Or so says Emmanuel Oliveiro; Ruth Schuster reports for Haaretz (archived):
Decades after a number of unknown alphabets were discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls, and against all odds, Emmanuel Oliveiro of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands believes he has cracked the “impossible” one known as Cryptic B. The code had been considered to be impossible to decipher, mainly because of the sheer paucity of Cryptic B material. All we have are isolated fragments from two scrolls called 4Q362 and 4Q363, and a few spots in other scrolls where scribes briefly introduced Cryptic B in the middle of a Hebrew text, Oliveiro explains, in the journal Dead Sea Discoveries in December.
Oliveiro’s process was based on analysis and intuition, similar to the methodology the scholar Józef Milik used when deciphering Cryptic A in 1955. Both began with assuming that they were dealing with a mono-alphabetic substitution system– where each of the 22 letters of Hebrew or Aramaic is consistently replaced with a specific cryptic sign (as in – say A is always be replaced by $). […]
But the key breakthrough was suddenly realizing that a sequence of five letters in a Cryptic B fragment might represent the five-letter Hebrew word Yisrael, spelled yod, sin, resh, aleph, lamed. It is true that the resh did not survive the eons intact. But looking at the high-resolution image of the age-darkened fragment – the word ישראל (Yisrael) leaps out. “Once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it,” as Oliveiro tells Haaretz by Zoom.
Many more details and images, along with history of the scrolls and their other scripts, at the link; I agree with David Weman, who sent me the link, that the quote at the end is delightful:
So, without certainty, Oliveiro cracked the impenetrable. “I told my friends and wife that I am going to try this and they’re like, you could be stuck here for 40 years and never crack the code,” he says. “And what do you hope to find anyway, a secret felafel recipe? But once I saw it – I think it was quite fast.” How fast? About two months to cross the desert of Cryptic B and see Yisrael.
Thanks, David!
Reason to click through, the photo of the key word Yisrael looks like a cubist portrait of Grouch Marx.
I take it there’s not a code so much as very stylized Hebrew signs, or it wouldn’t make sense to talk about the resh not surviving.
The paper is here (Open Access).
Although it is so fragmentary, I find it completely convincing.
Shit, really? That’s not a new-style WOW-style headline? EDIT: Cryptic B has not “definitely” been “cracked”.
@Y:
Yes, it looks sensible. I like its conclusion that the documents in question seem (as far as the extremely fragmentary nature of the evidence goes) to be fairly run-of-the mill (for Qumran.)
Interesting point that the purpose of the code (which is not a terribly obscure or “secure” one if this paper is right) may have been more related to prestige than effective concealment.
I also liked the expression “the מצאתי moment” after a second, when the penny dropped. (So to speak.)
The fragments are so small that it is not instantly clear to me why these texts were chosen to be encrypted.
On the other hand, among the sectarian texts, the Qumran pesharim and some others were presumably available to be read only by initiated Essenes or Ossenes, which name variants I consider to be, despite fifty-some other published proposed etymologies, a clipped version of their self designation, ‘osey hatorah, observers of torah–a name not accepted by, among others, Sadducees and Pharisees.
@David Eddyshaw and Y
The established Israeli Hebrew equivalent of “Eureka!” having for decades been ! מצאתי , its appearance here is not strange.
I don’t suppose for a moment that it is. It was just new to me.
I don’t know Israeli Hebrew, so I had to mentally translate it from Biblical Hebrew to English to Greek. And then English again.
Incidentally, I seem to recall that the psilosis is because A. was actually exclaiming in Doric, but I may have remembered that wrong. Wiktionary just references the Attic εὕρηκα.
Literally, εὕρηκα = ‘I found’ = מָצָאתִי. In my usage, it is not a fixed expression. I would only use it if I had been looking for a physical object, and would more likely add the object pronoun, as in English. For a more general use, יֵשׁ yesh would be more fitting.
Let me guess, LLM was involved?
Y : EDIT3: yeah, it can read the abstract now, thanks.
…hasn’t made it to German.
(Admittedly I don’t think I’ve heard anyone actually say it. But it’s always spelled heureka.)
@V:
I wouldn’t have thought so. I interpreted it as a kind of joke (and quite an amusing one, in context), though if M is right, it may not have been meant as such, but simply as the local equivalent of “eureka.”
