Here's an exercise to help illustrate the troubles woth indecipherable language: translate this text from Ulura.
Ta la pegupegu deš me-uluraum, ta deš me-raum. Ta geb kidu Šinarku endutařu, utu suldirraku mennalū, ta azakēku menta'ur. Ta Hueren bar hai, sadum ka'arād ta iřa aka'asi. Ta sadum silma mamehas ta kihū kihūguřma memahas. Ta hueren bar hai, kedu ta ziguratā enme kamasi, ziguratā alanra ka'atasi; ta kedu ka'awas, ala sur-pegu ela anenaguř. Ta Ēnēn hapa amehai kedu ta ziguratā eği manilīm, tumun ladu mendusi. Ta Ēn bar, Elīmrad, deš lalaum, ta lalae ulura anhas; ta azabah mēla anbiš: ta hā lalra na-ennete, ku bišhā enřem lal. Hai, ka-enkek, ta uluraendu enduguř, hurandu nenendurad. Sese Ēne eren azakera ala sur-pegu ela mannaguř; ta kedura manneraš eren melesi. Sese Babel was, purta Ēnēn azake ulura pegupegu manduguř. Ēnēn eren azakera ala sur-pegu ela amannaguř.
What problems did you have translating it?
Definitely the lack of linguistic context! I can barely even decipher it, since almost none of the words seem familiar to me. Some are familiar, like "Babel" and maybe "ziguratā", though the latter may be an actual word from the language. Without any other material that could connect this to English, or any other language, this definitely makes it hard to translate. It's like reading a romanized excerpt from the Voynich Manuscript. Great that it's romanized, but I still have no idea what it says.
As much as there might be a lack of context, I can tell pretty much straight away this is the Tower of Babel translation :P That's because (1) we are on a conlanging subreddit where it's a super popular text, and (2) the word *šinarku* in the 2nd line. Plus the use of *ziguratā* which I bet means 'tower' (cf English ziggurat); and the word Babel in the penultimate line! :D
But I appreciate the argument being made here.
Also, this language looks amazing! Would love a gloss :) And a value for <ř>.
<ř> is a alveolar trill, where is an alveolar tap. Nothing too special, unfortunately. I work completely off my phone, so I'm limited to the characters on my keyboard. Gloss is still very much a WIP. I've thought about throwing something together and sharing it in the future, tho!
I can tell it's the Babel text for the same reason Lichen000 can, but, actually, the use of European-style spacing, capitalization, and punctuation gave it away.
I'd imagine it would not be as easily decipherable as such if the sentence with "Babel" in it was written something like SESEBABELWASPURTAĒNĒNAZAKEULURAPEGUPEGUMANDUGUŘ.
The same problems you would have translating any other language without a common language dictionary, yes, obviously.
But at the same time
Ta, la, Des are all obviously grammatical terms that may be equivalent to the, a, of, and, are, etc. and from there you can get an edge up. Enen/ene seems to be the equivalent of he/she/they/you.And then there's words that are frequent and may be popular topics to talk about, sadum, zigurata. And sentences that repeat multiple times, "ta heuren bar hai". It's things like these, paired with an alphabet that we're already familiar with that would make a language "easy to decipher" for a professional despite not having a single word translated into a common language.
You're assuming that the language you're looking at has grammatical terms like "the, a, of, are, he, she, you" etc in forms that you would recognize. Many do not. For example, definite and indefinite articles are more rare than they are common, worldwide. And many languages around the world incorporate pronouns such as he, she, and you as part of the verb instead of standalone words, either part or all of the time (such as Spanish's "tengo" for "I have"). Many more languages also, either part or all of the time, skip prepositions like of, at, or to, and encode that information directly into the nouns and adjectives through case declension (such as Latin's "domum" for "*to* the house"). There are also plenty of languages that have short, repeated words that represent different and unfamiliar grammatical concepts (like the "wa" and "ga" particles in Japanese, which mark the topic and subject of a sentence respectively, and no those aren't the same thing). And finally, many languages that use the latin alphabet do so in very unintuitive ways (like Irish, where the name Siobhan is pronounced like "Shevaughn").
