Ancient languages reconstructed by computer program

By Rebecca Morelle Science reporter, BBC World Service

Unlike this Assyrian script, few ancient languages have a written record, which makes reconstructing them extremely difficult

A new tool has been developed that can reconstruct long-dead languages.

Researchers have created software that can rebuild protolanguages - the ancient tongues from which our modern languages evolved.
To test the system, the team took 637 languages currently spoken in Asia and the Pacific and recreated the early language from which they descended.
The work is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
Currently language reconstructions are carried out by linguists - but the process is slow and labour-intensive.
Dan Klein, an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said: "It's very time consuming for humans to look at all the data. There are thousands of languages in the world, with thousands of words each, not to mention all of those languages' ancestors.
"It would take hundreds of lifetimes to pore over all those languages, cross-referencing all the different changes that happened across such an expanse of space - and of time. But this is where computers shine."

Rosetta stone

Languages change gradually over time.
Over thousands of years, tiny variations in the way that we produce sounds have meant that early languages have morphed into many different descendents.
Dr Klein explains: "These sound changes are almost always regular, with similar words changing in similar ways, so patterns are left that a human or a computer can find.
"The trick is to identify these patterns of change and then to 'reverse' them, basically evolving words backwards in time."
The scientists demonstrated their system by looking at a group of Austronesian languages that are currently spoken in southeast Asia, parts of continental Asia and the Pacific.
From a database of 142,000 words, the system was able to recreate the early language from which these modern tongues derived. The scientists believe it would have been spoken about 7,000 years ago.
They then compared the computer's findings to those of linguists, finding that 85% of the early words that the software presented were within one "character" - or sound - of the words that the language experts had identified.
But while the computerised method was much faster, the scientists said it would not put the experts out of a job.
The software can churn through large amounts of data quickly, but it does not bring the same degree of accuracy as a linguist's expertise.
Dr Klein said: "Our system still has shortcomings. For example, it can't handle morphological changes or re-duplications - how a word like 'cat' becomes 'kitty-cat'.
"At a much deeper level, our system doesn't explain why or how certain changes happened, only that they probably did happen."
While researchers are able to reconstruct languages that date back thousands of years, there is still a question mark over whether it would ever be possible to go even further back to recreate the very first protolanguage from which all others evolved, or whether such a language even exists.

"Los poemas perdidos de Kipling"

"Entre unos documentos familiares, en el archivo de un antiguo responsable de la compañía naviera Cunard Line o en una casa en obras de Manhattan el catedrático estadounidense Thomas Pinney encontró algunos de los 50 poemas inéditos de Rudyard Kipling. "Sus textos no han recibido el estudio que merecían, pero eso está empezando a cambiar. Hay un tesoro oculto de obras dispersas, inéditas y no identificadas. Hace poco descubrí otro poema del que no teníamos constancia. Estamos en un momento apasionante para los estudiosos de la obra de Kipling y también para sus lectores", explica Pinney. Esos 50 poemas inéditos del autor de El libro de la selva forman parte de una edición de tres volúmenes que recoge su poesía completa y que Cambridge University Press publicará el jueves."

Texto publicado no blogue Papeles Perdidos do "El País". Texto na íntegra aqui.

Havia um livro por trás da operação Argo

Um texto do "El País" sobre o argumento que a CIA roubou para montar a operação Argo que Ben Affleck conta no seu filme homónimo que ganhou o Oscar de melhor filme. Ler o texto completo aqui.

‘Argo’ fue ‘El señor de la luz’
La ganadora del Oscar a la mejor película ‘esconde’ que la CIA robó un guion real: una parte oculta de la historia ahora convertida en documental

"“La película era falsa, la misión real”, ese lema se podía leer en el póster de Argo. El filme de Ben Affleck, Oscar a Mejor película de 2012, cuenta cómo el agente de la CIA Tony Mendez se inventó de la nada una producción ficticia como cobertura para entrar en el Irán de la revolución islámica. Así rescató a seis ciudadanos estadounidenses escondidos en la casa del embajador de Canadá.
"Pero esto no fue exactamente así: el guion que Mendez utilizó era real y el camino que siguió hasta convertirse en Argo es una historia en sí misma. “Nuestro documental podría ser considerado una precuela”, dice desde Nueva York Judd Ehrlich, director de Science Fiction Land, que se encuentra en posproducción. El éxito de la película ha sido el impulso final a años de trabajo. Gracias al crowdfunding ha recaudado los 50.000 dólares que necesitaba para completar un presupuesto aproximado de 400.000 (300.000 euros), calcula el director."

Philip Roth: O maior escritor americano vivo?

Um inquérito da "New York Magazine" sobre Philip Roth.

