Using AI, researchers have been able to translate Akkadian into English using a relatively small number texts for the language model to work from.
Incredible. Studied some Ugaritic in school. This would be amazing to explore
Before you know it we’ll be able to speak dead languages that might have taken forever to figure out
That would be great, but don’t put the cart before the horse. While this is an amazing feat both for AI and for the study of human history, it still took tens of thousands of Akkadian text fragments to train it. That’s why I made sure to say that it was relatively small. It’s a huge number of texts, but nowhere near the vast amount used for a living language.
So does this mean that we will one day be able to translate Linear A into English? Probably not with this technology, but I wouldn’t discount the possibility.