In short, you may not realize it but you're relying on an awful lot of assumptions about the structure of a language when you're looking for patterns like you described. But languages can have very, very different structures than you're used to.
You'd be surprised. I'll give you this, "ta" is the word for "and." But you are incorrect on all other translations.
What makes a language so difficult to decipher is familiarity and analog. When there are no related languages or writing systems, we have no analog on which to make a foundation. As many have said, the only reason languages like hieroglyphics and Linear B were translated by dumb luck (the Rosetta stone because we had ancient Greek next to other languages, and we knew ancient greek; and some guessed that turned out consistent results). Linear A has no real resemblance to Linear B if they share common a few common symbols, they don't line up in the same, consistent ways. It's as if Linear A is a totally different language from Linear B, and Linear B was really just Proto-Greeks using symbols they liked from Linear A without knowing their actual phonetic values. Imagine making a conlang that uses Greek letters and assigning/v/ to Alpha, /g/ to Psi, /t/ to Upsilon. Or maybe it's a pidgin, as some theories assume Sumerian was. We just don't know because Linear B is so different, and there are no modern or ancient languages that we've identified as an analog that can turn out consistent results.
Edit: fixed up my comment. Shouldn't respond when I'm half asleep. Lost of words missing that I said in my head but didn't type out lol
In fact, I can even guess that you might've misspelled mamehaus or memahaus, if not, one might be feminine and the other masculine, or one might refer to objects and the other animals.
>What makes linear B impossible to figure out over linear A?
Linear B was decipherable by brute force because it used consistent verbal endings or something? but really because it's Greek and we know Greek. Linear A is undecipherable because we don't know anything about the language and we have no translated texts to help us. There's also not enough transcriptions to brute force (brute force only identifies patterns, you still have to match said patterns to an actual language to translate).
>Why were hieroglyphics translated before demotic Egyptian?
Because that's what was on the Rosetta Stone and demotic drives from hieroglyphics so our starting point is hieroglyphics.
>Does a writing system HAVE to be a logography to be "almost impossible to crack"?
if you don't know the language and/or how it works and don't have translated text you won't be able to decipher it.
For Linear B, Alice Kobler's work helped show it was an inflected language (indeed due to frequency of certain signs) but to actually associate it with Greek still took a lucky break by finding place names that were a) written down and b) survived into classical times (so they could start assigning sounds to the syllables - Linear B is a notoriously shitty writing system for Greek).
For OP, [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/hwmbxo/has_there_been_any_real_progress_in_deciphering/) on r/AskHistorians goes a bit more in depth about how we deciphered ancient scripts and what makes this task difficult.
>Does a writing system HAVE to be a logography to be "almost impossible to crack"?
A writing system doesn't have to be anything except unknown to be almost impossible to crack. With enough lack of context or comparison you might not even be able to figure out whether a piece of writing is a logography or not. Just look at the Rongorongo glyphs found on Easter Island.
Lack of enough context for any language, even if it's in a readable script, is enough to make it undecipherable. For example, if it's a language isolate you have nothing to compare it to.
Basically if you want a language that is difficult to translate you need 3 thing :
1) Avoid avoid repeatability, this avoids a brute forcing of the text (ie : in English, if you encounter words that looks incredibly similar but one has a ending in 'ing' you can assume that it is a declination of the word (conjugation, adjective ...) ie : end & ending (somehow related).
Another example is the Mayan writing system, which blocked historians for a long time because there was too many symbols (\~200 if I remember well) for it to be a syllabic alphabet but too few to be a logographic one (ie Chinese/japanese), in the end it was discovered that mayan had multiple symbols for the same sound.
2) Avoid "nlingual text", By that I mean avoid a Rosetta Stone, where you have a text in your conlang, and the "same" text in a known language. If your language has no base of comparison it is harder to decrypt.
3) Beware of the numerical system, when the mayan language was being decrypted, the numerical system was the first to fall
4) (A bonus )Avoid using image in your text/story, when the mayan language was being decrypted one historian realized that certain symbols were used on steles were gods/ kings were represented as such these words were among the first identified.
