A UC Santa Cruz professor unearthed the oldest alphabet yet • Hacker News Board

Re: A UC Santa Cruz professor unearthed the oldest alphabet yet

#41

Post by gunian » Fri, Jan 17, 2025, 8:44 PM UTC

CoastalCoder wrote: post #12

gunian wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the LOTR, Eru Ilúvatar created the world with a specific hierarchy. In the Abrahamic religions everything happens for a reason In Buddhism suffering is enlightenment or something like that about some path In the world of the rich kids Leibniz and Darwin it be what it be So if all history is written by a few it is the will of the universe fighting that would be like fighting the very nature of reality itself. This…

There's a certain poetry to the parent comment, but I don't understand what it's meant to convey.

Hierarchy, eugenics, slavery, inequality are all part of the fabric of our reality

History in this reality will always be written by the people at the top of the hierarchy i.e the last two empires to rule the world

Sometimes we dream and see glimpses of a world without slavery, inequality or hierarchy but it is a dream nothing more

Lol shoulda just said that

Re: A UC Santa Cruz professor unearthed the oldest alphabet yet

#42

Post by detourdog » Fri, Jan 17, 2025, 9:12 PM UTC

rastignack wrote: post #22

sandworm101 wrote: post #17

>> I try to keep that in mind when I’m excavating today; scholars of the future are counting on us to leave the best documentation we can. The answer is to stop digging. It is understood that imaging techniques will eventually be good enough that artifacts may soon be studdied without disturbing the surrounding soil, without destroying all that evidence that future generations might be able to use. Of course that mea…

Who knows what will happen in Syria in the next decades. We need to document as much as we can, while we can.

Here is something regarding a 3d scan of a building destroyed by Isis. https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/may/27/isis-palmyra-...

Re: A UC Santa Cruz professor unearthed the oldest alphabet yet

#43

Post by legerdemain » Fri, Jan 17, 2025, 9:13 PM UTC

I almost took an introductory course on archeology with Glenn Schwartz, many years ago, but dropped it after the first class. I remember having very different emotional responses to faculty members as a student. Schwartz struck me as elegant, diffident, blue-blooded, and completely disinterested in teaching a bunch of young morons who were just taking the course as a distribution requirement. I'm glad to see that he and his former students are an influential force in this area of study.

Re: A UC Santa Cruz professor unearthed the oldest alphabet yet

#44

Post by sandworm101 » Fri, Jan 17, 2025, 9:29 PM UTC

mmooss wrote: post #31

sandworm101 wrote: post #17

>> I try to keep that in mind when I’m excavating today; scholars of the future are counting on us to leave the best documentation we can. The answer is to stop digging. It is understood that imaging techniques will eventually be good enough that artifacts may soon be studdied without disturbing the surrounding soil, without destroying all that evidence that future generations might be able to use. Of course that mea…

> It is understood that imaging techniques will eventually be good enough that artifacts may soon be studdied without disturbing the surrounding soil Who understands that? It's very interesting. Is there somewhere in archaeology where it's discussed? Is there a paper or article? It might be interesting for HN's front page.

It is happening today. Chambers inside Egypt's great pyramid were detected in 2016 using muon imaging. It was a slow process but radically less damaging than the alternatives such as drilling test holes. More commonly, ground penetrating radar is regularly used to avoid digging test or exploratory trenches across sites. As resolution increases, fewer and fewer trenches need be dug. Scans are often used years prior to digging as a non-invasive way to confirm the existance of structures in aid of grant proposals. At some point, the scans will be the entire dig.

Re: A UC Santa Cruz professor unearthed the oldest alphabet yet

#45

Post by fuzzfactor » Fri, Jan 17, 2025, 9:31 PM UTC

airstrike wrote: post #23

adrian_b wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article does not provide the slightest clue about why the researchers believe that this is an alphabetic script, taking into account that they say that it does not resemble other known scripts. Usually it is assumed that a script is alphabetic instead of being syllabic when the total number of distinct symbols is small, but this is not foolproof, because there are languages with a relatively small number of disti…

Wait, you're the same person that made the super insightful comment about the origins of life and RNA yesterday... I'm honestly amazed at how you know so much about everything

>the same person that made the super insightful comment about the origins of life and RNA yesterday...

Astute observation.

That's some worthwhile reading.

I would say that some people can make use of natural intelligence better than others can do with the artificial stuff.

