turkiye without an umlaut, just like you spell most other words with an umlaut in common everyday English text and no one really cares.
This is nothing but complaining for complaining's sake. Get over it.
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This is nothing but complaining for complaining's sake. Get over it.
No, it's not. Following Erdogan's spelling desires clearly places the author in a camp that bows to dictators. It is a political statement of support for the AK and its leader.
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Where Erdogan goes, all the expats follow. It's more about not offending minorities.
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Following Erdogan's spelling desires
That was not the complaint of the post I replied to. So irrelevant. His problem was not about Erdogan. His problem was about the spelling.
Learn to read. Stick to the topic. If you don't want to do that, go away.
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Double dots over letters is common to a number of other continental languages such as French, German and Spanish.
And in English we tend to ignore them in loanwords such as naive, Chloe and Zoe.
Do you even metal, bro? Motley Crue, Motorhead and Spinal Tap would like a word.
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The diaeresis of naive is to separate to vowels so that, here, you pronounce the second. So in naive, you pronounce the i so that the word does not come out as "nave". The diaeresis of loan words from German (umlauts there) or whatever rock bands use to make their name distinct are entirely different.
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Slashcode can handle Unicode now?
Türkiye
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The standard Latin alphabet is 21 letters, all caps, plus maybe two more letters for Greek loanwords. English uses a modified Latin alphabet.
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Re: On naming countries (Score:2)
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They can ask to be called Türkiye, but I think it's stupid to accommodate that request in English when it goes outside the standard Latin alphabet that English uses.
So your objection is that a preferred name should not be honored because "in English when it goes outside the standard Latin alphabet". You are aware that 1) English derives from the Germanic language in which the umlaut is a part 2) Describe which "standard Latin" alphabet is your reference. For computers, the umlaut has been part of Latin extended alphabet [wikipedia.org] since 1987. At what point do you recognize the umlaut as part of Latin?
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> So your objection is that a preferred name should not be honored because
No, the "preferred" name should not be honored because it's stupid and insulting to use a name that 99% of English speakers aren't even able to pronounce correctly.
Turks themselves don't call Greece Ellada but Yunanistan, AB (Avrupa Birligi) instead EU. And so on. Each language has its preferred named for foreign countries and peoples.
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No, the "preferred" name should not be honored because it's stupid and insulting to use a name that 99% of English speakers aren't even able to pronounce correctly.
By "99% of English" speakers do you also include people from places like Germany who use umlauts and also speak English. Does that include the Dutch who also use umlauts and 95% of the Netherlands speak English. Or do you just mean 'Murica.
Turks themselves don't call Greece Ellada but Yunanistan, AB (Avrupa Birligi) instead EU. And so on. Each language has its preferred named for foreign countries and peoples.
No your point was that you seemingly cannot fathom umlauts in a English which is derived from Germanic which has umlauts.
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Re:On naming countries (Score:4)
"Hint: the latin alphabet was used by an empire called "Roman Empire"
That alphabet has no Umlauts or any other letters with dots or accents on them: that is the Latin Alphabet."
I look forward to you writing all your future posts without "u", "w", or "j" because you only use the Latin Alphabet.
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If I write english, I use the english alphabeth.
That's funny. I do not see your type being the Germanic font of Old English [wikimedia.org]. It seems you are using the Roman version of Latin type. Please tell me how you are using English again.
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Not really. Carolingian Minuscule perhaps.
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Not really difficult not to be an nitpicking idiot.
You just nitpicked about someone nitpicking. Did that just escape you?
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You can call it what you want. It doesn't change their official name in their official documents. They changed their official anglicised name, nothing more. You can be an arse about it, or just roll with it.
By the way putting diacritics on letters doesn't make it a "modified" Latin alphabet. The alphabet is still latin. No languages recognise diacritics as independent components of their alphabet.
It's OK to translate
It's also okay to use more than 26 letters and a shift key. Even standard English has many words that use diacri
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> By the way putting diacritics on letters doesn't make it a "modified" Latin alphabet.
The Latin alphabet didn't have "j", "w" or "u" either.
> No languages recognise diacritics as independent components of their alphabet.
That's an idiotic thing to say. Languages don't "recognize" anything. FWIW in a lot of languages "diacritics" and/or diacritics + base letter and/or digraphs are considered separate letters in dictionaries, sorting, etc.
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That's an idiotic thing to say. Languages don't "recognize" anything.
Indeed. Allow me to rewrite that sentence for the autistic among us: "No humans recognise diacritics as independent components of their language's alphabet."
Fun fact about language, in one of the languages I speak you'd be called an "ant fucker" for your obtuse correction.
FWIW in a lot of languages "diacritics" and/or diacritics + base letter and/or digraphs are considered separate letters
They are considered letters in terms of typing them, but not in terms of the underlying alphabet. No student ever learns the German alphabet (for example) has the letter ö, ü or ë in it. They do however recognise the letter
Something stupid in the article (Score:4)
> "Currently, there are no available photos of the newly discovered tablet with Kalamaic writings, as experts are still working out how to translate it"
Umm... taking a picture of it won't stop you from translating it. NOT taking a picture of it stops others from trying, which implies you are either afraid other people are better suited to the task than you are and will get there first, or you are trying to control the information for propaganda purposes.
