In late 1920s, archaeologists discovered unknown to them, in the city of Ugarit write clay tablets. Linguist spent decades trying to decipher the writing, said that since Biblical times, but could do it completely. However, a new computer program developed by a team of the Massachusetts Institute of technology has translated now about 60% of the text.
Scientists at MIT used the program to compare the Ugaritic text to Hebrew text and were delighted with how quickly with took. Ugaritic language is considered a lost language and consists of points and stylus wedge-shaped signs. BC, where used in West Syria has not been used since 1200. The programme was able to translate most of the symbols of letters and words.
According to Regina Barzilai, a professor in MIT's computer science this may be the first time that anyone has never actually demonstrated an analysis of any of the missing languages team. 60% of the language was identified correctly. Barzilai, said in an interview, "traditionally, decipherment has been seen as a kind of game academic detective and computers does not seem to be of much use." "Our goal is to provide all the power of the modern machine learning and statistics for this problem."
Team hopes to decrypt other ancient languages in the future and the computer program will be the key to help us learn more about our history. For example, expect to look next Etruscan, a script that was used in 700 BC in Italy. By 100 BC Etruscan had been replaced by Latin and due to this, remain very few traces of the language. And of those remaining, none of this seems to correspond to any other more current, as does the Ugaritic with Hebrew language.
According to Barzilai, computer program has the ability to analyze multiple languages at once to see if anything between old and modern languages number coincides with.
The programme was made public last week at the 48th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics in Sweden.
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