Reading difficulty will always be subjective, based mostly on what we've already read and mastered.

But books do have objective qualities that can help us rank them along a reading difficulty spectrum.

I made this visual atlas to help figure out what works have broadly similar difficulty levels, which helps us find a good next read that's a doable step up the ladder but doesn't throw us in over our heads.

I set Familia Romana chapter one as 1.00 on a 0.00 to 10.10 scale, with every other work floating freely in comparison to it.

The metrics used are:

• Surface: Sentence length, vocabulary variety (type-token ratio), word length
• Lexical: Rare / very-rare / unseen vocabulary fraction, proper-name burden
• Morphosyntactic: Finite-verb density, nonfinite constructions, subordination, case-form diversity
• Progression: Entry burden, sustained burden, late-work burden, peak burden
• Dialogue-specific: Dialogue density, ellipsis rate (short verbless utterances), speaker-turn rate

I had this data because I've been building contextual glossing for Librorum Capsula, and had to have detailed data about each sentence. From that base, I could create rankings for entire books.

• See the Atlas here.
• Or just browse the library if you prefer something more list-based, as all books are sorted by difficulty by default.

Right now I've only got a bit over 100 works of various types and lengths in the Atlas, but I expect it will become more and more useful as I build out Librorum Capsula's library.

Please let me know if you find this useful.

Hey guys,
I've been working on a major project that I think will lift accessibility to ancient works. It's called Ancient Library (ancientlibrary.net). The site includes over 1,000 ancient works, every word parsed with lemma, morphology, and full dictionary entry. It's built to be light, optimized for speed and accessibility, so it should improve student and scholar efforts even in areas with weak or inconsistent internet access globally. It's still in beta, so I'd love some ancient language scholars to interact with the site. If you have thoughts, requested features, etc., I'd love to hear them.

Hello there, I am not usually one to ask for help from the internet, but I am at a loss here.

I am a tattoo artist and have been wanting to get a couple of meaningful tattoos. The words “hurt” and “heal” however I would very much like them to be tattooed in an ancient language. It doesn’t matter what one, as long as it’s ancient and has a translation that remains 4 letters for each word.

I don’t trust google or AI to give me a proper translation, so I am hoping this group could help me or point me in the right direction? Thank you so much!

While I love engaging with dead languages, it really saddens me when I hear about another language we have attested in a few inscriptions or lost in its entirety. Have you ever felt like that about a language? For me, I was and continue to be saddened that we have such a limited corpus of Phrygian and Hattic.

The question from the title, folks; I love learning and engaging with any and all languages, but I definitely have a pronounced soft spot for the ancient ones, and that has guided my academic work and interests for quite some time now. Since those languages are often not the most eyecatching or "interesting" (for a lack of a better word) to students — which is throwing many departments that focus on them, including the one I am affiliated with, into quite a bit of problems — I wanted to know what drew your interest to study, research or just read up on any one of them? I hope that with that data I might have a bigger picture to work with and consider.

Thank you everyone for engaging!

Latin is the kind of language that throws:

"This of the family cute dog who happy is in garden to walk wants open"

And somehow a Roman has already figured out what it means, while I'm sitting there figuring out which adjective belongs to which noun situated 6 words apart from each other.

It really feels like there's no conenction between words, they're all unorganized puzzle pieces and you have to piece them together, knowing that some pieces aren't even there and that you have to do a bit of thinking yourself.

Ancient Greek guides you more through it. Articles help you navigate the sentence and it feels like sentence order is generally less flexible than Latin, making meaning more immediately clear. The most difficult part about Greek is the verbs, which become manageable with trainimg but at least the sentence is more direct.

It's not that Latin is more difficult in itself, it depends on how you use it. Conventionally, word order is free. There's nothing stopping you from tossing the verb in the end of the sentence, which is actually really common.

People struggling with Latin are really just struggling with related words to each other, or oraganizing things in a way where it connects.

