A Paleo-Hispanic alphabet is discovered in Spain, and researchers use AI to read 2,000-year-old scrolls burnt to a crisp by Mt. Vesuvius for the first time

Me on a daily basis:

Welcome to this week’s edition of Discovery Dispatch, a weekly roundup of the latest language-related news, research in linguistics, interesting reads from the week, and newest books and other media dealing with language and linguistics.

📢 Updates

Announcements and what’s new with me and Linguistic Discovery.

History.com recently interviewed me about the world’s oldest language. This actually isn’t the best question because with just a few exceptions all languages are equally old. (The exceptions are incredibly cool though.) Myself, Gareth Roberts, and Claire Bowern all tried to impress this on the interviewer, and explained why there’s not really a straightforward answer to this question. Overall I think the article came out well. I’ve seen other versions of this question where the journalist/writer tried to force an answer even though there isn’t one.

I think people really like the idea of a language frozen in time that allows us to peer back into the depths of history because it’s exotic and mysterious, but the fact is languages are always changing. So I agree with Gareth Roberts that most people probably mean something like, “What’s the oldest written language we have evidence of?” when they ask this.

In any case, here’s the article!

• What is the world’s oldest language? (History.com)

📰 In the News

Language and linguistics in the news.

2,500-year-old slate with paleo-alphabet discovered in Spain

Archaeologists have discovered a stone tablet at a Tartessian site in southwestern Spain that depicts battle scenes in the center and a partial alphabet in a Paleo-Hispanic script along the edges (21 signs total).

2,500-year-old slate containing drawings of battle scenes and paleo-alphabet discovered in Spain

Archaeologists discovered the stone tablet at a Tartessian site in southwestern Spain.

Live ScienceJennifer Nalewicki

A lost civilization’s partial alphabet was discovered in a social media post

In online images of an ancient tablet, an expert spotted previously unnoticed letters — a partial alphabet from the Tartessian civilization.

Science Newsccrockett

El CSIC investiga un abecedario hallado en la tablilla de pizarra del yacimiento de Casas del Turuñuelo

Investigadores del Instituto de Arqueología de Mérida (IAM), centro mixto del CSIC y la Junta de Extremadura) están estudiando una serie de signos inscritos en la tablilla de pizarra del yacimiento tartésico de Casas del Turuñuelo, (Guareña, Badajoz), cuyo hallazgo se anunció la semana pa

Consejo Superior de Investigaciones CientíficasCSIC

Using AI to digitally unwrap and read the library of Herculaneum

The second breakthrough comes from using AI to digitally unroll scrolls from the Roman town of Herculaneum which had been compressed by ash and burnt to a crisp by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. An entire library of these scorched scrolls was discovered in a villa in Herculaneum—an unrivaled treasure trove of knowledge about the ancient world, provided we’re able to read them. Preserved libraries like this from the ancient world and incredibly rare. Scholars had tried to carefully unwrap a few of these scrolls in the past, but the process destroyed the scrolls. Now, we might finally have a chance at unlocking the text within these scrolls.

First glimpse inside burnt scroll after 2,000 years

The document charred by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius is being ‘unwrapped’ using X-ray scans and AI.

BBC News

• (BBC Science Focus magazine has a feature article about this, and the web version includes some really neat visuals and animations too, but it’s currently only available in the digital early edition, so I can’t link to it here.)

🗞️ Current Linguistics

Recently published research in linguistics.

How many words and sentences do we know?

This is a surprisingly difficult question to answer! For starters, the answer varies based on whether you’re examining active vocabulary (words you actually use) versus passive vocabulary (words you recognize or understand but don’t use). One clever experiment estimates that the average 20-year-old knows about 42,000 words passively, while the average 60-year-old knows 48,000 words. I was actually quite surprised that the number grew that much in adulthood! It just goes to show that our linguistic abilities continue to develop over the course of our lifetimes (albeit to a lesser extent than in childhood).

How Many Words and Sentences Do We Know?

We all excel in keeping words in mind, to speak, read, and write. How many words and sentences do we know? It turns out a lot. Some 60,000 words and some sextillion sentences.

Psychology TodayMax Louwerse Ph.D.

Frontiers | How Many Words Do We Know? Practical Estimates of Vocabulary Size Dependent on Word Definition, the Degree of Language Input and the Participant’s Age

Based on an analysis of the literature and a large scale crowdsourcing experiment, we estimate that an average 20 year old native speaker of American English…

FrontiersMarc Brysbaert

A neurological dictionary

Using novel technology for recording the activity of individual neurons, researchers have created a mini neurological dictionary showing which neurons fire when people hear specific words. The recordings were accurate enough that the researchers could even predict the word being listened to by the person based on just the neural activity alone. They also found that certain neurons are able to reliably distinguish between homonyms (e.g. sun vs. son), and they continuously anticipate the most likely meaning of the words based on the context.

