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The computer program relies on a few basic assumptions in order to make
intuitive guesses about the language's structure. Most importantly, the lost
language has to be closely related to a known, deciphered language, which in
the case of Ugaritic is Hebrew. Second, the alphabets of the two languages
need to share some consistent correlations between the individual letters or
symbols. There should also be recognizable cognates of words between the two
languages, and words that have prefixes or suffixes in one language (like
verbs that end in "-ing" or "-ed" in English) should show the same features
in the other language.
That might seem like a lot of information for the program to require, but
even all that is no guarantee of decipherment. After Ugaritic was first
discovered in 1929, it remained untranslatable for years. It finally
revealed some of its secrets to German cryptographer Hans Bauer, who was
only able to make substantial headway when he guessed the drawing of an ax
was next to the Ugaritic word for "ax." Even this breakthrough wasn't a
complete success, because although Bauer's guess was correct he matched the
wrong sounds and letters together, resulting in a mistranslation.
So, the question for the computer program wasn't just how quickly it could
translate Ugaritic compared to its human counterparts; there's also whether
it could avoid the mistakes and pitfalls that had slowed down the initial
decipherment. The program worked by looking for correlations and
correspondences at the various levels of languages described above -
individual sounds and letters, different segments of the word, and cognates
between languages. It then mapped the similarities between Hebrew and
Ugaritic, starting with the sounds and then bringing in the other aspects to
figure out the most probable matches. By cross-referencing these different
parts of language and repeating the process hundreds of thousands of times,
the program arrives at a fully deciphered Ugaritic.
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