Y’s Sprachgefühl seems to suggest otherwise, but they did recently say they’d been out of regular contact with Israeli Hebrew for a while IIRC.
I can’t access the article without a CAPTCHA that does not appear without my ad-blocking
Yes, that happened to me, too, even when I experimented with coming from several different countries. But I did manage to read the paper itself (it’s quite short.)
DE, True, but I have kept up with the language to some degree through family, the internet, etc.
David Eddyshaw: you have to understand that, as someone who actually worked on LLMs twenty years ago and also did AI for computer games, currently calling LLMs “AI” gives me a lot of “what are you talking about” vibe. What the fuck are are talking about — they have nothing in common.
And as someone who has read Marvin Minsky’s ideas about Generalized AI. Those are three completely different things.
Why do fuck do they call LLMs AI?
Absolutely. The marketing of LLMs as “AI” is the central fraud of a thoroughly fraudulent project. (That‘s the reason why they call them “AI.”)
David Eddyshaw: We have nothing to do except celebrate Christmas, saint Jordan’s day, (‘6th of January) and all of of the others, until it all blows away, and we see what what we can to with the remains of the financial system.
what V (and DE) said! i suspect the bubble bursting may gonna make 2008 look like 1928.
Any timeline on these predictions? I am still waiting for bitcoin to disappear in a puff of hot air.
In the end, it’s just Markov chains, as applied to human societies. It’s quite simple. https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kritzer_01_15/
Language Hat pondered the question of (H)EUREKA in 2010. Nobody knows the answer; speculations include (1) the spelling was influenced by other Greek words starting with eu-, or (2) the story about Archimedes was transmitted only through Latin texts, in which the Greek word was written without breathing marks.
[Provocation deleted. That’s it, CJ, you’re done here. –LH]
Charles Jaeger: you’re not really trying at this point. Just say 88 and get it done with it. What was the other shibboleth, some number of words? 14?
Fashbots gonna fash.
But he’s a _boring_ fash, not the kind that live across the street from from me and do spray paint across the street from my brother’s condo and do an annual torch-bearing march, Right? Right?
[deleted]
Charles Jaeger: I just ignore anything you write. It’s a habit I have from other blogs. I have done that for more than twenty years. I just scroll down. There’s always one or two trolls.
I thought he said he was going to flounce off his his Stahlhelm site.
what V (and DE) said! i suspect the bubble bursting may gonna make 2008 look like 1928
@rozele For a solid case that the bubble awaits a pin, see https://substack.com/home/post/p-180824094
For some legal background, https://news.bloomberglaw.com/legal-exchange-insights-and-commentary/trumps-ai-order-will-lead-to-gc-headaches-and-legal-uncertainty?source=newsletter&item=body-link®ion=text-section
The trumpster has attempted to dismantle state laws by presidential dictate.
The author of the above linked essay says,
[deleted]
Oliveiro describes the five Cryptic B letters of Yisrael as three recognizable Paleo Hebrew signs with flourishes — yod, resh and lamed — along with a hey standing for shin as it does in Cryptic A and for alef a novel sign used that way in Cryptic A.
I could describe the latter two as a shin inverted and an alef abstracted and flowing, a way of writing alef in one motion, if you consider the essence of alef a bounded area at the left with two legs (horns).
These characters aren’t within the range of Semitic writing themselves, but the variation in Semitic writing traditions seems pretty wide, which has me wondering whether this might be not a Cryptic script (ie, one invented to obscure meaning from the uninitiated), but an otherwise unattested script that developed normally.
I recognize that it’s awkward to posit another scribal school that would have Yisrael, Jehudah and the tents of Jacob as key topics, all in what Oliveiro treats as fairly standard Biblical Hebrew, so maybe it’s a dead end.
Thank you for deleting those comments, Hat.
Thanks to the reader who e-mailed me that a cleanup was necessary.
Let me guess, LLM was involved?
Nope. The only mention of “AI” in the linked articles is a passing remark that it *wasn’t* of any use.
Yes, the number of words in a particular racist sentence. Also “18” for letters of the alphabet. And Doitschland for expressing that Really Existing Germany isn’t German enough. And the three-finger salute (Kühnengruß)…
A three-finger salute should be 1.5 times as good as the British two-finger salute and three times as good as the US (and German) one-finger salute!
