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Fun idea I can't handle myself
Nov. 2nd, 2018 03:39 pmI somehow came up with fun idea. I suspect it's *not* new, but I don't recall encountering it before.
Archeological dig unearths some cuneiform tablets. Definitely the real thing. Lots of context, carbon datable stuff in the matrix, they can even check the age on some of the broken pieces by that trick involving heating ceramic (somehow that can give an age range, I just can't recall how).
So, definitely from ancient Sumeria or Assyria or whatever.
But some of them seem to be random nonsense. They get scanned along with a large number of other tablets as part of a process of making info available to scholars online.
somebody runs some software against the database that contains them and a lot of other ancient and more recent inscriptions and documents.
Some graduate student notices something odd about the results of an analysis attempting to identify various languages by things like letter/phoneme frequencies.
The "nonsense" tablets show a high correlation with modern English. Obviously a goof of some sort.
So trying to figure out what sort of bug it is, the student examines the scans more carefully. He has to get some help from a friend in another department who can actually *read* clay tablets.
The friend asks who he got to make up the fakes. Much confusion as friend doesn't want to believe they are real.
Basically, the "nonsense" seems to be a "phonetic" transcription of some passages in modern English.
The original team hadn't picked it up because there are several *different* schools of thought on how many ancient languages are pronounced.
What do they say? Well, that'd be the story, wouldn't it.
Alas, pulling it off properly for a story would requires somebody who knows the language and the writing system. And *I* don't know anybody like that.
Archeological dig unearths some cuneiform tablets. Definitely the real thing. Lots of context, carbon datable stuff in the matrix, they can even check the age on some of the broken pieces by that trick involving heating ceramic (somehow that can give an age range, I just can't recall how).
So, definitely from ancient Sumeria or Assyria or whatever.
But some of them seem to be random nonsense. They get scanned along with a large number of other tablets as part of a process of making info available to scholars online.
somebody runs some software against the database that contains them and a lot of other ancient and more recent inscriptions and documents.
Some graduate student notices something odd about the results of an analysis attempting to identify various languages by things like letter/phoneme frequencies.
The "nonsense" tablets show a high correlation with modern English. Obviously a goof of some sort.
So trying to figure out what sort of bug it is, the student examines the scans more carefully. He has to get some help from a friend in another department who can actually *read* clay tablets.
The friend asks who he got to make up the fakes. Much confusion as friend doesn't want to believe they are real.
Basically, the "nonsense" seems to be a "phonetic" transcription of some passages in modern English.
The original team hadn't picked it up because there are several *different* schools of thought on how many ancient languages are pronounced.
What do they say? Well, that'd be the story, wouldn't it.
Alas, pulling it off properly for a story would requires somebody who knows the language and the writing system. And *I* don't know anybody like that.
