How to Decipher an Ancient Script - Decipherment Club #1

This ancient message took centuries to crack. We could always read this message. We still have no clue how to read this message. Why? What if history were hiding something from you? Would you want to know about it? Well, if you stick with me a few minutes, we’ll start getting you to think like a decipherer. Then you can join the club and hold a flickering lamp up to an old wall and with your perceptive gaze, nod slowly in enlightened appreciation of the symbols. I’ll bring the symbols and techniques. You’re buying the hat and the lamp, though. If you stay for this series, we’ll tell tales of decipherment that take us from the sands of Egypt through the Central American jungle to the middle of the Pacific. You’ll work alongside history’s great decoders and some crackpots in their relentless attempts to recover voices long vanished. We already saw what decipherment is not like: cryptography or cryptanalysis. But what is it yes like? Decipherment is something we do with a message we can’t read. That was a bit vague. Let’s go again. Decipherment is an operation performed on an unknown message, and it requires two components. First, a script, a writing system. These visual, etched, inked, carved, whatevered symbols that we’re eager to read, mocking us silently across the ages, are called glyphs. The meaningful units we’re trying to identify among these glyphs are called graphemes. The other thing we need is a language. If there’s no language underlying the symbols at all, there’s no linguistic message to decipher. Some claim this is true of the Indus Scripts or the Tartaria tablets. Before this video, you talked about decipherment the way people normally do: deciphering symbols to dig up the hidden ancient message inside of them. We built on that by admitting that we have to identify the message’s writing system and language to unearth its meaning. That’s our first understanding of decipherment. Let’s call it model #1. But if you’re joining our secret club, you have to change the way you look at decipherment. Decipherment binds certain language bits to certain writing bits, and sees if they coordinate, if the message reads naturally with that writing system and that language. Model #1… I really don’t like these names. Let’s see, this one has layers or kind of hidden guts? And this one is matching pieces? Hidden guts is more romantic, more oracular. But what happens when some hack decipherer comes along and challenges your reading? Hidden guts tells you to peer through the graphemic haze like a kind of seer-sage. Matching pieces invites you to compare texts and find a best fit. It even invites predictions when we find texts and more texts in the language. It’s a fresh starting point for thinking about how to decipher. But what can you decipher? What can’t you decipher? That's actually a great question for next time.

Channel: NativLang

Views: 107,826

Keywords: decipherment, decipher, deciphering, undeciphered, undeciphered languages, undeciphered scripts, ancient texts, writing systems, ancient scripts, scripts, writing, linguistics, language

Id: 8q0kQZEOTUo

Length: 3min 10sec (190 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 16 2015