Literary Caucus: Salman Rushdie, James Franco, and 28 More Notables Assess Philip Roth’s Career

"Philip Roth turns 80 next month, with 27 novels behind him, but when he announced his retirement last November, it felt like he was actually cutting something short—possibly the most prolific, probably the most distinguished, and certainly the most debated career in postwar American fiction. Roth was never just a novelist to readers but an iconoclast and narcissist, a Jewish cultural hero (villain to some), a (probable) misogynist, a literary celebrity who folded his own life into novels like they were tabloids (or metafictions?) and, after Toni Morrison, our great American hope, The Man Who Should Win the Nobel Prize (If Any Man Should). Just ahead of Philip Roth: Unmasked, an intimate documentary airing on PBS next month, we asked a panel of 30 literati to assess his oeuvre."

Uma boca para alimentar com poesia

O poeta Simon Armitage pretende passar o Verão a caminhar pela costa inglesa sem dinheiro e a viver exclusivamente de leituras da sua poesia. Poemas em troca de cama e comida. Abaixo a notícia do "Guardian", assinado por Alison Flood.

Simon Armitage to walk south-west coast path, paying his way with poetry

Poet plans to travel from Minehead to the Scilly Isles this summer, giving poetry readings in return for food and shelter.

 

The award-winning poet Simon Armitage is preparing to throw himself on the hospitality of the people of south-west England this summer when he sets out to walk the coast path alone, paying his way with poetry.

Armitage, recovered from the challenge of walking the Pennine Way in 2010, will set out from Minehead on 29 August, intending to arrive in Land's End on 17 September, a distance of around 260 miles. He hopes to barter his way "from start to finish", giving poetry readings in local pubs, schools and village halls in return for food and shelter.

"The whole idea is that of the barter. All I've got to offer is my work, and the reading of it," said Armitage, who was awarded the CBE for services to poetry in 2010. "Will that be enough for people to say I can stay at their home, or that they'll give me some sandwiches? I'm looking for anyone who can tolerate me … In the Pennines there was never a night when I didn't have anywhere to stay, even if it was in someone's front room."

Armitage's Pennine walk gave rise to the book Walking Home, and he is planning to write a follow-up, Walking Away, about his journey through Somerset, Devon and Cornwall.

"The first book turned out to be about people and their stories, and that's what I'm hoping to find this time," he said. "I don't imagine as much jeopardy as there was in the Pennines, where I got lost quite a few times; but the south-west coast path has its own peculiarities and tricky sections: a lot of valleys and ravines. And it'll be a completely different rhythm – the rhythm of the tides, rather than the rhythm of the rain clouds in the Pennines. And there'll be this constant companion of the sea on one side."

Armitage also hopes that locals will be keen to walk along with him. "On the Pennine Way, quite often people turned up to walk with me, so I'd get unexpected expert analysis," he said. "That idea of the companion was my most valued aspect of the Pennine Way, although I was on my own a lot too. You do want those Wordsworthian moments of tranquility, although in this case it will be Coleridgian, but you also want the person from Porlock to interrupt you."
Once he reaches Land's End, Armitage will travel across to the Scilly Isles, where when the tide is lowest he hopes to walk between the islands of Tresco, Bryher and Samson. "The idea is to get there at the lowest tide on a full moon, which in theory means it's possible to walk between two or three of the islands," he said. "I hope they like poetry."

O peso dos livros

Para quem, como eu, já carregou muito livro escada-acima, escada abaixo.

The weight of books

By David L. Ulin
Books are about the interior journey. And yet, there is another side of books, their physical presence: the sheer weight of all those volumes, the space they occupy.

My wife calls me the scavenger of shelves. It’s not necessarily a term of endearment, uttered more in the spirit of toleration, or exasperated love. We’ve been together for a long time, more than thirty years, and she’s had no choice but to come to a reckoning with my book absorption, with a library that grows and grows again.
“The books are taking over the house,” she told me, not for the first time, after I had completed a massive reshelving project, close to 4,000 volumes and more than 100 shelves, stretching from the living room into our bedroom, then down the hall to the dining room and my home office, everything alphabetized by author, David Aaronovitch to Stefan Zweig.
It’s the kind of project I take on every seven years or so, usually precipitated by a move. This time, though, the inciting incident was my 50th birthday, for which I gave myself the only gift I truly wanted: a set of built-in, floor-to-ceiling shelves. [continua]

"El librero políglota de Líbano"

"Abu Ibrahim Sarouj tiene una de esas barbas de mil colores que esconde una sonrisa que habla cualquier idioma. "Sé algunas palabras de muchas lenguas, solo que del árabe sé más", se jacta tras una breve charla de saludo en español. El septuagenario clérigo ortodoxo regenta una sui generis librería, en Líbano, donde atesora casi 80.000 volúmenes apilados en un edificio que se cae a pedazos. El interior de la Librería del Viajero parece un laberinto de estanterías combadas, montañas de revistas y fascículos a ras de suelo y columnas que nacen en sillas. "Vamos al jardín", dice."

A história de um livreiro libanês publicada pelo "El País" cuja continuação pode ser encontrada aqui.