Posted on 10/14/2023 9:36:53 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
I have clicked both archeonews links and there is nothing there except notice of nothing.
There are a number of dramass and philosophical works written by Greeks 3 or 4 hundred years earlier that it would be wonderful to discover in this library. For some dramatists we have 2 or 3 works but reports of a dozen others. What an exciting literary prospect.
I wonder how many different languages or age separations exists between these various clay records. An AI trying to work on English literature 2,000 years in the future might have a bit of difficulty translating the English of 1066 from that of 1566, for example. I think the linguistic differences between 1066 and 1566 were probably a lot greater than those between 1523 and 2023. The invention of the printing press probably helped reduce the changes in literary language closer to our own time.
Also some cultures/nations have a more rigid control over their formal language. I have a modern copy of a book written in Spanish of the 1500s. With a copy of a similar document written in English then and today, it is much harder to read the English. Spain had a very hard working Academy that supervised the official language for centuries. English did not so far as I know. Variations of modern Bible translatons compared with the King James version are an example. An AI system will have to deal with these many variations in clay texts. Probably human scolars will have to do some sorting by the criteria I mention before any machine reading can be effective.
I had a DNS error on the site when I tried clicking in from work.
Thanks...
That answers a lot of my questions about the preliminary translation...
An English-speaker who died 50 years ago might have trouble making sense of a lot of current-day English, especially online communications using a lot of acronyms. What would he make of LOL, for example? “Little old lady”? “Lots of love”?
You will find a lot of slangy type terms on an abbreviated format like emails and tweets, opps, xes, but more formal writing has probably been more stable and slow moving since the printing press.
I have a fellow from Honduras who comes and does yard work for me. He brings his 8 year son along who has an El Salvadoran. The father and I speak Spanish because he has little English, and had majored in Spanish until Sputnik when I switched to a Science major. His father keeps saying to the son (in SPanish), “Now I want you to listen to this lady and learn to speak the “good” Spanish she speaks.” Sometimes I will say a common phrase I learned in Mexico, and he will say, “Now you are talking Mexican,” and we both laugh. I know when my Puerto Rican daughter-in-law is chattering with friends in Spanish, I miss words and meanings.
Oh look, some a-hole put "fakery" in the keywords.
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