Today’s Rather Silly Purchase
Posted on June 21, 2023 Posted by John Scalzi 28 Comments
It’s my own personal cuneiform tablet! Does it actually say (more or less) “The failure mode of ‘clever’ is ‘asshole'”? I have no way to check! They say it’s a syllabic transliteration into Old Persian, which, okay, I believe them! Is the tablet even correctly oriented in this picture? Again, I would be the last to know! But if it’s not, I can, like, turn it. Either way, I’ve spent $20 in worse ways before. If you’re curious enough to find out how to get your own, here’s a link.
— JS
It just feels like it should be center aligned, however…
I think you were taken. It looks like a round tuit to me.
Going by this image, I’d say the pic would need to be turned 90 degrees clockwise/righty tighty. :)
https://i.pinimg.com/474x/62/7f/8a/627f8aff8afa2c28c0ea041ed3165d3e.jpg
Sometimes you just need silly. :)
Reminds me of the tattoo website which translates the “Chinese” of uploaded photos. So many are nonsense but look cool. So would make a qualified reader of Chinese snigger.
I’m not a qualified reader of old Persian. Looks good to me.
The stone needs to rotate 90 deg. Clockwise to read correctly.
Why do you torment future archaeologists?
Turn it sideways. Top line should look like it starts with a “k.”
And yes! All that time studying Akkadian in college finally paid off!
That’s cool! I wonder if “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn” would fit on one tablet?
True enough, $20 has been squandered upon worse things, say, a gallon of gas… Not that high in Ohio, yet? The summer is young… *sigh…
Wow. [/Owen Wilson]
Looks like your cat ran over it when it was wet!
At first I thought it was a quote from Old Man’s War
Did someone (Ken) say that was a round tuit? I have been looking for one of those for years.
Full circle anyone?
https://www.archaeology.org/news/11449-230518-artificial-intelligence-cuneiform
Neat but they should offer it as a cylinder seal, that you could stamp things with.
Strong I just got a tattoo in Chinese energy. However! Ea-nasir approves!
This is a really well done video on how to read and write cuneiform, though it may not match your Old Persian. I don’t remember what they used here. It’s been a long time since I watched it. Still, it’s really interesting.
https://youtu.be/zOwP0KUlnZg
One could use the Unicode code chart for Old Persian Cuneiform (which I read Wikipedia to say is inspired by rather than derived from Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform).
https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U103A0.pdf
Old Persian has asmaller vowel inventory than English, so liberties have probably been taken in transliterating the vowels. After a little cogitation, they could have done a symbol to symbol transliteration (in which case how were ‘e’ and ‘o’ handled – one could reasonably drop the final ‘e’s in ‘failure’, ‘mode’ or ‘asshole’, but other instances remain), or they could have done a phoneme to phoneme transformation – using the ‘th’ glyph in Old Persian, and the using the ‘v’ glyph instead of the ‘f’ glyph in ‘of’, or some combination, such as picking out English consonant and vowel digraphs as distinct symbols before performing the transformation.
Do they have a computer script to do the transliteration, or is done mentally by the scribes, and if the latter, are they consistent? They don’t seem to document the transliteration rules.
With an untrained eye I can’t easily break up the stylus imprints into characters, but there seemed to be more or less the right number of characters (if the trailing ‘e’s were dropped).
“Help! I’m imprisoned in a tablet factory!”
When I was in England I used to hear people say, “He’s too clever for his own good.” (Not necessarily about me, mind you.) In which case I think the level of “Asshole” has already been achieved.
While I feel morally certain that Old Persian had concepts that map directly onto our notions of “clever” and “asshole,” I have my doubts that there is any idiom in that language which corresponds to our idea of “failure mode.”
Just be careful buying copper from Ea-nasir. He’s got a bad reputation.
Why do I think that they’re going to experience a big spike in sales?
I kinda want to get one that says “This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever spent money on.”
“While I feel morally certain that Old Persian had concepts that map directly onto our notions of “clever” and “asshole,” I have my doubts that there is any idiom in that language which corresponds to our idea of “failure mode.”
They’re not translating the words into Old Persian; they’re transliterating–mapping the English syllables to Old Persian writing that matches the sound.
Really thought it was going to be another church…
I often joke with my students that I’ve been teaching so long that the clay tablets I learned from have started to crumble.
Perhaps I should get a tablet with the Pythagorean Theorem on it.