David Marjanović : 14 really? I could not remember it, but apparently I did. I just gauged it. Apparently I hailed it.
Steve : thank you for banning that person.
I don’t like banning people, and he seemed willing (for a moment or two) to confine his comments to linguistic topics (I was genuinely interested in what he might have to say about the Greek used in Crete!), but alas. Fascists gonna fash. So it goes, and so he went.
If you’re in interested Cretan Greek, an old friend of mine did her PhD in archaeology doing fieldwork there. But I’m not sure if I can get in touch with her. [EDIT] she was educated in Classical Greek, though.
But she was interested in languages (we all were, in that friend group).
“he seemed willing (for a moment or two) to confine his comments to linguistic topics”
That would be a good thing for all of us. While it’s pretty mild to refer to the US President as ‘the trumpster’, as another commenter does (and I’m certainly not a Trump supporter) it’s a political statement. I can get politics – and for that matter, serious analysis of what AI is and is not – elsewhere. I come here for language stuff.
But people don’t come here for meta-comments either, so I’ll stop, and thank this blog for introducing me to ‘The Secret Languages of Ireland’, which I downloaded in its entirety and (as a follower of those who ‘rise in their nightshift to write for the Zeitschrift’) read with great interest.
That some sectarian Qumran texts used cryptic writing coheres, imo, with the use in other texts of alternate names for some individuals and some groups.
For example, using Teacher of Righteousness instead of Judah the Essene.*
And using Ephraim instead of Pharisees.**
*
https://people.duke.edu/~goranson/Qumran-Related%20History.pdf
** also from Dead Sea Discoveries, in this case an Essene-influenced usage
https://people.duke.edu/~goranson/Exclusion_of_Ephraim.pdf
Philo and Josephus and Pliny the Elder and Dio of Prusa as quoted by Synesius of Cyrene and others are useful outside tradents, but they were not three-year-process Essene initiants.
Some sectarian Qumran mss give attestation from inside.
I come here for language stuff.
And there’s plenty of language stuff to be had. But (contrary to what many people seem to think) the blog has never been laser-focused on language; from the beginning it has been about whatever I found interesting. It’s true that the first post was about language, but after that, the second post (July 31, 2002), “Life in the Big City,” was about how I spent my evening, the next, on Aug. 1, was on growing up, Aug. 2 was on facial expressions, the Aug. 3 posts were on Nabokov and Pushkin (with my first link to Anatoly Vorobey) and on the psychological contradictions of Neil Bissoondath, Aug. 4 on an embarrassing New York Times correction, Aug. 5 on a happy coincidence, and Aug. 6 on Jenia Graman’s translation of Ali and Nino. That’s a week’s worth of posts only a few of which have even a tenuous connection to language. People talk about all kinds of things in all kinds of ways here, and that’s what I enjoy about it; anyone who wants discussion confined to linguistic matters can find that at Language Log. Anyone who happens on a discussion that offends (or simply doesn’t interest) them should feel free to skip it — I sometimes do that when people get into the weeds on some topic that doesn’t grab me. This is Liberty Hall (except for fascists).
Over at the Log one occasionally finds posts about certain issues with somewhat limited obvious relevance to linguistics because they happen to match up with some longstanding interest of Mark Liberman. Opinions may differ as to whether that stuff makes the overall thing better or worse, but it’s his blog (“blog” pronounced with CLOTH vowel by me, but maybe there are weirdos out there who do it differently).
Stephen G., Thanks for your perspective.
What do you make of the use of two cryptic scripts at Qumran? Or does the new idea that Cryptic B uses many signs, with elaboration, for their standard meanings, alongside some ciphers used as in Cryptic A, suggest that B is less an independent script than an intermediate form between the common script and Cryptic A, maybe suggesting a lighter use of misdirection/encoding?
I’m also curious what you make of the Mt. Zion cup, maybe still the only example of Qumran cryptic writing outside Qumran.
Separate question for those from the top of the comments, I’m wondering what prompted the mention discussion of LLMs. Nothing I saw in the Oliveiro paper or its abstract suggested they were used, and I don’t see that in the articles either, aside from one that says that “cousin AI” couldn’t help in this case. But you all seem to understand each other about why it’s relevant. What did I miss?
