2023-10-07T07:13:29UTC

Random bits of week40, 2023

A 2000-years-old tree

Olive tree of Vouves (Ελιά των Βουβών) is estimated to be 2000-4000 years old. Its branches were cut for winners of 2004 and 2008 Olympics. The tree is still productive, though it is due to its grafted olive variety τσουνάτη. NASA has better photos (2016). Google map has a user-uploaded 360-degree shot from standing inside of the tree. And btw, wikipedia has a list of remarkable trees, categorized by reasons.

Two ancient cemeteries from roughly 3000 years ago are close to the tree. I didn't find the names or photos, but they don't sound like archaeological sites. For a useless reference, i searched for the vertical speed of palimpsest cities. At one specific historical settlement (Kaifeng, China), the accumulation speed of layers seems to be at the scale between 2 meters for 2000 years (city gate) to 7 meters for 400 years (persumably twice-flooded site). I couldn't find numbers for sites with less activities, though.

Akkadian?

Came across this youtube channel Learn Akkadian by Reese Waters who holds a Master degree of Assyriology from the University of Cambridge. I knew nothing about any Mesopotamian languages, and the Akkadian rules covered in the series felt 100$\times$ more complicated than expected. Which makes me wonder:

1. was the script's decoding a practical use case of some probability theory? That still sounds hard as hell without computers,
2. how was the vocalization determined? and lastly a more practical one,
3. what's the known dictionary size & is it small or large compared to living scripts?

For (1), the deciphering of scripts

The alphabets benefited from the decoding of the Old Persian which lived until 300 BCE and used cuneiform, before evolving in Middle Persian. Based on wikipedia, Old Persian has well-preserved inscriptions in the ruins of Persepolis, the capital of the Achaemenid Empire, whose kings' names and genealogy were known by the Greeks. Additionally, royal inscriptions were subject to certain (rigid) conventions. These two aspects enabled the initial decipherment, albeit incomplete and with mistakes, of some characters and names of kings around 1802 by Georg Friedrich Grotefend. This work was not accepted by the Academy until by 1815, when his friend Heeren finally let it appear in prints.

Old Persian decoding achievements were transferred to Elamite and Babylonian due to the existence of Behistun Inscription, an Achaemenid royal inscription that had texts written in all three languages^[1]. Decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs from Rosetta Stone happened in 1822. In 1837, Henry Rawlinson^[2], who knew the Old Persian, finished the initial version of Behistun Inscription's translation. However, Rawlinson never described how he deciphered Akkadian further after this, and decipherers working on the subject left very limited documentation as well, although the discovery of Ashurbanipal's Library in 1849 that supplied a huge amount of Akkadian texts were definitely invaluable. This post from r/AskHistorian considered the decipherment to benefit from Akkadian being close enough to Hebrew/Arabic/Aramaic as a Semitic language, while Egyptian hieroglyphs was largely isolated. In 1857, The decoding of Babylonian was tested for "whether the decipherment had been archieved or not":

... the Royal Asiatic Society sent drawings of the same inscription to four different scholars, who were to translate without consulting one another. A committee (including no less than the Dean of St Paul's Cathedral) was set up to compare the translations.

And the committee reported positive, based on the consistency between confident translations and reasonable differences in interpretation of nouns as well as other uncertain texts.

This post from r/AskHistorians mentions some other bi/multilingual texts available now, and offered a few very specific translation examples.

For (2), the inferring of the spoken language

Reddit r/AskHistorians has a long post on examples of comparative method. IMHO this sounds like interpolation in one direction, and my hope of finding studies that test the method against known-groundtruth (interpolate between dialects that evolves at different speed, for example, between native speakers at their homeland, immigrated communities of $\le$ 1 century, and territories colonized for $\ge$ 1 centuries) is not high.

For (3), the vocabulary size

Defining vocabulary size is arbitrary on its own, but my hope of finding a definition that normalizes against total size of the corpus, or how often would we encounter a new word when parsing through Akkadian tablets, is low. Here are some marginally interesting numbers instead:

• The complete Akkadian dictionary seems to have 28k entries.
• English dictionary started out with 43k entries (1755).
• First French dictionary had 25k entries (1684^[3]).
• First German dictionary was completed in 1961^[4] in 32 volumes containing 330k entries.

So unless the Akkadian's 28k count includes tenses or remarks on special cases, the number seems pretty impressive.

Lemon-in-coke

Saw someone mentioned that Lemon-with-coca-cola(檸檬可樂/檸樂/06/檸樂煲薑) is a popular soft drink in Hongkong but less served anywhere else. While the hot variant is indeed an unusual drink based on internet opinions, the chilled variant isn't so much. An English-speaking redditor was weirdly angry with the idea, but lemon flavored cola is a thing albeit developed fairly recently: Pepsi Twist (2000-no later than 2009), Pepsi Lime (2004-2006), and as competing products, Coca-Cola with Lemon (2001-current), Coca-Cola with Lime (2005-2007). Some photos of Coca-Cola with Lemon containers: Sweden 2021, unknown 2022, Greek 2022.