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Recent research suggests that most languages that have ever existed are no longer spoken. Dozens of these dead languages are also considered to be lost, or “undeciphered”—that is, we don’t know enough about their grammar or vocabulary to be able to actually understand their texts. Lost languages are more than a mere academic curiosity; without them, we miss an entire body of knowledge about the people who spoke them.
However, researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) recently made a major development in this area: a new system that has been shown to be able to automatically decipher a lost language, without needing advanced knowledge of its relation to other languages. They also showed that their system can itself determine relationships between languages, and they used it to prove recent scholarship suggesting that the language of Iberian is not actually related to Basque. The team’s ultimate goal is for the system to be able to decipher lost languages that have puzzled linguists for decades, using just a few thousand words.
Led by MIT Professor Regina Barzilay, the system relies on several principles grounded in insights from historical linguistics, such as the fact that languages generally only evolve in certain predictable ways. The researchers developed a decipherment algorithm, which can segment words in an ancient language and map them to counterparts in a related language.
With the new system, the relationship between languages is inferred by the algorithm. This question is one of the biggest challenges in decipherment. For Iberian, the scholars still cannot agree on the related language: Some argue for Basque, while others refute this hypothesis and claim that Iberian doesn’t relate to any known language.
The proposed algorithm can assess the proximity between two languages; in fact, when tested on known languages, it can even accurately identify language families. The team applied their algorithm to Iberian considering Basque, as well as some less-likely candidates. While Basque and Latin were closer to Iberian than other languages, they were still too different to be considered related.
In future work, the team hopes to expand their work beyond the act of connecting texts to related words in a known language—an approach referred to as “cognate-based decipherment.” This paradigm assumes that such a known language exists, but the example of Iberian shows that this is not always the case. The team’s new approach would involve identifying semantic meaning of the words, even if they don’t know how to read them.
1. According to the author, the efforts to understand dead language are encouraged by ______.
A) explorative spirit of the researchers
B) the curiosity to learn a new language
C) the pursuit for a whole body of knowledge
D) the desire to understand human civilization
2. The word “decipher” (Line 3, Paragraph 2) is closest in meaning to ______.
A) determine
B) describe
C) decode
D) declare
3. What can we learn about the new system?
A) It deciphered languages unintelligible to us for years.
B) It is based upon the knowledge of historic linguistics.
C) It can predict the evolution course of languages.
D) It has difficulty distinguishing related languages.
4. In the fifth paragraph, the author mentions the languages of Iberian and Basque to ______.
A) exemplify the breakthrough of the new algorithm
B) illustrate detailed process of language deciphering
C) overthrow the wrong concepts held for decades
D) popularize some basic knowledge of linguistics
5. The author ends his introduction to the study with ______.
A) background knowledge in its field
B) information on its future directions
C) emphasis on its significance
D) illustration of its limitations