People who feel that discussion of linguistics should never trespass on what they conceive to be “politics” are operating with too narrow a view of what linguistics actually is: it is not a study whose legitimate subject-matter consists exclusively of phonology, morphology and syntax.
The LSA (for example) knows better:
https://www.lsadc.org/advocacy
Language is intimately linked with culture (we’re none of us Chomskyans round here.)
I’m wondering what prompted the mention discussion of LLMs.
V will have to answer that; he’s the one who brought it in out of the blue. You’re right that there’s nothing in the paper or its abstract that would seem to lead to that idea.
I misinterpreted V as alluding to the use of מצאתי for “eureka”, which, in hindsight, was clearly not the case. I leapt to that conclusion because I couldn’t see any other link.
The evidence is so limited and fragmentary that I imagine that any kind of “AI” would flounder with it. It’s pretty much exactly the kind of thing they’re no good at.
Ryan,
On the Mount Zion cup, Josephus, War 5.145, mentioned a Jerusalem Gate of the Essenes, which may be why the cryptic-inscribed limestone (ritually-pure?) cup was found near there.
i wonder whether the selective use of a different script (or set of scripts, if we think about the Cryptics as variations within a family) could be part of a metatextual practice like printing jesus’ words in red in some editions of the gospels, or printing rashi’s commentaries in a distinct typeface in many talmud editions? that could’ve been a qumran-wide practice, or that of a sub-group or particular scribe. perhaps impossible to tell with such a small body of fragments – at least until/unless some of them can be matched to known texts.
(or/and: is this just an early cursive? i’ve definitely seen people entirely comfortable with block-letter hebrew be completely stymied by the fairly standard cursive used in yiddish circles, or simply not recognize a slightly stylized version of it as related to what they know. but i know nothing about the paleography of hebrew cursives.)
currently calling LLMs “AI” gives me a lot of “what are you talking about” vibe. What the fuck are are talking about …
Aww infotech has a long history of abusing trendy terms for marketing purposes. That was happening long before there was an internet. For example, as soon as ‘Relational Database’ acquired a cachet, all sorts of very-definitely-not-Relational file systems started marketing their Relational-like query abilities. (Like they would translate a subset of SQL queries into lookups.)
Some of what LLMs can deliver you might describe as displaying what from a human we’d call intelligence, and they’re artificial, if not capital-A capital-I.
BTW I’m not sure I’d describe it as ‘intelligence’ to drive Non-Player Characters in computer games, nor (say) play chess. Those applications strike me as too, errm, artificial to be indexes of human-style intelligence.
So far, Minsky’s ‘AGI’ hasn’t been abused as a marketing term.
Thanks SG.
The thing that struck me about the Cryptic A mug is that the finger hole on the handle looks quite small for a finger. It looks pretty awkward to hold. The square handle on the curving body is an odd look to me though arguably it’s easier to hold it level than with a rounded handle.
Having a tight finger hole right at the wall of the cup probably isn’t a design flaw but I’m so conditioned by using mugs for hot coffee and tea that it scalds my finger just to look at it.
On the subject of not wanting to hear about politics here, I certainly take the point made by our host that this blog is not exclusively about language, and that in any case language is connected with culture, which includes politics; although political changes usually affect a language’s lexical vocabulary much more than its grammar or phonology (unless a closed society doesn’t import so many loan words and therefore has a lower tendency to naturalise alien sounds, as has happened in North Korea versus South Korea).
Nevertheless, I agree with Eliezer Yudkowsky’s warning that ‘Politics is the Mind-Killer’ in his blog post of that name, of 18th Feb 2007.
Yudkowsky is a very smart guy, and like many very smart guys (these types are almost always guys) he vastly overrates “rationality” and thinks most people are too stupid and/or misguided to look on the world with the crystal clarity he brings to it. I confess to an ingrained prejudice against that kind of guy; the smugness with which they approach everything is repellent to me. Here’s the start of Politics is the Mind-Killer:
I just can’t read that kind of screed, and I avoid that kind of guy at parties. In any case, his absurd caricature is not how we discuss politics around here.
