"Cuneiform" is a medium, sort of like "paper" if that included the tool you use to make the marks.
Writing systems using cuneiform include Sumerian, Akkadian, Hittite, Hurrian, Ugaritic, Old Persian...
The article states that "Properly written out, these syllables join up into a flowing calligraphy that your average, educated Babylonian would be able to read at a glance", so presumably they're thinking of Akkadian. Why not say so?
(Does it make a difference? Consider that our first attempt to read the name of Gilgamesh came out as "Izdubar".)
Back in the days when a wide variety of removable digital media flourished (floppy disks, various flavors of tapes, ZIP and JAZ drives, Syquest and Bernoulli cartridges, mag-op WORM, etc) a friend and I joked about how we needed a "Cuneiform drive" to write to and bake sheets of clay because, compared to all the storage formats we were using, Cuneiform actually held up over time.
Good stuff, but this has triggered my pet peeve! The title should be:
How to Write in Cuneiform, the Oldest Known Writing System in the World
The added word being: KNOWN
You can argue that, "well, obviously!" but correctness and exactness are what makes science, history, journalism, etc good, and allowing incorrectness like this is a step backwards.
I read a history book when I was a teenager (can't remember which one, unfortunately), and the author wrote a preface that said something along the lines of "Everything in this book is based on the published information I could discover during my research period of April to September 1999. I have chosen to write in absolutes--stating many things as certain and clear--but in reality there is still much we do not know about this time period. No history author should say their writing is fact and any good historian will make it clear that their work is composed of assumptions layered on assumptions. Please read these works with this in mind."
If you don't have a preface like that, you should add "known" to your title/sentence! I will argue with someone all day over this! I will die on this hill!
The "How to Write" part seems to be entirely in video form, and the link seems to be a thin blog post introducing it, so it would be good to have a `[video]` tag in the title here.
6 years to master a syllabic alphabet seems like a stretch...They seem to be crossing learning the language and learning the writing system.
I studied Greek and Hebrew in college, Latin in high school. In each the very first night's homework was to memorize the characters and their pronunciation.
Multiple ANE cultures used cuneiform (Ugaritic, Akkadian, Sumerian, Hittite, and so on). The time to master each depends on your native language, the target language, and exposure to similar languages. The writing system is not the hard part.
it's already in the Training Data but as you Can Imagine a Lot of hallucinations Going on. in fact you can try it out with the examples given on the video. It has gotten significantly better
Dr. Irving Finkel is an interesting guy. I ran across him shortly after I discovered the Lewis chessmen [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_chessmen], and I found out that Dr. Finkel had loaned his personal set to the Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone filmmakers for Harry and Ron to play Wizard's Chess with. I have since purchased my own Lewis Chessmen reproduction, and it is absolutely beautiful!
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[ 6.2 ms ] story [ 40.7 ms ] threadWriting systems using cuneiform include Sumerian, Akkadian, Hittite, Hurrian, Ugaritic, Old Persian...
The article states that "Properly written out, these syllables join up into a flowing calligraphy that your average, educated Babylonian would be able to read at a glance", so presumably they're thinking of Akkadian. Why not say so?
(Does it make a difference? Consider that our first attempt to read the name of Gilgamesh came out as "Izdubar".)
I think they have that mixed up with hiragana and katakana. Kanji are Chinese characters.
You can argue that, "well, obviously!" but correctness and exactness are what makes science, history, journalism, etc good, and allowing incorrectness like this is a step backwards.
I read a history book when I was a teenager (can't remember which one, unfortunately), and the author wrote a preface that said something along the lines of "Everything in this book is based on the published information I could discover during my research period of April to September 1999. I have chosen to write in absolutes--stating many things as certain and clear--but in reality there is still much we do not know about this time period. No history author should say their writing is fact and any good historian will make it clear that their work is composed of assumptions layered on assumptions. Please read these works with this in mind."
If you don't have a preface like that, you should add "known" to your title/sentence! I will argue with someone all day over this! I will die on this hill!
Has anyone considered that possibility?
I highly recommend watching his lectures and British museum feature on YouTube if you’re interested in the ancient world.
I studied Greek and Hebrew in college, Latin in high school. In each the very first night's homework was to memorize the characters and their pronunciation.
Multiple ANE cultures used cuneiform (Ugaritic, Akkadian, Sumerian, Hittite, and so on). The time to master each depends on your native language, the target language, and exposure to similar languages. The writing system is not the hard part.
Now all we need is LLM support for translation. Is there enough cuneiform content available for training?
[1] https://www.hethport.uni-wuerzburg.de/cuneifont/
Some discussion on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44280168