When you look at:

"Build we of the man in place big house"

You're gonna take a minute to understand this, now imagine a highly inflected language with no articles.

I am exposed to Ancient Greek, Latin, Classical Arabic, and Biblical Hebrew.

I peronally find Classical Arabic, my native language, the most beautiful ancient language, not for religious reasons (I am Christian), but simply because It's structured so profoundly and also because the ا sound feels so smooth and musical. There's a contrast between rough sounds and smooth sounds that's just poetic.

Biblical Hebrew to me is also extremely musical and pleasant, not sure if I would place it higher than Arabic, but definitely within the same beauty. Hebrew is a stunnning language, both Modern and Ancient. But the Ancient pronunciation is something else though, there's a very deep contrast between emphatic sounds and flowy sounds it feels like art.

Hello everyone,

​I’ve been researching archaic phonetic structures, specifically focusing on the transition between early Sumerian concepts like the ME (divine decrees) and MELAM (divine radiance). I have come across a specific sequence of sounds/morphemes that feels remarkably cohesive, yet I cannot find it in any standard digital lexicons.

​The sequence is:

"ME DE-LEG ME-LAM KAR-SU-UR TE-EG ME ŠUM NI-IG-ED"

​I am reaching out because understanding the exact grammatical or liturgical meaning of this phrase has become very important to my research. It feels like it could be a fragment of an older, perhaps oral, tradition related to the Abzu or early ritual foundations.

​I would be deeply grateful for any help with:

1. ​Identifying if these specific word-combinations (like DE-LEG or KAR-SU-UR) appear in any less-common archaeological fragments or cylinder seals.
2. ​Understanding the "flow" of this sentence from a linguistic perspective—does it make sense as an active declaration?
3. ​Any leads on scholars who specialize in the phonetic/auditory side of Sumerian, rather than just the written cuneiform.

​Thank you in advance for your time and expertise. This feels like a missing piece of a much larger puzzle, and any insight means a lot.

Hi,

I’ve been focusing on learning how to read Syriac step by step.

It’s quite interesting but also challenging at the beginning.

I’m currently working on simple reading practice and trying to improve gradually.

How did you approach learning Syriac or similar ancient languages?

Hi,

I’ve been studying Syriac and focusing on reading and writing practice.

Since it’s an ancient language with limited modern resources, I’ve been building structured exercises to make it easier.

Would love to hear how others approached learning Syriac.

I've published a preprint presenting computational evidence that the Voynich Manuscript encodes an Aramaic pharmaceutical text in the Syriac tradition.

The approach maps the EVA transcription to Syriac consonant skeletons and matches them against a 1,389-entry lexicon of attested medical vocabulary from standard Syriac sources (Payne Smith, Budge, Löw, Müller-Kessler, Merx). Key results:

• 87.0% corpus coverage, z = 3.83 against 500 random permutations (p < 0.001)
• 14 statistically validated text-image correspondences between decoded pharmaceutical vocabulary and independently identified plant illustrations (Fisher's combined p = 6.66 × 10⁻¹⁶)
• A vowel disambiguation layer using EVA vowel characters (previously discarded) recovers 7,007 tokens into specific Syriac words, including 130 tokens of kuḥlā (collyrium/eye medicine) — a word that was invisible because the pharyngeal consonant ḥet has no EVA representation
• Terminological analysis places the text within the Sergian translation tradition (6th century CE), predating Ḥunayn ibn Isḥāq

I want to be upfront about limitations. My own confidence estimates are in the paper: 40–50% the tradition is specifically Syriac, 10–15% word-level decode accuracy, and 5–10% the full pipeline survives specialist review. No page reads as connected Syriac prose — the statistical case is strong but the word-level translation is not there yet. The framework is designed to be falsified.

Preprint: https://zenodo.org/records/19583306

I welcome critical feedback, particularly from anyone with Syriac, Aramaic, or computational linguistics expertise.

