Computers deciphering languages

On June 30, there was a news release about how a computer program has managed to mostly decipher Ugaritic "on its own" (that is to say, re-decipher for the pursuit of computer science advancement). This was already discussed on Memiyawanzi and Abnormal Interests but I feel I should add my two cents considering that I involve myself in both linguistics and computer programming on this site.

When I was still in French-immersed gradeschool, I learned quickly that English words don't map nicely to French words in phrases all the time. One clever teacher encouraged me to think of an English joke and to try to translate it into French. As she anticipated my reaction, she delighted in watching the personal discovery she had abetted unfold all over my face. Naturally, the puns on which my joke relied had magically lost their meaning and I realized then very early that translation is quite complex. Unfortunately, many others in adulthood have never taken the time to think about just how complex translation really is. Many people who are monolingual especially have little experience to go on to understand just how difficult this task really is and just how amazingly effortlessly the human brain solves many problems.

And after programming things like the online Etruscan dictionary, I can say with some degree of experience that trying to machine-translate something using simple one-to-one mapping algorithms between languages produces ludicrous Babelfish-like results (eg. 'What is on television?' becomes *'Qu'est à la télévision?' on that site for some reason). Even when AI algorithms are added to improve results, the translations are still nowhere near as competent as produced by human beings because they are unequipped to overcome gaps in knowledge or ambiguities in speech like plastic brains can. Historical translation becomes all the more complex because there are even more unknowns involved.

The article is interesting but I feel it's a lot of pompous hype from an institution that is no doubt pressured to come up with innovation after innovation, or at least to look like it is. The realistic limitations of this program can easily get misconstrued. What I think will be the truely noteworthy innovation to this complex goal of machine translation is a very general pattern-recognition algorithm, one that doesn't require the guidance of researchers or the programming-in of added assumptions to find and discover new patterns. Yet, if programmers could accomplish that, we'd not only have a fancy translator algorithm but a fully fledged digital human complete with the beginnings of artificial intuition. Until then, these programs are in no way a replacement for human beings and any talk of that sort is more relevant to sci-fi than current reality.

The dank bowels of earth

Memiyawanzi remarks lately on the use of γῆ κατ' εὐρώσσ' 'dank earth below' in the oddly named post Dank earth and ejaculations. It inspires me to take a crack at this interesting and potentially profound concept. For me, the subtle phrase in Greek can be understood as part of a much larger concept that goes well beyond Homer or the borders of Greece, pertaining to the world of the dead as it was once conceived.

Hades is described as 'cold', 'dark' and 'watery'. This is equally a description of the literal earth that we dig up when we bury the dead, showing us the analogy involved here and its evolution. The rivers in Hades that are later named (ie. Acheron, Styx, etc.) are relatively recent add-ons to the initial analogy of burial and moist earth. In Ugaritic texts, we read instances of 'filth' in reference to the city of the underworld, directly derived from the image of the deceased being laid to rest in the literal filth of the earth. Hence, the underworld came to be seen by many cultures of the Mediterranean to be cold, dark and moist. This was also the understanding of Etruscans who traded afterall with the Greeks and who absorbed many traditions from the Near East.

However, I believe the symbolism goes one step further. The very rites of Etruscans which were designed to divine the future from the internal organs of sheep, themselves imported traditions traced back to Babylonian extispicy, are necessarily built on a lost metaphor of the Earth, not only as cold, dark and moist but also a living deity, complete with innards. From the metaphor of a living earth, ancients reasoned further that the sun, as it passes under the horizon in the west and underneath the earth to rise again in the east, is effectively passing through the bowels of the earth. The way in which the sun passes through the world of the dead below and how it's effectively reborn every morning was a directly significant and life-affirming image to ancient believers throughout the eastern Mediterranean, whether Greek, Etruscan, Hittite or Egyptian. People ancient and modern have mourned their loved ones and often need to believe in a greater purpose to mortal life, sometimes straining to see any hope, even a blind metaphor-induced one.


