An ancient language has defied translation for 100 years.

By Alizeh Kohari    8 February 2022 • Karachi, Pakistan

An interesting article, perhaps with some relevance for Bible translation. Here is a little introduction:

"When [Jiaming Luo] became a computer science doctoral student at MIT in 2015, his interest collided with his advisor’s long-standing fascination with ancient scripts. After all, what could be more neglected — or, to use Luo’s more academic term, “lower resourced” — than a long-lost language, left to us as enigmatic symbols on scattered fragments? “I think of these languages as mysteries,” Luo told Rest of World over Zoom. “That’s definitely what attracts me to them.”

"In 2019, Luo made headlines when, working with a team of fellow MIT researchers, he brought his machine-learning expertise to the decipherment of ancient scripts. He and his colleagues developed an algorithm informed by patterns in how languages change over time. They fed their algorithm words in a lost language and in a known related language; its job was to align words from the lost language with their counterparts in the known language. Crucially, the same algorithm could be applied to different language pairs."

See at:

https://restofworld.org/2022/indus-translation-ai-code-script/?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits