What happens when you put AI to work deciphering lost languages?

AI 中文解读

【核心亮点】AI正在挑战语言学界的终极难题：破译那些没有“罗塞塔石碑”的失传古文字，比如克里特岛的线形文字A。【通俗解读】想象一下，你拿到一本用完全看不懂的符号写成的天书，既没有对照翻译，也没有任何已知语言的关联——这就是语言学家面对线形文字A时的一筹莫展。埃特鲁斯坎语稍微好一点，但也就只有墓碑上几个单词的线索。现在，AI像侦探一样上场了：它能从海量残缺符号中自动寻找重复模式、统计规律，甚至比对人脑无法感知的细微联系。比如通过分析符号出现的频率和位置，AI能推断哪些是动词、哪些是人名，就像拼图一样逐步还原句子结构。【实际影响】这项技术短期内不会改变你的日常生活，但对历史研究是革命性的。它可能让沉睡数千年的米诺斯文明开口说话，补全西方文明起源的拼图。未来你去博物馆看古文字展时，AI可能已经帮学者翻译出了当年贸易账本甚至爱情诗——人类对自己祖先的认知将被彻底刷新。

Every ancient language that has ever been deciphered needed an anchor. Usually that’s a bilingual text, like the Rosetta Stone, or a known relative to compare it to. Linear A, the writing system of the Bronze Age Minoan civilization on the Greek island of Crete, has neither. Linear A is described as a “language isolate” because it has no confirmed link to any known language, living or dead. As such, it has posed a significant challenge for linguists over the past century. Etruscan, a language of Italy that was used before the rise of the Roman Empire, has fared only slightly better. A partial vocabulary has been collected from short funerary inscriptions, but its grammar and deeper meaning still elude linguists.Read full article Comments