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August 31, 2007

Playing Around With Akkadian, Sumerian and Egyptian

There is a new toy on the internet. It purports to translate English into Assyrian/Babylonian, Sumerian, or Egyptian. It's kind of fun but it is not a translator. It is a word looker upper. And even at that, it often returns extremely weird results. Here's part of what Bill Poser said about it on Language Log.

It doesn't work. I don't know much Akkadian or Sumerian, but I do have a fair knowledge of Egyptian, enough to test this translator. If you enter single words, it will often return a reasonable result, though in a number of cases the result is not what I would consider the usual word or spelling. The system doesn't seem to have a very large vocabulary. Quite a few of the words I tried were missing, including both ordinary words like "silent" and names of major Egyptian gods. If, however, you enter sentences, the result is invariably gibberish. This system has no knowledge of Egyptian grammar.

And I found the same to be true its ability to translate into Akkadian. It didn't know Marduk and when I tried the first line of the Enuma Elish, "When on high the heaven had not been named," I got the following,

Not the first line of the Enuma Elish

I guess this reads, "aššu on AN the GIŠ had lā been KÚRd." One might see this as, aššu on šamî the işşu had lā been nakir(?)d, and translate it "Because on heaven the tree had not been (made) hostile." There are several other options but I think this one is the most charitable. Sure, because of the syntax, this is not the easiest thing to translate. But it does show what you get when you take the first, more of less matching, word or sign in a list with out regard to connotation or grammar.

If you're interested, here's what the first line of the Enuma Elish actually looks like,

The first line of the Enuma Elish

This is from John Heise's Akkadian Language with examples of cuneiform texts chapter 3.

Posted by Duane Smith at August 31, 2007 7:08 PM | Read more on Akkadian |

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Comments

Hmmmmmm, this whole thing could be improved. Right now, programmers are programming their silly stuff without linguistic knowledge and linguists can't do it because they are, well let's be honest, technologically inept. In the far-away future of robots and hovercars, I envision an open-source translation project where programmers can offer their two cents and linguistic specialists can offer their two cents and together we might achieve a total of five cents with interest ;)

Posted by: Glen Gordon at September 1, 2007 3:57 AM

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