MIT CSAIL's AI revives dead languages it hasn't seen before

Researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) claim to have developed a system that can decipher a lost language without knowing its relation to other languages. The team says this is a step toward a system that's able to decipher lost languages using just a few thousand words. Lost languages are more than an academic curiosity. Without them, we risk losing a body of knowledge about the people who historically spoke them. Unfortunately, most lost languages left such minimal records that scientists can't decipher the languages using conventional machine-translation algorithms.