Anyone who kicks off with “the evolutionary reasons for this are so obvious” has yet to mature beyond being a teenager who thinks all adults (and his parents in particular) are stupid.
One notes the rhetorical sleight-of-hand in conflating “politics” in general with (literally) murderous partisanship, and deducing from this that all political discussion is a primitive atavism. Including, apparently, any discussion of the minimum wage …
The argument that we should not talk about politics is much favoured by those who feel that the way power is currently distributed in the world is just about fine as it is. It is not itself a politically neutral position. And it aligns nicely with the hostility to democracy itself which is in evidence in the current crop of tech bros.
Am biologist, can confirm.
Or about Trump during the next 3 years?
I’ll stop here, but this could end up being noticeably similar.
Yeah. I don’t want discussions of Trump not because it’s “OMG politics” but because there’s nothing interesting to say.
DE, I don’t mind talking about politics, but what is discussed about politics within this blog is entertainment, not activism. And, channeling L. Brezhnev, entertainment must be entertaining. BTW, didn’t know that tech-bros shy away from discussing politics.
@D.O.:
The tech-bros are indeed not shy of proclaiming their political opinions; my point was rather that shutting off all but narrowly technocratic political discussion in practice aids such enemies of democracy, whose politics largely reduce to the view that people like themselves are uniquely qualified to lead us all, on account of their being so successful and all by the only metrics that really matter. I invoked these people because Yudkovsky shares their basic mindset, despite his contrarian view that “AI” is more likely to doom us all rather than introduce the Millennium.
What one finds interesting (or not) is pretty subjective. I find syntactic minutiae endlessly fascinating; I have some glimmerings of awareness that not even all Hatters altogether share this enthusiasm. On the other hand, my eyes glaze over at the mention of human genetics, but this is clearly not the case for many Hatters; I doubt that it is mere coincidence that they evidently know rather more about it than I do.
DE, we can continue this discussion in the nearest pub (or maybe bar) to the midpoint of our respective locations, which probably will make us drink with the fishes.
what DE said! (both times!)
@hat
Maybe something about how Trump uses language?
https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/research/perspective/talking-trump-literally-speaking
I find syntactic minutiae endlessly fascinating; I have some glimmerings of awareness that not even all Hatters altogether share this enthusiasm. On the other hand, my eyes glaze over at the mention of human genetics,
I love syntactic minutiae, though it’s hard work to make sense of them in a language I don’t know well.
Genetics can be very illuminating, especially for short time depths. However when they announce a breakthrough elucidating human genetics over the past 100,000 years, I think to myself that before, they had 0.01% of the data, now they have 0.1%, hopelessly unrepresentative, so the conclusions are very likely wrong. Same thing with claiming to discover linguistic universals through typology.
Not that I blame anyone for trying. That’s what scientists do.
Maybe something about how Trump uses language?
Nah, just not interested in the guy. I want him to go away so I can forget about him.
If only it could have turned out that “Cryptic B” had been used by writers in the Essene community to conceal* intemperate political rants about some now-obscure member of the Hasmonean Dynasty, all the pieces would fall into place.
*Back when the desire for ones rants to “go viral” was counterbalanced by the desire not to be beheaded.
the secret language of disgruntled copper ingot buyers!
@JWB:
As “graves” seems to be about the only surprising word putatively identified, your conjecture may not be so far from the mark …
“86 John Hyrcanus” …
@D.O.:
An excellent suggestion. I will be identifiable by the fact that I will be wearing my favourite commenting hat:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/Garibaldi_%281866%29.jpg
and by the fact that nobody will be sitting anywhere near me, for some reason.
There are interesting things to be said about how Trump uses language, but they were all said in his first term. Most interesting to me is the demonstration, across several posts on LLog, that Trump never said “bigly” – he used to say “big-league”, with an unreleased [g].
There are interesting things to be said about how Trump uses language
Meh. Leave that to the inferior Language Log.
That’s exactly what I said after the comma…
Cannot imagine a more important discovery than an old falafel recipe.
Nothing to it. Make some falafel, let it sit somewhere for a year.
(Thank you! I’ll be here all week.)
I’ve actually made preparation for falafel and let it sit in the freezer for a year, then fried it. Also, agreed with Yuval. Culinary history is fascinating.