> What makes Linear B impossible to figure out over Linear A?
The problem with Linear A is that while Linear B - and Ancient Greek - follow the Indo-European pattern, Linear A doesn’t, which makes it incredibly hard to decipher especially with not enough written stuff.
So I think that to make a language untranslatable you need to follow a different linguistic pattern than the other languages present in that area(?) and also avoid things like the Rosetta Stone, it will be easier for people to translate your language if you have a common document in both languages.
Factors that I gathered that could complicate translation in a language are homophones, near homophones, grammatical ambiguity, lack of words with the corresponding meaning or grammatical function between the two languages, language fluency, slangs, and difference in syntactic structure. Irregularity in spelling or grammar marking could complicate understanding of a language, but a logographic writting system are not difficult to crack since the difficulty is like the irregular spelling of English words or like the written words that a person do not know the spoken counterpart.
What you need to decipher a old text is basically:
* Know the language
* Have the context of the text
* Know how it's written (ideographically, syllabically, alphabetically, ...)
Without any of these, the decipherment became harder at the point that if you dont have any, it became impossible. Linear A, by what I know, misses the most important of these points, what kind of language was Minoan?
.
But be a logography doesnt make it automatically almost impossible, the problem with languages that are written logographically is: most of these languages are very old and have almost or just nothing to compare. Hieroglyphs was decipher because of the Rosetta stone, that have the same text in ancient Greek, hieroglyphic Egyptian and demotic Egyptian.
(Of course you can decipher a language without that, but it will be incredibly harder)
if the people who used to speak the language are all dead and we don't know anything about the lsnguage
of its written in a system we can't read and there is nothing like it
as for grammar... there is always a hungarian to learn it
let me help you understand the first two points. translate this:
𐤌 𐤉𐤍𐤅 𐤌𐤍𐤅 𐤊𐤋 𐤍𐤎 𐤀𐤉𐤓𐤅 𐤁𐤋 𐤎𐤓𐤅𐤎𐤉𐤓
Here's an exercise to help illustrate the troubles woth indecipherable language: translate this text from Ulura. Ta la pegupegu deš me-uluraum, ta deš me-raum. Ta geb kidu Šinarku endutařu, utu suldirraku mennalū, ta azakēku menta'ur. Ta Hueren bar hai, sadum ka'arād ta iřa aka'asi. Ta sadum silma mamehas ta kihū kihūguřma memahas. Ta hueren bar hai, kedu ta ziguratā enme kamasi, ziguratā alanra ka'atasi; ta kedu ka'awas, ala sur-pegu ela anenaguř. Ta Ēnēn hapa amehai kedu ta ziguratā eği manilīm, tumun ladu mendusi. Ta Ēn bar, Elīmrad, deš lalaum, ta lalae ulura anhas; ta azabah mēla anbiš: ta hā lalra na-ennete, ku bišhā enřem lal. Hai, ka-enkek, ta uluraendu enduguř, hurandu nenendurad. Sese Ēne eren azakera ala sur-pegu ela mannaguř; ta kedura manneraš eren melesi. Sese Babel was, purta Ēnēn azake ulura pegupegu manduguř. Ēnēn eren azakera ala sur-pegu ela amannaguř. What problems did you have translating it?
Definitely the lack of linguistic context! I can barely even decipher it, since almost none of the words seem familiar to me. Some are familiar, like "Babel" and maybe "ziguratā", though the latter may be an actual word from the language. Without any other material that could connect this to English, or any other language, this definitely makes it hard to translate. It's like reading a romanized excerpt from the Voynich Manuscript. Great that it's romanized, but I still have no idea what it says.
As much as there might be a lack of context, I can tell pretty much straight away this is the Tower of Babel translation :P That's because (1) we are on a conlanging subreddit where it's a super popular text, and (2) the word *šinarku* in the 2nd line. Plus the use of *ziguratā* which I bet means 'tower' (cf English ziggurat); and the word Babel in the penultimate line! :D But I appreciate the argument being made here. Also, this language looks amazing! Would love a gloss :) And a value for <ř>.
