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You send us your most ephemeral and worthless communications, and we'll carefully transcribe them into the most long-lasting medium known to man - a clay tablet.
...
Here's how it works:
Just send us a tweet or text (use the text field in the order form)
We'll carefully translate it into cuneiform
We'll stamp it on an actual clay tablet
and mail it to you.Favorite jokes? Amazing pickup lines? Your 2-star review of last summer's blockbuster?
KEEP IT FOREVER.
I dunno, the choice of Old Persian is rather questionable when everyone knows the lingua franca was Akkadian, and looking at the tablets it's pretty clear they were using a sharpened chopstick rather than reeds harvested from the banks of the Euphrates. In sum: FAIL.
(Score: 3, Informative) by bd on Monday November 09 2015, @09:29PM
The website certainly is not reassuring...
They say: We take the letters from your message and transliterate by syllable, as nearly as we can, into cuneiform.
So they don't translate to old persian but just use the persian alphabet.
Just take a look at the first example translation on the website, it is supposed to say: I know when that hotline bling that can only mean one thing
using the table in http://www.omniglot.com/writing/opcuneiform.htm [omniglot.com], the text in the clay tablet reads:
a-la-1-fa-ra-da-sa-a
ga-di-na-ma-ra-i-da-a-la-mi-fa
ra-da-sa-ra-ra-da-ta-vi-ta-ga-da
a-la-1-fa-ra-da-sa-a-ma-a-ka-na-mu
na-i-ba-ta-a-ra-ta-ga-ta-ra-va
ta-i-ta-va-ta-i-ta-va-na-za
a XX i XX ga-za-i
XX XX ra XX XX
Just from the number of letters, that just cannot be a syllabe per syllable translation.
Interestingly, the line "ala1faradasaa" appears in the first and fourth line, and a very similar line appears at the end of second
and beginning of third line with "alamifaradasaa". In line six, we have another repetition with "taitava taitava". I would guess
that this is some old-persian text. Maybe a list of items? The repetitions would be something I would not expect in prosaic text.
Propably it says something like "this idiot can't read old persian"... maybe in poetic fashion, hence the structure and repetitions.
Or am I just blind and don't see the english text?
(Score: 1) by angelosphere on Tuesday November 10 2015, @08:43PM
I was to say about the same:
the left side in the phone is definitely in no way translated in the right side on the clay. However I did not dig into it as deep as you did.
If you translate an alphabet based text, like english into a syllable based one, the text becomes shorter.
English is a bad example, like german, but lets look at the english transliteration of a Japanese text:
"O ne ga i shi ma su" ... spaces added for argument. This are 7 syllables, aka 7 signs in Japanese Kana scripts (every word broken up by a space is a syllable in Japanese). However it is 13 characters in latin alphabet.
I'm just not sure if the cuneiform are considered syllables ... at later times they where characters to.
However as my parent pointed out: the same fragments are repeated several times, which makes no sense.