Study discovers a ‘brain thesaurus’ that lets neurons derive meaning from spoken words

Using a novel technology for obtaining recordings from single neurons, a team of investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital, a founding member of the Mass General Brigham health care system, discovered a microscopic “thesaurus” that reflects how word meanings are represented by neurons in the human brain.

Medical XpressBrandon Chase

Semantic encoding during language comprehension at single-cell resolution - Nature

By tracking the activity of individual neurons using microarrays and Neuropixels probes, a study examines the representation of linguistic meaning, at the single-cell level, during natural speech processing in humans.

NatureMohsen Jamali

Demonstratives direct the listener’s attention

Demonstrative words like this and that are typically defined in spatial terms such as ‘near’ and ‘far’. A 2024 study finds that the function of demonstratives actually has more to do with establishing joint attention than physical location.

Words like ‘this’ and ‘that’ direct attention across languages

Discover how demonstratives like ‘this’ and ‘that’ direct attention and reveal insights into social cognition across different languages.

Earth.comRodielon Putol

• Jara-Ettinger & Rubio-Fernandez. 2024. Demonstratives as attention tools: Evidence of mentalistic representations within language. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 121(32). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2402068121

Cats are better at word association than human babies

Cats are quicker than babies to associate a picture of a word with its corresponding picture, a 2024 study shows.

• Cats beat babies at word-association game (Science)

Cats are better at word association than human babies are, study finds

Cats are quicker than babies to associate a picture of a word with its corresponding picture, new research shows.

Live ScienceVictoria Atkinson

Rapid formation of picture-word association in cats - Scientific Reports

Scientific Reports - Rapid formation of picture-word association in cats

NatureSaho Takagi

The Dead Sea Scrolls may be older than previously thought, according to AI

Machine learning has given greater support to something some scholars had suspected about the Dead Sea Scrolls—that they are 50–100 years older than previously thought.

• Some Dead Sea Scrolls are older than researchers thought, AI analysis suggests (Science)

Dating ancient manuscripts using radiocarbon and AI-based writing style analysis

Determining by means of palaeography the chronology of ancient handwritten manuscripts such as the Dead Sea Scrolls is essential for reconstructing the evolution of ideas, but there is an almost complete lack of date-bearing manuscripts. To overcome this problem, we present Enoch, an AI-based date-prediction model, trained on the basis of 24 14C-dated scroll samples. By applying Bayesian ridge regression on angular and allographic writing style feature vectors, Enoch could predict 14C-based dates with varied mean absolute errors (MAEs) of 27.9 to 30.7 years. In order to explore the viability of the character-shape based dating approach, the trained Enoch model then computed date predictions for 135 non-dated scrolls, aligning with 79% in palaeographic post-hoc evaluation. The 14C ranges and Enoch’s style-based predictions are often older than traditionally assumed palaeographic estimates, leading to a new chronology of the scrolls and the re-dating of ancient Jewish key texts that contribute to current debates on Jewish and Christian origins.

PLOS OneMladen Popović ,

📃 This Week’s Reads

Interesting articles I’ve come across this week.

Babel: the language magazine

Do People Who Speak Different Languages Think Differently?

McElvenny credits linguist Noam Chomsky (1928–) with revitalizing the idea that we all have the same sort of minds; language does not really change that.

Mind MattersNews

Could Neanderthals Speak? It Depends on Who You Talk To

Humans can tolerate mysteries quite well as long as we can fill them in with speculations, which in the end tell us mostly about ourselves.

Mind MattersDenyse O’Leary

• ‘Rizz’ vs. ‘skibidi’: Why some slang words stick around and others fade away (Fast Company)

When Did “American English” Emerge?

Did linguistic independence from Britain appear before political independence?

IFLScienceTom Hale

How Much Does Our Language Shape Our Thinking?

English continues to expand into diverse regions around the world. The question is whether humanity will be homogenized as a result.

The New YorkerManvir Singh

Which Are The Most Spoken Languages In The United Kingdom?

Discover the most widely used languages in the UK and learn about their historical roots and significance.

BabbelThomas Moore Devlin

Why Traffic Lights In Japan Are Blue Instead Of Green - SlashGear

Japanese traffic lights are blue instead of the green Americans know, but the reasoning involves some complex linguistic background and history.

SlashGearAnthoni Oisin

🗃️ Resources

Maps, databases, lists, etc. on language and linguistics.

The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) has just made available a new Resource Hub, offering “easy access to essential materials, professional development tools, teaching resources, and more”. It’s a large database of videos, audio recordings, and documents related to linguistics careers, scholarship, and teaching.

• LSA Resource Hub

Thanks for reading this week’s digest! I hope you found something fun or interesting to read in this issue!

~ Danny