I had a little bit of contact with Sumerian myself in university (you might have guess from my username). I was in the Applied Computer Linguistics group in a project that translated Sumerian into English (with AI but before it was cool). The takeaway was that it's too little data to really train the neurol network properly but since most of the tablets were just which king owns how much cattle and stuff, it could handle it (I, for the record, don't own any cattle)

I sadly didn't learn too much about Sumerian. I know it's highly agglutinative and a language isolate. We had an Old Orientalist in the team and it was always cool to hear about and see cuneiform and how it developed over time and was used differently in different languages

[–] meyotch@slrpnk.net 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

It’s enough to make one believe in the power of the nam-shub of Enki, amirite?

[–] andros_rex@lemmy.world 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

More like the power of human ignorance and laziness. Like, you can read the real deal online. None of the spaceship shit.

They also really love photoshopping the Pleiades into random artifacts on Facebook. Or Graham Hancock’s stupid “handbags.”

[–] meyotch@slrpnk.net 1 points 1 day ago

For me it is comforting at least to know I am not the only one to feel this way about subjects I have paid in blood to learn.

“Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before," Bokonon tells us. "He is full of murderous resentment of people who are ignorant without having come by their ignorance the hard way.”

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