Fear in Akkadian Texts: New Digital Perspectives on Lexical Semantics

Svärd, Saana; Alstola, Tero; Jauhiainen, Heidi; Sahala, Aleksi; Lindén, Krister

doi:10.1163/9789004430761_019

Cited by 2 publications

(5 citation statements)

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“…This suggests that a deeper analysis focusing on one of these emotions and investigating the words within that field could reveal a more nuanced understanding of how emotions were embodied in Akkadian (and more specifically Neo-Assyrian) texts. Variability within an emotion category could be related to a more complex usage of emotion words than indicated by the principal emotional categories used in the current study, which has been demonstrated by the complex usage of 'fear' words in a recent study using similar methods 7 .…”

Section: Variability Of Embodiment Of Emotions Within Emotion Categoriesmentioning

confidence: 56%

“…Whilst a general rule is that verbs appear at the end of a sentence, this is not the case in every text (and not every text has a verb preserved). Scholars investigating co-occurrences in Akkadian datasets therefore prefer to use window sizes to define the idea of how 'close' a word is to the target word 7,9,20,24,26 . In effect, this method ignores syntax, which runs the risk of identifying false collocates that are actually words that span sentences or line breaks in the texts.…”

Section: Word Embeddingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…To evaluate how individuals in distant cultures-in time, geography, and customs-may have experienced emotions, it is possible to analyse emotion expressions in written documents, which have been dutifully compiled and analysed in many languages 6 . Semantic analysis of text corpora from the premodern era can give us a glimpse into the emotional lives of civilisations that have long ago ceased to be [7][8][9] . Comparison of emotion expressions across languages is however difficult.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The study of emotions in texts written in Akkadian is a recent development and has focused on individual lexemes, domains of emotions, or on specific text genres 7,[11][12][13][14][15] . The specific topic of the embodiment of emotions in Akkadian has only recently been discussed 16,17 .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Many are based on the methods developed by corpus linguists working with modern language corpora, but methods such as word co-occurrences and vector space analysis that have been tailored to the unique challenges of Akkadian datasets (such as a lack of punctuation and a tendency to be highly repetitive), have recently been developed 8,19 . These tools can now be used to explore complex topics, such as cultural associations of specific words or groups of words as well as emotion expressions in languages in the ancient Near East 7,8,14,20,21 .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Embodied Emotions in Ancient Neo-Assyrian Texts Revealed by Bodily Mapping of Emotional Semantics

Lahnakoski,

Bennett,

Nummenmaa

et al. 2024

Preprint

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Autonomic activity during emotions is subjectively felt in the body via interoceptive and somatosensory pathways resulting in emotion specific bodily sensations. Here we utilized this relationship and computational linguistic methods to map a representation of emotions in ancient texts. We analysed Neo-Assyrian texts from 934–612 BCE to discern consistent relationships between linguistic expressions related to both emotions and bodily sensations. We then computed statistical regularities between emotion terms and words referring to body parts, and back-projected the resulting emotion body part relationships on a standard body template, yielding bodily sensation maps for the emotions. We found consistent embodied patterns for eighteen distinct emotions. Hierarchical clustering revealed four main clusters of bodily emotion categories, two clusters of mainly positive emotions, one large cluster of mainly negative emotions and one of empathy and schadenfreude. These results reveal the historical use of embodied language pertaining to human emotions. Our data-driven tool projecting emotional lexical spaces on a human body provides a novel method for comparing textual embodiment patterns across different languages and cultures across time.

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Section: Variability Of Embodiment Of Emotions Within Emotion Categoriesmentioning

confidence: 56%

Section: Word Embeddingsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Embodied Emotions in Ancient Neo-Assyrian Texts Revealed by Bodily Mapping of Emotional Semantics

Lahnakoski,

Bennett,

Nummenmaa

et al. 2024

Preprint

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Research on Reconstruction and Cultural Inheritance of Ancient Literature under Digital Expression

Luo

2024

Applied Mathematics and Nonlinear Sciences

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It is one of the ascendant research topics to study ancient literature by means of digital humanities technology, to construct the historical scene of literature, to restore the writer’s creative prosperity and to excavate the era value of ancient books. The digital reconstruction of ancient books has greatly impacted the preservation and inheritance of ancient literary resources. As an important carrier of ancient literature, ancient books have many texts that need to be identified, and it isn’t easy to disseminate in the information age due to their text form. This paper uses computer image processing methods to handle broken ancient text and obtain a more clearly visible digital form. At the same time, a method for document correction based on neural networks is proposed for certain texts that have occlusions and distortions. In several sets of experiments, it is shown that the document correction F1 value of the model in this paper is significantly ahead of the mainstream model with 0.903. Applying the digital platform for ancient books to the member groups of the Association for the Study of Ancient Literature, 81.5% of the respondents strongly agree with Q7, “I think the digital platform for ancient books is very conducive to cultural inheritance”, and the total of disagreeing and strongly disagreeing only accounts for 5%. It can be assumed that the ancient books digital platform designed in this paper and its document correction and recognition function have been widely recognized, and the ancient books digital platform can be applied to the digitization of ancient literature documents, daily reading, and storage of texts, text recognition, etc., contributing to the automation of ancient literature research, book storage and dissemination, and electronic reading. Based on this, the future database of ancient books should not only be a query and retrieval tool but also help scholars to make multidimensional statistics, comparisons, and analyses so as to generate new knowledge and ideas.

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Fear in Akkadian Texts: New Digital Perspectives on Lexical Semantics

Abstract: This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC 4.0 license. chapter 18

Cited by 2 publications

References 4 publications

Embodied Emotions in Ancient Neo-Assyrian Texts Revealed by Bodily Mapping of Emotional Semantics

Embodied Emotions in Ancient Neo-Assyrian Texts Revealed by Bodily Mapping of Emotional Semantics

Research on Reconstruction and Cultural Inheritance of Ancient Literature under Digital Expression

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