AI Is Used To Share What Ancient Languages Sounded Like
By Margherita Cole on October 23, 2023
Most students study at least one other language in school. While most learn French or Spanish—popular languages that are commonly spoken today—some may choose to study a “dead language” like Latin. Learning an ancient language, however, can be a strange endeavor for many people, since in many cases, it is unclear what the pronunciation was for words. Well, a YouTube channel called Equator AI seeks to demystify history by using AI to bring ancient languages to life.
Their videos feature artificially created portraits of people dressed in the clothing from different eras who recite ancient texts in the most likely pronunciation. While it is hard to be completely certain about how some of these languages were spoken, the clips do help these distant cultures feel much more real. In addition to Latin and Ancient Greek, their videos include Old English, Akkadian, Sumerian, Ancient Egyptian, Phoenician, and Etruscan.
One of their videos displays the written text that the AI characters are reading on one side of the screen, so those who are familiar with the written version (or people who are curious about the written text) can follow along. People in the comments were quick to point out the familiarity between some ancient languages and their modern descendant. “The [ancient] Greek at the end is actually quite easy to understand. He speaks to us from almost two thousand years ago, and still sounds like someone we met today,” comments one person. Another writes, “Latin sounds really cool the way it is pronounced here as a Proto-Italic language. At school we learned and spoke it not so rhythmically, stiffer.”
More:
https://mymodernmet.com/listen-to-ancient-languages-equator-ai/
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One of my areas of study before I buckled down and declared a major was linguistics. Even after I graduated and worked in my primary chosen career I continued my interest in language and did research that helped establish the foundations for early speech synthesis and the speech generated by AI today.
My work centered on writing languages that provide individuals who are unable to speak augmented speech by way of speech generating devices, like Stephen Hawking. The same computer languages we have today that let us have our emails spoken to us and that through AI lead to this wonderful thing you've shared here.
I am an award winning, published author in the field and am so excited to see how far we've come in this arena.
Thanks so much for sharing this, Judi Lynn. I helps to remind me that I'm not old and useless because I did many things in the past that were useful and helpful and continue to be relevant even so many years later.
❤️