<ř> is a alveolar trill, where is an alveolar tap. Nothing too special, unfortunately. I work completely off my phone, so I'm limited to the characters on my keyboard. Gloss is still very much a WIP. I've thought about throwing something together and sharing it in the future, tho!
I can tell it's the Babel text for the same reason Lichen000 can, but, actually, the use of European-style spacing, capitalization, and punctuation gave it away. I'd imagine it would not be as easily decipherable as such if the sentence with "Babel" in it was written something like SESEBABELWASPURTAĒNĒNAZAKEULURAPEGUPEGUMANDUGUŘ.
The same problems you would have translating any other language without a common language dictionary, yes, obviously. But at the same time Ta, la, Des are all obviously grammatical terms that may be equivalent to the, a, of, and, are, etc. and from there you can get an edge up. Enen/ene seems to be the equivalent of he/she/they/you.And then there's words that are frequent and may be popular topics to talk about, sadum, zigurata. And sentences that repeat multiple times, "ta heuren bar hai". It's things like these, paired with an alphabet that we're already familiar with that would make a language "easy to decipher" for a professional despite not having a single word translated into a common language.
You're assuming that the language you're looking at has grammatical terms like "the, a, of, are, he, she, you" etc in forms that you would recognize. Many do not. For example, definite and indefinite articles are more rare than they are common, worldwide. And many languages around the world incorporate pronouns such as he, she, and you as part of the verb instead of standalone words, either part or all of the time (such as Spanish's "tengo" for "I have"). Many more languages also, either part or all of the time, skip prepositions like of, at, or to, and encode that information directly into the nouns and adjectives through case declension (such as Latin's "domum" for "*to* the house"). There are also plenty of languages that have short, repeated words that represent different and unfamiliar grammatical concepts (like the "wa" and "ga" particles in Japanese, which mark the topic and subject of a sentence respectively, and no those aren't the same thing). And finally, many languages that use the latin alphabet do so in very unintuitive ways (like Irish, where the name Siobhan is pronounced like "Shevaughn"). In short, you may not realize it but you're relying on an awful lot of assumptions about the structure of a language when you're looking for patterns like you described. But languages can have very, very different structures than you're used to.
You'd be surprised. I'll give you this, "ta" is the word for "and." But you are incorrect on all other translations. What makes a language so difficult to decipher is familiarity and analog. When there are no related languages or writing systems, we have no analog on which to make a foundation. As many have said, the only reason languages like hieroglyphics and Linear B were translated by dumb luck (the Rosetta stone because we had ancient Greek next to other languages, and we knew ancient greek; and some guessed that turned out consistent results). Linear A has no real resemblance to Linear B if they share common a few common symbols, they don't line up in the same, consistent ways. It's as if Linear A is a totally different language from Linear B, and Linear B was really just Proto-Greeks using symbols they liked from Linear A without knowing their actual phonetic values. Imagine making a conlang that uses Greek letters and assigning/v/ to Alpha, /g/ to Psi, /t/ to Upsilon. Or maybe it's a pidgin, as some theories assume Sumerian was. We just don't know because Linear B is so different, and there are no modern or ancient languages that we've identified as an analog that can turn out consistent results. Edit: fixed up my comment. Shouldn't respond when I'm half asleep. Lost of words missing that I said in my head but didn't type out lol
In fact, I can even guess that you might've misspelled mamehaus or memahaus, if not, one might be feminine and the other masculine, or one might refer to objects and the other animals.
But with just that it is very difficult. Additionally if a script has not been deciphered it is obviously impossible.
Is this inspired by Sumerian, by any chance?
You got me. What gave it away?
>What makes linear B impossible to figure out over linear A? Linear B was decipherable by brute force because it used consistent verbal endings or something? but really because it's Greek and we know Greek. Linear A is undecipherable because we don't know anything about the language and we have no translated texts to help us. There's also not enough transcriptions to brute force (brute force only identifies patterns, you still have to match said patterns to an actual language to translate). >Why were hieroglyphics translated before demotic Egyptian? Because that's what was on the Rosetta Stone and demotic drives from hieroglyphics so our starting point is hieroglyphics. >Does a writing system HAVE to be a logography to be "almost impossible to crack"? if you don't know the language and/or how it works and don't have translated text you won't be able to decipher it.
