Crowdsourcing decipherment of old texts

Check this out. Lots of our readers probably know about Proto-Elamite ... written about 5,000 years ago and basic undeciphered. Now they're putting material online to get crowdsourcing.

That is cool. And the pics are nice too.

Emmett Bennett and Linear B

I found out yesterday that Emmett Bennett passed away two weeks ago here in Madison. He was an emeritus professor of Classics, where he taught for almost 30 years. As the NYT obit linked above describes, he played a key role in deciphering the early Greek texts in the script called Linear B, one of the amazing stories of philology. Unfortunately, I don't know the story well enough to tell any more than it's told in the obit or the sketch here. (I'll dig a little to see if I can find out more.)

You can see some of his documents here, including tables of symbols he worked out. You may think that a Classics prof working on ancient clay tablets wouldn't be too cutting edge, but he was using punch cards back in the 1940s, held a patent (it looks like), and worked to figure out ancient bookkeeping.

For now, it's another reminder of the Wisconsin tradition, not only in ancient languages but also in the use of new technologies and the value of thinking broadly.

Image from here, the first page of a piece in the American Journal of Archeology from 1950.

Indus script in the news ...

Anybody know how much is new in this claim of the decipherment of the Indus (Harappan) script?

Asko Parpola (University of Helsinki) has long been identified with efforts to connect this ancient but undeciphered script with Dravidian. Here, he declares that “an opening to the secrets of the Indus script has been achieved."

This is one of those old puzzles that have often been claimed to have been solved, and curious minds want to know ...

Merit Badges

Check out the Onion's* latest statshot (here). 11% are working on that philology badge!!!

* America's Finest News Source, of course

Tattúínárdœla saga: Outgeek THIS

Recently, I posted something on graffiti at the University of Chicago in a variety of often-obscure languages (here), suggesting that our Wisconsin students needed to fly the geek flag here. In response to the post, Janet S. commented:

UChicago outgeeks all rivals. Wisconsin is not even on UChicago's radar of geekery.

On being asked about the topic, various colleagues and students report a range of obscure graffiti around campus. (Our contributor Joe got nervous that when he called attention to that post that some students might now be inspired to produce new graffiti — probably in Gothic, Runic and Old High German, knowing what he's teaching these days. Not the intent, obviously.)

Just as I was starting to worry that Janet S. might be closer to right than I'm able to concede, people told me about this, which is aptly captured by the blog's title and subtitle:

Tattúínárdœla saga
Yes, this is Star Wars in Old Norse.

A grad student from Wisconsin — hear me now, believe me later — is translating Star Wars into saga form and writing it in Old Norse, even providing an English translation. Reports are that the Old Norse is very good.

I can only stare in slack-jawed wonder at this stunning exercise. Thank you, Jackson Crawford, thank you for rescuing Wisconsin's geek cred. Your work clearly pushes the geekvelope, redlines the geekometer and opens whole new vistas in geekmacation. Above all, it's thrown down a Star Wars gauntlet to other schools and other language heads. And, yes, the image is from an ad and you can buy them, here. (And to the missus, my birthday is coming up.)

And here's hoping that things in present-day Iceland settle down quickly. For the pressing language angle on the volcanic eruption, see this on the Log.

Dead langauge graffitti: U of Chicago students trying to outgeek Wisconsin?

This is cool. A student at Chicago has done a book on local graffiti in the Regenstein Library:

There are still plenty of nerds at the University of Chicago. Dombrowski has come across Reg graffiti written in Arabic ("a lot of it, actually"), Chinese ("a reasonable amount"), German, Turkish, Greek, Russian and Serbian. But that's not the nerdy part, of course. The nerdy part is: the graffiti she has found scrawled in dead languages; the graffiti that use the letters of multiple dead languages; and the graffiti scrawled in hieroglyphics. As with every piece of graffiti she locates, she took a picture of the hieroglyphic graffiti. Then she brought it to an Egyptologist at the university for translation.

Translation: "We did it twice in the morning."

Wisconsin is a modest state — if fish fry and cheeseheads are big things, it's hard to have a big attitude. But come on, Madison students, the gauntlet has been thrown down! We need collections of Madison's most arcane scribblings. How much Old Church Slavonic is there in Memorial? I know there's German graffiti all around. There MUST be Gothic. (Legend has it that student used to sing the school song in Gothic.) Who can document Mayan hieroglyphs?

Image from here. It's not the best we have to offer.