Re: A UC Santa Cruz professor unearthed the oldest alphabet yet

#46

Post by airstrike » Fri, Jan 17, 2025, 9:45 PM UTC

kagevf wrote: post #39

adrian_b wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article does not provide the slightest clue about why the researchers believe that this is an alphabetic script, taking into account that they say that it does not resemble other known scripts. Usually it is assumed that a script is alphabetic instead of being syllabic when the total number of distinct symbols is small, but this is not foolproof, because there are languages with a relatively small number of disti…

> there are languages with a relatively small number of distinct syllables, like Japanese Japanese has around 50 syllabic symbols, depending on how you count - include both sets of kana? include more archaic kana? etc What would be a more typical number of syllabic symbols? I tried googling it to get an idea, but couldn't find much useful information. I guess Arabic has 28?

I think they meant syllables specifically, not syllabic symbols. Meanings syllabic symbols might get confused for an alphabet if the language has a sufficiently small set of syllables. See https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/36909

Re: A UC Santa Cruz professor unearthed the oldest alphabet yet

#47

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jan 17, 2025, 10:27 PM UTC

sandworm101 wrote: post #44

mmooss wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is understood that imaging techniques will eventually be good enough that artifacts may soon be studdied without disturbing the surrounding soil Who understands that? It's very interesting. Is there somewhere in archaeology where it's discussed? Is there a paper or article? It might be interesting for HN's front page.

It is happening today. Chambers inside Egypt's great pyramid were detected in 2016 using muon imaging. It was a slow process but radically less damaging than the alternatives such as drilling test holes. More commonly, ground penetrating radar is regularly used to avoid digging test or exploratory trenches across sites. As resolution increases, fewer and fewer trenches need be dug. Scans are often used years prior to…

[deleted]

Re: A UC Santa Cruz professor unearthed the oldest alphabet yet

#48

Post by godelski » Fri, Jan 17, 2025, 10:35 PM UTC

legerdemain wrote: post #43

I almost took an introductory course on archeology with Glenn Schwartz, many years ago, but dropped it after the first class. I remember having very different emotional responses to faculty members as a student. Schwartz struck me as elegant, diffident, blue-blooded, and completely disinterested in teaching a bunch of young morons who were just taking the course as a distribution requirement. I'm glad to see that he…

I always say a professor has (at least) 3 personalities, each of which do not need be similar to one another

  - Teacher
  - Advisor
  - Faculty

I've seen professors be great faculty members where everyone likes them but they are an abusive advisor and terrible teacher. I've seen professors be amazing advisors, terrible teachers, and most faculty members hate them (often happens when lots of department politics and this person is usually highly research focused). I've also seen people be good at all 3 and terrible at all 3. The current chair of my department is the latter and was unanimously voted against for chair, but no one else ran so he won by default lol.

Re: A UC Santa Cruz professor unearthed the oldest alphabet yet

#49

Post by kagevf » Fri, Jan 17, 2025, 10:51 PM UTC

airstrike wrote: post #46

kagevf wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there are languages with a relatively small number of distinct syllables, like Japanese Japanese has around 50 syllabic symbols, depending on how you count - include both sets of kana? include more archaic kana? etc What would be a more typical number of syllabic symbols? I tried googling it to get an idea, but couldn't find much useful information. I guess Arabic has 28?

I think they meant syllables specifically, not syllabic symbols. Meanings syllabic symbols might get confused for an alphabet if the language has a sufficiently small set of syllables. See https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/36909

Yeah, was aware of that possibility; I guess I should have made a point about the disctinction between symbols vs "possible sound combinations" (my words). And even "possible sound combinations" can be further limited to "actually used sound combinations" as mentioned in the answer on that SO link.

So, in terms of "possible sound combinations" I think Japanese would likely be on the lower side given that the number of sounds are also pretty low. Alright, thank you for that reply; the point in the original post I replied to makes more sense to me now.

Re: A UC Santa Cruz professor unearthed the oldest alphabet yet

#50

Post by Ferret7446 » Fri, Jan 17, 2025, 11:06 PM UTC

adrian_b wrote: post #13

gschizas wrote: post #6

As far as I can understand that's not a real alphabet, it's an abjad (consonants only)

This is a modern distinction. Until recently the term "alphabet" was used for any writing system where the symbols correspond approximately with phonemes, regardless whether both consonants and vowels are written as in all alphabets derived from or inspired by the Greek alphabet, or only the consonants are written, like in other writing systems derived from the old Semitic alphabet, without passing through the Greek…

And we live in the modern world, so we should use the modern definitions?

For reference, "abjad" was introduced in 1990, so it's 35 years old. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect people to start using 35 year old terms to accurately describe academic subjects.