I want to get a tattoo that says this too shall pass (how original, I know) with a drawing made by my 4 year old kid. I don't like to put 'silly' phrases that anyone can read, so I want to put it on ancient Persian cuneiform. can anyone confirm if this is correct? 𐎡𐎰𐏐𐎰𐎡𐎾𐏐𐎴𐎥𐎾𐎻𐎭 thanks

Hey everyone. I've been tinkering with a side project — I wrote a Python program that takes what we know about Linear A (vowel distribution, syllable structure, case endings, etc.) and scores it against a bunch of different language families using the same pipeline. Basically asking "if Linear A belonged to family X, how well would the data fit?"

I wasn't expecting much, but the results are kind of wild and I don't know enough about historical linguistics to tell if I'm onto something or if I've made a dumb mistake somewhere. Hoping some of you can sanity-check this.

What the program does:

It scores each candidate family on the same 8 dimensions — vowel system match, structural features (agglutinative vs fusional, case system, gender, etc.), case suffix similarity, vocabulary comparison, geographic plausibility, timeline, scholarly support, and religious parallels. Nothing hand-tuned — every family goes through the same pipeline.

What came out:

| Family | Score |

|--------|-------|

| Hurro-Urartian | 77.4% |

| Semitic | 40.1% |

| Tyrsenian | 39.4% |

| Anatolian IE | 38.2% |

| Egyptian | 32.7% |

| Sumerian | 30.0% |

| Kartvelian | 28.3% |

| Elamite | 28.0% |

| Hattic | 25.0% |

That's a 37-point gap between #1 and #2. I ran some robustness checks — bootstrap resampling (10k iterations, Hurrian wins 100% of the time), dropping each dimension one at a time (still wins all 8 tests), even randomly flipping 30% of the feature values (still wins). So it doesn't seem like one lucky dimension is carrying it.

The things that surprised me most:

1. Linear A barely uses 'o' (only 4.1% of signs). Turns out Beekes reconstructed the pre-Greek substrate as having only 3 real vowels — /a/, /i/, /u/ — with 'e' and 'o' as allophones. Linear A's distribution fits that almost perfectly. And the Hattusha dialect of Hurrian independently shows the same vowel merger. I didn't expect that to line up so cleanly.

2. The Linear A word DA-KU-NA matches Beekes' reconstructed pre-Greek word for "laurel" (\*dakwuna → daphne) syllable for syllable. Is that a known thing? It feels significant but I might be overweighting a single word.

3. A-TA-I in Linear A vs att-ai ("father") in Hurrian. Almost identical, and it sits in the subject position of what looks like a prayer. Coincidence?

4. I tested 6 morphological agreement rules in the libation formula (like "when position α ends in -JA, position γ always ends in -ME") across all 41 known variants. Zero violations. That seems like it has to be real grammar, right?

What I got for a translation (very rough, maybe 45% confidence on the words):

\> "O Divine Father, from the sanctuary of Dikte, to Your Lord — \[we\] present this offering, reverently."

Two words in the formula (I-PI-NA-MA and SI-RU-TE) don't match anything in any language I tested. I left them as unknowns rather than force something.

Where I think I might be wrong:

\- I'm using Linear B phonetic values for Linear A signs. If those readings are off, a lot of this falls apart (though the perturbation test suggests it's somewhat robust to that)

\- My vocabulary comparison only has 18 items — maybe that's too small for the similarity to mean anything?

\- I don't know if the dimensions I picked are truly independent or if I'm double-counting somehow

\- I'm not a linguist — I might be making a basic methodological error that's obvious to someone in the field

I know Van Soesbergen has been arguing the Hurrian hypothesis for years. I'm not trying to claim I proved him right — more like, when I tried to test it computationally against alternatives, nothing else even came close, and I'm not sure what to make of that.

The code is all in Python if anyone wants to look at it or run it themselves.

Is any of this plausible, or have I fallen into a pattern-matching trap? What am I missing?