Either way, it's a dick move in terms of advancing human knowledge of our history.
Re:Something stupid in the article (Score:4, Interesting)
I can to some extent understand why the ones who discovered it want first crack at translating it, too. What's more important, at least in my eyes, is whether they'll admit defeat if they can't translate it and then publish it to everyone. And in a reasonable time frame, mind.
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The way science works, if the data is served to the many, other scientists will work like hell to disprove an argument. That's a good thing.
A bad thing is to give the goddam stuff to conspiracy money farms before validation.
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Are there no other alternative motives? Could it be that scientists don't want social conspirators providing agenda-based translations? Science is about controlled investigations. People not in the field have no need to know when the phase is speculative. Give us the answer when you can demonstrate that you are correct.
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Could it be that scientists don't want social conspirators providing agenda-based translations?
Or the scientists have their own agenda to protect.
Science isn't done by the first one across the line with an answer is correct. It's the eventual arrival at a consensus by experts in the field. Unless there are current events that need to be manipulated by "facts on the ground".
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Science isn't done by the first one across the line with an answer is correct. It's the eventual arrival at a consensus by experts in the field. Unless there are current events that need to be manipulated by "facts on the ground".
Science is not done in real time either. It seems in this day some people are perplexed why scientists do not immediately start sharing every detail they find on Instagram and TikTok. Analysis takes time. Now if they never published the data, that would be a different story. They have not published yet. So what?
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Maybe they're just busy
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Umm... taking a picture of it won't stop you from translating it. NOT taking a picture of it stops others from trying, which implies you are either afraid other people are better suited to the task than you are and will get there first, or you are trying to control the information for propaganda purposes. Either way, it's a dick move in terms of advancing human knowledge of our history.
Base on your post, it seems these people have held onto this photo for decades, impeding the advance of human knowledge then? No wait, they just discovered something and have not posted everything. Why are you so mad about a recent discovery not being immediately shared? Have you ever published a scientific paper? Rushed and immediate is the opposite of what should be done.
Already translated. (Score:2)
Too hot to hide (Score:2)
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By now my warranty has expired.
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Lost for a reason.... (Score:2)
Probably just a crap design and something better came along.
What I love about archaeology. (Score:2)
Archaeology is the field where history and science overlap.
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I agree and would reinforce with:
Archaeology is the field where history and science overlap.
No, it's the same thing.
The term "archaeology" has its roots in Greek. It is derived from the combination of two Greek words: "archaios," meaning "ancient" or "old," and "logos," meaning "study" or "science." Therefore, "archaeology" can be translated to mean the "study of the ancient" or the "science of the old." The discipline of archaeology involves the study of human history and prehistory through the excavation and analysis of artifacts, structures, and other physical r
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They just found the programming manual... (Score:2)
Possibly Indo-European (Score:5, Interesting)
The mysterious language reportedly has constructs that fit the hypothesis that the new language belongs to the Anatolian-Indo-European family. This should make it relatively straightforward to crack because all Indo-European languages follow very similar grammatical rules.
There will, for example, be two or three suffixes, probably three, which define the gender of a word. Since you can thus identify which words are nouns, you can identify which words are adjectives and which are verbs.
This sort of code-breaking involves building a dictionary in which similar words are grouped. Alice Kober's triplets, for example, made it possible for Michael Ventris to crack Linear B. This requires sufficient text, which is unlikely here.
Numbers will also follow fairly straightforward rules and should be easy to identify, if there are any. However, you probably won't get many numbers in a religious text, so this probably doesn't help. Yet.
We can't use Michael Ventris' other observations, one of which was geographical. Linear B texts from the same location included a recurring noun. There were also words that were always matched up to specific symbols. Ventris assumed that placenames were likely conserved, so experimented on that basis. He found that if you did that, all the words next to the objects spelled the object name in Greek.
This won't work here because we don't know where the text is from and it's unlikely the text will contain the name of the civilisation. It's more likely to have names of deities, rulers, ranks, and common objects.
My guess is that the effort will be based on the assumption that the Hittites faithfully transcribed what was spoken, so everything will be written out phonetically.
These transcribed words hopefully fall into one of two groups - words with identifiable gender suffixes and words that are close to the reconstructed words from the language family from that time.
That will, with a LOT of luck, give us a crude translation.
The only other hope is that we'll find further Hittite tablets of this language.
It is all lost like tears in (Score:2)
the rain.
Why do they asume it is a "new" language? (Score:2)
I mean, I could easily make a complete mess of a language just adding a recurrent modified on easy syllabe.
For example, in Spanish, there's a childish game that you add "p+vowel" for each syllabe, thus transforming "Te amo" (I love you) to "Pe-te ta-a-po-mo" (Pi-I po-lo-pe-ve pu-you) but that is NOT a "new" language...
where? (Score:2)
I looked in my world atlas, and there isn't anywhere named Türkiye. There isn't even anywhere with an umlaut. That must be in some other language, probably Spanish.