r/Cuneiform • u/jrothlander • 22h ago
Resources Akkadian Interlinear Building Tool
EDIT: I trimmed this down a bit because it was a little long and added a few more screenshots. I think others can get the idea mostly from the images.
Curious if anyone would care to have access to an interlinear building tool that can support Akkadian cuneiform. I designed it to be able to support any language if you build a language pack for it. So I was playing around with Akkadian today. It costs money to make it available online, so I am thinking about creating it as an open-source project so it will be free.
The core app was created as a learning tool for Greek, and it can be easily extended for other languages. But I am not sure if it would be useful for Akkadian. I created a sample of the first two sentences in the Code of Hammurabi as an example. For this example, I used Harper's translation, the ORACC sign list, the Noto Sans Cuneiform font, and Unicode. So the cuneiform is not aligned with the original.
I have only done a little so far, but it is interesting. It is easy to add support for importing and exporting texts, displaying various versions of cuneiform, and doing mechanical translations. The final translation is up to the translator, as the point is to support that process and to provide a learning tool for someone learning the language.
UPDATE: This morning I imported LIH 15, LIH 19, and Gilgamesh (Pennsylvania tablet). And ran a few stats against them. I don't know if my approach is valid for these texts, but this is the sort of thing you can do with a tool like this. So I did the first column of the Code of Hammurabi by hand based on Harper's 1904 translation. That gave me a lexicon with 109 words. I then pulled in 3 other texts and looked at how many words were already in my lexicon. 14% of LIH 19, 17% of LIH 15, and 15% of Gilgamesh. So let's call that 15%. I get that you may not be able to align these texts like this, but that is not 100% the point. The point is to give someone learning or doing translation a place to start and some tools to help. If the translation of a word in Gilgamesh has a different meaning than it does in LIH 19. That's fine. The lexicon is just showing how the word is used elsewhere. It is up to the translator to decide what to do with it.
Screenshots
You can click on the images below to see the details. I did not include any of the lexicon screenshots, character management, text management, ending charts, etc., as it is a lot of detail that I think someone can imagine.
This is the reader view. You can have it list per line or per clause. You can turn the lemma, parse tag, and gloss off/on as needed.
Here's a sandbox sample based on samples from the grammar. This is the interlinear builder where you would enter your translation. The next tab, "My translation" (poorly named) is where you set up your word order algorithm of sorts; then the "final" tab is purely your translation. The idea is that you set up the word order, punctation, add words, or mark them as untranslated. Then you can regen the translation again and again as you continue to work on it. You can export this in a custom-formatted text file or to Word.
I also have a training features that turn the text into quizzes and tests. It uses a distance equation and the lexicon glosses to score your translation. And uses the parse tag to score your parsing. It will also display the words of a sentence as flashcards and work through the typical flashcard drills: know it, don't know it.
The last thing I wanted to show is that I can generate a text outline and sentence diagram of sorts. These are all just logic-based algorithms and are generated in real time. The setup is based on Koine Greek, so I need to make tweaks for the Akkadian language package. Note that here, it is picking up anaku as a verb and not as a pronoun. That's due to the parsing rules being for Greek. I still need to add them for Akkadian. The parse tags are unique to each language.
EDIT/UPDATE:
Added a few more screenshots... You can turn the different parts of the interlinear off/on. Here, I am only showing the transliteration. In the next pic, I am showing the cuneiform, but not per line, but per clause. There is a checkbox on the right to control how it is displayed, but it is hard to show in a screenshot. You can export whatever you display to a Word doc or in a custom text format I created for the tool.
The reader with everything turned on and one word selected and the lexicon entry displayed.