Knowing now the source behind expressions like 'bowels of the earth'^[1] and Etrusco-Babylonian haruspical rites, we're armed with the power not only to crack the intended meaning of some obscure Greek texts or comprehend the purpose of some Etruscan artifacts, but we're also capable now of seeing a glimpse into the heliocentric belief system of the Minoans in the same region. The Minoans left traces in their murals and their stories carried on by the Greeks. The mystery of the labyrinth unravels itself and we recognize it as a representation of the entrails of the earth. The living Earth is the maze of innards. As anthopomorphic goddess, she protects her holy symbol of immortal life within her, the labrys. The Minotaur becomes transparent as Death incarnate (cf. the Ugaritic death god, Mot), with whom Theseus wrestles in the dead of night. Here, Theseus can only represent the immortal, heroic Sun^[2] who in Herculean fashion conquers death. We see this not only by his function but also by his non-Greek name built on a Proto-Aegean root *tʰes- 'to dawn' (> Etruscan θesan 'dawn').

The Minoan mural below, tragically described as showing a 'secular' act by some stunted historians^[3], is replete with iconography. The tanned youth representing the sun 'floats' in the air atop the living bull of the underworld between two ladies representing the horizons of east and west and forming the invisible Horns of Consecration (cf. Egyptian aker). In sacrifice, this same bull might be offered to the gods and his organs interpreted by priests just as if the animal were literally Death incarnate^[4], perhaps holding important omens of the future in his murky, dank depths.




NOTES
^[1] Compare equivalent expressions in the Semitic world like Ugaritic l-kbd ’arṣ 'in the bowels of the earth' where kbd refers to both the literal viscera of an organism and also metaphorically as the interior of something.
^[2] Rev C W Jones, On mythology in funereal sculpture in Parker, The archaeology of Rome (1877), p.27 (see link).
^[3] Nilsson, The Minoan-Mycenaean religion and its survival in Greek religion (1971), 2nd edition, p.374 (see link). In a failed attempt at erudition, the author dug himself into a corner with a contrived attempt to impose his own atheism on ancient cultures: "It is often assumed that Minoan bull-fighting was a sacral performance, but there is nothing in the Minoan monuments to prove that it was more than a very popular secular sport."; Renfrew, The emergence of civilisation: The Cyclades and the Aegean in the third millennium BC (1972), p.435: "Whether or not it had a religious origin and significance, which is not certain, these representations are entirely secular in flavour, expressing often the dramatic contrast in the anatomies of bull and leaper." Again, an exaggerated emphasis on secular interpretation of bull-leaping at the expense of a competent and convincing explanation of its source.
^[4] Castleden, Minoans: Life in Bronze Age Crete (1993), p.168 (see link) laments: "The bull sacrifice was probably a regular occurrence at the temples, yet it is very rarely depicted: the scene with the tressed bull on its sacrificial table shown on the Agia Triadha sarcophagus is a rarity."

Revisiting TLE 193 and 'The City of Dirt'

I don't want to fill up my blog with too much nonsense about other unmentionable blogs with poor commentbox moderation. This is strictly about linguistics :)

My mind has been on the Etruscan inscription TLE 193 again. There's something so fishy about it and I can't let it go. Readers may remember that I previously flipflopped on whether to interpret uples in TLE 193 as a name or a word. This artifact is an inscribed urn which contained crematory remains of an individual female discovered in Tuscania during the middle of the 19th-century. (I still haven't uncovered a picture of it. Was it stolen from a museum somewhere along the way?) To refresh our memories, let's look at the inscription again:

larθi . ceisi . ceises . velus . velisnal . ravnθus . seχ
avils . śas . amce . uples

I'm looking at that perplexing last word, uples, and not knowing whether to interpret it as Upaliie, a gentilicium or as a reflex of a seperate word ufli which is found in the Liber Linteus mummy text and which cannot possibly be a name because of its context (LL 11.ix-xi) :

θui . useti . catneti . slapiχun . slapinaś . favin . ufli . spurta . eisna . hinθu . cla . θesns

As usual, the Etruscan specialists are even more indecisive about what ufli means than I am. It appears that there is no well-argued reason for interpreting uples as a last name in TLE 193 other than the existence of the Italic-derived name Upaliie (from Oscan Upfals) elsewhere.