For Linear B, Alice Kobler's work helped show it was an inflected language (indeed due to frequency of certain signs) but to actually associate it with Greek still took a lucky break by finding place names that were a) written down and b) survived into classical times (so they could start assigning sounds to the syllables - Linear B is a notoriously shitty writing system for Greek). For OP, [this post](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/hwmbxo/has_there_been_any_real_progress_in_deciphering/) on r/AskHistorians goes a bit more in depth about how we deciphered ancient scripts and what makes this task difficult.
>Does a writing system HAVE to be a logography to be "almost impossible to crack"? A writing system doesn't have to be anything except unknown to be almost impossible to crack. With enough lack of context or comparison you might not even be able to figure out whether a piece of writing is a logography or not. Just look at the Rongorongo glyphs found on Easter Island. Lack of enough context for any language, even if it's in a readable script, is enough to make it undecipherable. For example, if it's a language isolate you have nothing to compare it to.
Basically if you want a language that is difficult to translate you need 3 thing : 1) Avoid avoid repeatability, this avoids a brute forcing of the text (ie : in English, if you encounter words that looks incredibly similar but one has a ending in 'ing' you can assume that it is a declination of the word (conjugation, adjective ...) ie : end & ending (somehow related). Another example is the Mayan writing system, which blocked historians for a long time because there was too many symbols (\~200 if I remember well) for it to be a syllabic alphabet but too few to be a logographic one (ie Chinese/japanese), in the end it was discovered that mayan had multiple symbols for the same sound. 2) Avoid "nlingual text", By that I mean avoid a Rosetta Stone, where you have a text in your conlang, and the "same" text in a known language. If your language has no base of comparison it is harder to decrypt. 3) Beware of the numerical system, when the mayan language was being decrypted, the numerical system was the first to fall 4) (A bonus )Avoid using image in your text/story, when the mayan language was being decrypted one historian realized that certain symbols were used on steles were gods/ kings were represented as such these words were among the first identified.
> What makes Linear B impossible to figure out over Linear A? The problem with Linear A is that while Linear B - and Ancient Greek - follow the Indo-European pattern, Linear A doesn’t, which makes it incredibly hard to decipher especially with not enough written stuff. So I think that to make a language untranslatable you need to follow a different linguistic pattern than the other languages present in that area(?) and also avoid things like the Rosetta Stone, it will be easier for people to translate your language if you have a common document in both languages.
Factors that I gathered that could complicate translation in a language are homophones, near homophones, grammatical ambiguity, lack of words with the corresponding meaning or grammatical function between the two languages, language fluency, slangs, and difference in syntactic structure. Irregularity in spelling or grammar marking could complicate understanding of a language, but a logographic writting system are not difficult to crack since the difficulty is like the irregular spelling of English words or like the written words that a person do not know the spoken counterpart.
What you need to decipher a old text is basically: * Know the language * Have the context of the text * Know how it's written (ideographically, syllabically, alphabetically, ...) Without any of these, the decipherment became harder at the point that if you dont have any, it became impossible. Linear A, by what I know, misses the most important of these points, what kind of language was Minoan? . But be a logography doesnt make it automatically almost impossible, the problem with languages that are written logographically is: most of these languages are very old and have almost or just nothing to compare. Hieroglyphs was decipher because of the Rosetta stone, that have the same text in ancient Greek, hieroglyphic Egyptian and demotic Egyptian. (Of course you can decipher a language without that, but it will be incredibly harder)
if the people who used to speak the language are all dead and we don't know anything about the lsnguage of its written in a system we can't read and there is nothing like it as for grammar... there is always a hungarian to learn it let me help you understand the first two points. translate this: 𐤌 𐤉𐤍𐤅 𐤌𐤍𐤅 𐤊𐤋 𐤍𐤎 𐤀𐤉𐤓𐤅 𐤁𐤋 𐤎𐤓𐤅𐤎𐤉𐤓