Jihatsu Research Unit
TIAR Fellow
MIYAGAWA So Associate Professor,
Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences
Bridging ancient languages like Meroitic with AI to give endangered voices a future
Endangered languages and ancient scripts risk being lost forever once their speakers or decipherers are gone.
By combining large language models with linguistics, I am developing AI systems that can read, translate, and help teach endangered and undeciphered ancient languages, including Ancient Egyptian, Coptic, the still only partially deciphered Meroitic script, and endangered Ryukyuan languages.
I hope this technology will help record and pass on minority languages and lost scripts worldwide, contributing to preserving humanity’s linguistic diversity for the future.
| Field of Research | Egyptology, Coptic and Meroitic Studies, Historical Linguistics, Digital Humanities, Natural Language Processing |
|---|---|
| Research Topic | Development of decipherment, machine-translation, and text-analysis technologies for undeciphered or partially deciphered ancient languages such as Ancient Egyptian, Coptic, and Meroitic, as well as endangered Ryukyuan languages, using large language models (LLMs) and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) |
| Keywords | Ancient Egyptian, Coptic, Meroitic, Japonic Languages, Endangered Languages, Large Language Models, Digital Humanities, Historical Linguistics |
| Certification Start | FY2026 |
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