However as I scrub for data even harder, I'm noticing that there is an interesting pattern in the way that this inscription has been translated over the past couple of centuries. Right after it was discovered, we see that throughout the 19th century, the phrase śas amce is simply considered the age of the deceased. Due to competing theories at the time, people argued back and forth whether this numeral was '4', '5' or '6'. We now know that it signifies '6'^[1]. Regardless of the debate at the time, it seemed to be agreed that this was the tragic remains of a young prepubescent girl.

This is odd, because after Pallottino's academic career came into full swing in the 20th century, I notice that some scholars were swayed to the idea that this artifact speaks of a grown woman married to a man named Uple for 'four' or 'six' years. When I assimilated evidence for the name Upaliie from other inscriptions, it gave me a pang of fear that I may be wrong about my initial reading and needed to be honest to my readers. So I promply wrote an apology even though it was technically in keeping with earlier views. However, this more modern interpretation is full of even larger holes than the original reading when I think about it more.

It seems insurmountably odd, amid all the known inscriptions available where age of the deceased is consistently recorded in funerary inscriptions, for this one mysterious artifact to go astray and replace the expected number of years lived with the duration of her marriage. Women's ages were just as important as the men's to Etruscans. And yet, how do we deal with uples? So I'm revisiting my original idea that uples is indeed the same word as the locative noun ufli (for earlier *upil-i). If the value is 'dirt' then avils śas amce uples would read "At six years, (she) was (given) to the dirt", a circumlocutive euphemism for the burial of her urn. Here, I think we could interpret uples not as a genitive form (which should be *upil-s, by the way), but the directive case in -iś (uples < *upil(a)-iś). The directive case is observed in the Liber Linteus indicating 'to' or 'toward'. But you may wonder why I insist on the value of 'dirt'.

Aside from 'dirt' fitting well with TLE 193, I noticed that it may completely unlock the phrase in the Liber Linteus ufli spurta eisna hinθu. We are told that spur means 'city', eisna means 'divine' and hinθu means 'below'. Upon reading something about Ugaritic mythos a while back, I noticed that it kind of sounds a lot like the Ugaritic city of the underworld which they called Qrt Hmry^[2] 'City of Mire', doesn't it? Thus "ufli (in dirt) spur-ta (the city) eisna (divine) hinθu (below)" = "the divine city in the dirt below".

Since we know that Etruscans did indeed believe in a city in the underworld^[3] because of carved reliefs that depict it, we have yet another tempting association with the Near East that critics can't seem to absorb yet. Nifty idea, no? Yes, I know. You can thank me later, hehe.


NOTES
^[1] We know that śa means 'six' because of TLE 181 where the age recorded (avils : XX : tivrs : śas) can only sensibly read "20 years (and) six months old" (i.e. "20 and a half years old"). I'm sure you'll all agree that "20 years and four months old" is by contrast quite unusual to find in any funerary inscription worldwide, past or present. In fact, such a thing would almost seem sacrilegious. The Bonfantes et alia remain completely unaware of this simple deduction. Note Bonfante/Bonfante, The Etruscan Language (2002), rev.ed., p.94 (see link) as a typical example.
^[2] Watson/Wyatt, Handbook of Ugaritic Studies (1999), p.187 (see link): "Mot's domain is described as being a town (qrt) called 'Miry' (hmry), in a land called 'Filth or Mud' [...]"
^[3] Bonnefoy, Roman and European Mythologies (1992), p.35 concerning the Etruscans: "The realm of the hereafter was represented as a city lined with towers, whose door is guarded by demons." (see link)