When the languages of preliterate peoples die, they disappear forever, leaving at best a trace of themselves in placenames that stay the same even after the dominant language changes.
But what about languages that have a written form, but that are no longer spoken?
Experts may still be able to read these languages, but often they don’t know how they were pronounced, and can only guess.
The Voices of Dead Languages Project at Charles University in Prague is reconstructing what a number of ancient languages, including Akkadian, Babylonian and Hittite, sounded like. They are using AI, alongside traditional linguistic knowledge, to figure out similarities between these dead languages and other living languages that are related to them. By comparing different languages that are all related to the dead language, and finding out what pronunciations they have in common, they can start to see patterns that provide insights into the likely pronunciations of the past.
Of course, the research also poses some interesting linguistic-philosophical questions. Like: can a language truly be ‘dead’ when it lives on in other languages – as, for example, much of Latin persists in the Romance languages? When is a language ‘dying’ and when simply going through a normal process of evolutionary change? Is the difference always clearcut or are there many shades of grey?
Food for thought.
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