Polygraphy (just in case you're wondering what a Classics PhD student does with her time)

[rochvelleth]

I may have mentioned this before, but part of my work now involves transcribing Hebrew because some annoying academic dudes in the 60s decided it was cool to transcribe Phoenician inscriptions into Hebrew

Comments

[ex_robhu]

The upshot of this was that I ended up sitting in bed with a big sign table, a book with the Hebrew transcriptions and a pad of paper - and now I have some inscriptions transcribed in modern notation, which is very useful
This sounds like the kind of thing we invented computers for...

[rochvelleth]

And how could a computer read a 1968 book with Hebrew text in it and convert it into modern epigraphists' notation? Or is that not what you mean?

[ex_robhu]

It would be slightly tricky in that the original text is not in a computer readable format... so you'd use OCR (Optical Character Recognition). You'd scan the page (probably with one of those hand 'wand' scanners) as an image, a program would work out what all the glyphs were, then it would use a lookup table to convert to the other glyphs, and present you with what it had done along with a lookup of what the glyphs mean according to a dictionary.

You could make it cleverer where it would suggest translations it thought were likely. This is possible but not perfect.

[ex_robhu]

I bet you had no idea computers were this cool ;-)

Soon there will be no need for people at all!

[ewx]

We know what the Romans called the Phoenicians, do we know what the Phoenicians called the Romans?

[rochvelleth]

I believe we don't actually. If there's any epigraphical evidence, I don't know about it, but I'll keep an eye out. I expect that if there is any evidence it would be late and recovered from the ruins of Carthage, but it seems very unlikely considering the comparative poverty of Punic corpus :/

[cjwatson]

If it helps resolve the terminological confusion about what you're calling a "letter" or "sign" depending on the context, typographers call this a "glyph" (physical shape) or "character" (abstract thing that a glyph represents). A character that forms part of a writing system rather than being a digit or a punctuation mark or whatever is called a "grapheme", and I think that's probably the most appropriate word here.

Sorry if you knew all this and were simplifying for the benefit of LJ. :-)

[rochvelleth]

:) No, actually, I don't know so much about typography, so that's interesting - thank you. Most interesting is what 'grapheme' is used for - in palaeographical terminology (where it originates from), a grapheme is the name given to any variant form of a single sign (or way to write a single sound, IYSWIM) - so, for instance, in ancient Greek sometimes you get an iota that looks like our capital I, or you get one that looks very much like our capital S; or, say, in the Cypriot syllabic script you get Paphian and Common forms of the same letters. It seems quite strange to me, being epigraphically but not typographically trained, to use 'grapheme' to mean something else

[megamole]

Hmm. I think I might need to do a usericon for you of Astarte/Asherah/Ishtar with "PUNIC TANG" on it.

[rochvelleth]

*lol* :)