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Dumb Cuneiform

dumbcuneiform.com

62 pointstiziano8816 comments

I'm curious as to how the cuneiform is translated. Are they (or have access to) linguists who specialised in old Mesopotamian languages? Or do they use some freely available tools like this: http://www.paleoaliens.com/event/babylonian/ ?

Or in other words - is the translation legit? If I show it to the Sumerian god Gozer, will he laugh at me? I realise the translation is probably phonetic (i.e., written in cuneiform but would sound like English if Gozer read it).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transliteration

They're just mapping the english sounds into cuniform. It's not a translation.

It looks like a transliteration. Seems like they are using Cuneiform syllables to represent English. Quote from the webiste:

"We take the letters from your message and transliterate by syllable, as nearly as we can, into cuneiform."

You could pre-translate, but Gozer would probably still laugh at you because they use Old Persian cuneiform, not Sumerian. You might also risk your message exceeding 140 characters post-translation.

Cuneiform was used to write multiple languages, since it's basically a way to write syllables, so it's a decent choice for a project like this.

You are basically writing English, but using different symbols (like IPA I suppose).

As an archeology nerd, I appreciate this.

However it feels like you're lying when you say "Just tweet or text us", when you actually need to manually type out the message on a field in a Gumroad checkout widget... I think you should add better tech integration, or drop the tweet/ text part.

Their choice of 'Old Persian cuneiform' is also ... weird. I don't know how to phrase it, but seems doubly misleading. The time period they're preferring by that choice is ~500-300 BCE, whereas my appeal of cuneiform is that it's one of the earliest systems of writing, going back as 35 centuries BCE.

I love the idea, I think it would be sweet if you get a dictionary with your cuneiform so you can actually decode it.

Ugh, Old Persian? Lame

They should pay me the big bucks to translate tweets into Akkadian or Sumerian.

Weren't most cuneiform tablets receipts anyways?

Babylonian business cards?

One of their two examples is cat calling? Classy.

What's your age and gender? I'm geniunely curious what kind of person could possibly be "triggered" by this.

Nobody used the word "trigger". It's interesting to me that you're conflating pointing out a potential issue (their sarcastic "classy") with being personally upset ("triggered") - what's going on there? Also, why are age and gender the two attributes you want to learn about them as a result?

Just curious if this is a case of an actual female being offended at an innocuous "bad pickup line," or (what is more likely) a male SJW.

"actual female" "SJW"

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