Decipherment
In philology, decipherment is the discovery of the meaning of the symbols found in extinct languages and/or alphabets.[1] Today, at least a dozen languages remain undeciphered.[2]
Decipherment overlaps with another technical field known as cryptanalysis, a field that aims to decipher writings used in secret communication, known as ciphertext. A famous case of this was in the cryptanalysis of the Enigma during the World War II. Unlike in language decipherment, however, actors using ciphertext intentionally lay obstacles to prevent outsiders from uncovering the meaning of the communication system.[3]
Categories
[edit]According to Gelb and Whiting, the approach of decipherment depends on four categories of situations in an undeciphered language:[3]
- Type O: known writing and known language. Although decipherment in this case is trivial, useful information can be gleaned when a known language is written in an alphabet other than the one it is commonly written in. Studying the writing of the Phoenician or Sumerian languages in the Greek alphabet allows information about pronunciation and vocalization to be gleaned that cannot be obtained when studying the expression of these languages in their normal writing system.
- Type I: unknown writing and known language. Deciphered languages in this category include Phoenician, Ugaritic, Cypriot, and Linear B. In this situation, alphabetic systems are the easiest to decipher, followed by syllabic languages, and finally the most difficult being logo-syllabic.
- Type II: known writing and unknown language. Strictly speaking, this situation is not one of decipherment but of linguistic analysis. Decipherment in this category is considered extremely difficult to achieve on the basis of internal information only.
- Type III: unknown writing and unknown language. When this situation occurs in an isolated culture and without the availability of outside information, decipherment is typically considered impossible.
Methods
[edit]A number of methods are available to go about deciphering an extinct writing system or language. These can be divided into approaches utilizing external or internal information.[3]
External information
[edit]Many successful encipherments have proceeded from the discovery of external information, a common example being through the use of multilingual inscriptions, such as the Rosetta Stone (with the same text in three scripts: Demotic, hieroglyphic, and Greek) that enabled the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphic. In principle, multilingual text may be insufficient for a decipherment as translation is not a linear and reversible process, but instead represents an encoding of the message in a different symbolic system. Translating a text from one language into a second, and then from the second language back into the first, rarely reproduces exactly the original writing. Likewise, unless a significant number of words are contained in the multilingual text, limited information can be gleaned from it.[3]
Internal information
[edit]Internal approaches are multi-step: one must first ensure that the writing they are looking at represents real writing, as opposed to a grouping of pictorial representations or a modern-day forgery without further meaning. This is commonly approached with methods from the field of grammatology. Prior to decipherment of meaning, one can then determine the number of distinct graphemes (which, in turn, allows one to tell if the writing system is alphabetic, syllabic, or logo-syllabic), the sequence of writing (whether it be from left to right, right to left, top to bottom, etc), and the determination of whether individual words are properly segmented when the alphabet is written (such as with the use of a space or a different special mark) or not. If a repetitive schematic arrangement can be identified, this can help in decipherment. For example, if the last line of a text has a small number, it can be reasonably guessed to be referring to the date, where one of the words means "year" and, sometimes, a royal name also appears. Another case is when the text contains many small numbers, followed by a word, followed by a larger number; here, the word likely means "total" or "sum". After one has exhausted the information that can be inferentially derived from probable content, they must transition to the systematic application of statistical tools. These include methods concerning the frequency of appearance of each symbol, the order in which these symbols typically appear, whether some symbols appear at the beginning or end of words, etc. There are situations where orthographic features of a language make it difficult if not impossible to decipher specific features (especially without certain outside information), such as when an alphabet does not express double consonants. Additional, and more complex methods, also exist. Eventually, the application of such statistical methods becomes exceedingly laborious, in which computers might be used to apply them automatically.[3]
Artificial intelligence
[edit]In recent years, there has been a growing emphasis on methods utilizing artificial intelligence for the decipherment of lost languages, especially through natural language processing (NLP) methods. Proof-of-concept methods have independently re-deciphered Ugaritic and Linear B using data from similar languages, in this case Hebrew and Ancient Greek.[4] Still-undeciphered languages can benefit from this approach, though, because there is a lack of consensus over whether there is a close deciphered language to it or, if there is, which one it is, in addition to the problem that this model relies on an alphabets use of clearly segmented or divided words. However, many undeciphered alphabets invoke words that are not clearly segmented from surrounding words, like some Iberian languages.[2]
Notable decipherers
[edit]See also
[edit]
Deciphered scripts
[edit]Undeciphered scripts
[edit]- Rongorongo (Decipherment of rongorongo)
- Indus script
- Cretan hieroglyphs
- Byblos syllabary
- Linear A
- Linear Elamite
- Cypro-Minoan syllabary
- Espanca
- Numidian language[a]
Undeciphered texts
[edit]References
[edit]- ^ Although the script, Libyco-Berber, has been almost fully deciphered, the language has not.
- ^ Trask, R.L (2000). The Dictionary of Historical and Comparative Linguistics. Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, p. 82 ("The process of determining the relation between an extinct and unknown writing system and the language it represents. Strictly, decipherment is the elucidation of the script—that is, determining the values of the written characters")
- ^ a b Luo, Jiaming; Hartmann, Frederik; Santus, Enrico; Barzilay, Regina; Cao, Yuan (2021). "Deciphering Undersegmented Ancient Scripts Using Phonetic Prior". Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics. 9: 69–81. doi:10.1162/tacl_a_00354. ISSN 2307-387X.
- ^ a b c d e Gelb, I. J.; Whiting, R. M. (1975). "Methods of Decipherment". Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. 107 (2): 95–104. doi:10.1017/S0035869X00132769. ISSN 2051-2066.
- ^ Luo, Jiaming; Cao, Yuan; Barzilay, Regina (2019). "Neural Decipherment via Minimum-Cost Flow: From Ugaritic to Linear B". arXiv. Association for Computational Linguistics: 3146–3155. doi:10.18653/v1/P19-1303.
- ^ "Cypro-Syllabic".
- ^ "Anatomy of a Decipherment", http://images.library.wisc.edu/WI/EFacs/transactions/WT1966/reference/wi.wt1966.adcorre.pdf"
- ^ "Breaking the Code (Francois Desset, Padua) - YouTube". www.youtube.com. Archived from the original on 2021-12-11. Retrieved 2021-01-04.
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