Every ancient language that has ever been deciphered needed an anchor. Usually that’s a bilingual text, like the Rosetta Stone, or a known relative to compare it to. Linear A, the writing system of the Bronze Age Minoan civilisation on the Greek island of Crete, has neither.

Linear A is described as a “language isolate” because it has no confirmed link to any known language, living or dead. As such, it has posed a significant challenge for linguists over the past century.

Etruscan, a language of Italy that was used before the rise of the Roman Empire, has fared only slightly better. A partial vocabulary has been collected from short funerary inscriptions, but its grammar and deeper meaning still elude linguists.

Both languages are exactly the kind of puzzle that AI has recently been pulled into – not by replacing the linguists, but by supercharging their hunches. So does AI actually stand a chance of finishing what a century of human effort hasn’t?

A recent case shows both the appeal and the catch. In June 2026, a self-taught AI engineer and amateur linguist claimed a breakthrough on Linear A. It started from a single guess that one unknown word in a prayer inscription derived from a Semitic root meaning “to dwell” or “to inhabit”.

He then used AI-built programming scripts to test that sound-pattern against the rest of a collected Linear A corpus. He was reportedly able to assign values to 40 signs and compiled a 408-word lexicon, showing – in his view – that Linear A is an extinct member of the Semitic language group, which encompasses languages such as Hebrew and Aramaic.

The need for creativity

It’s worth being precise about what AI did and didn’t do here. It didn’t have the idea. The engineer did.

The AI was the research assistant. It rapidly cross-checked a human hypothesis against thousands of characters, work that would have taken a human months by hand. That division of labour is the pattern currently worth paying attention to, far more than any single claim that is still under review.

So where does AI actually help, and where does it hit a wall? It’s genuinely strong at large-scale pattern testing. It can check whether a hunch about one sign or word holds up across an entire archive in minutes instead of years. It can spot repeated sequences a human eye would miss, and restore damaged or fragmentary inscriptions by predicting likely missing characters.

AI also does something distinct called “cross-lingual transfer”, where a model trained on a known language can sometimes infer patterns in a closely related unknown one. This is similar to how knowing Spanish helps you guess at Portuguese.

Researchers have already used this kind of approach successfully on scripts such as Ugaritic, where the language family is known. Ugaritic is an extinct Semitic language, spoken during the late Bronze Age (about 1300-1190BC) in the ancient coastal city of Ugarit (in what is now Syria).

But there’s a hard ceiling: statistical pattern matching can’t manufacture meaning out of nothing. It needs an anchor – a known language family, or a bilingual text – to tell it which patterns are meaningful and which are coincidence.

Linear A and Etruscan are hard precisely because that anchor is missing or incomplete, and no amount of computing power invents one from scratch.

Scant evidence

With a large enough corpus, an AI model could hypothetically get fluent enough to converse with a Minoan or Etruscan speaker on the model’s own statistical terms. This means that it could recognise repeating patterns of words and other structural units of a language that would allow the AI model to repurpose the terms in a different context. One that might approximate a limited conversation, at least on the surface.

But the AI system still wouldn’t be able to hand a human a translation, because fluency and meaning aren’t the same thing here. The model can learn which signs follow which, and which words cluster together, without ever knowing what any of them actually refer to.

This is also why verifying any AI-assisted claim about these languages is so difficult, and it’s a problem bigger than any one case. Normally, you’d check a proposed translation or interpretation against native speakers, other texts or expert consensus built up over decades. None of that exists for a genuinely undeciphered language. Short of a time machine, there’s no way to check.

Small surviving corpora make this worse: Linear A’s entire surviving corpus is about 7,500 characters, short enough to fit on a single screen and with that little data, almost any hypothesis can find scattered matches to support it.

That is why claims in this space lean so heavily on independent expert scrutiny and peer-review rather than statistical confidence scores. It is also why “AI found a pattern” and “AI found the correct meaning” are very different claims that are easy to blur together.

None of this means that AI is a dead end for these languages. Quite the opposite: it’s a real accelerant, able to compress years of manual cross-referencing into mere minutes and let more people attempt these problems than institutional resources ever allowed.

But it doesn’t remove the two ingredients that decipherment has always required. One is a genuine comparative anchor. The other is rigorous human review, to tell a real breakthrough from an appealing coincidence.

Until one of those shows up for Linear A or Etruscan, AI’s role in deciphering languages will stay what it is today: a very fast assistant to a very old, very human puzzle.

Julia Roberts was seen with one of her three kids, daughter Hazel, while out in Sun Valley, Idaho  on Monday.

The 58-year-old actress – who attended her niece Emma Roberts’s wedding on Saturday – and her 21-year-old mini-me coordinated in casual outfits, with the former wearing a knee-length, long-sleeved, button-up black dress.

She added black flip-flips and coordinating square-shaped sunglasses while tucking a large, light-colored clutch under her arm.

Hazel, whom Julia shares with longtime husband Danny Moder, wore black and white checked capris, a black T-shirt, and black cardigan with dark ballet flats. 

Like her mom, she also wore onyx sunglasses during the outing. 

In addition to Hazel, Julia and Moder share Hazel’s twin brother Phinnaeus, and son Henry, 18. 

Roberts wore a knee-length, long-sleeved, button-up black dress

The Pretty Woman star’s niece Emma said ‘I do’ to Cody John in a romantic ceremony over the weekend.

Emma’s father is Eric Roberts, brother to Julia.  

The 35-year-old American Horror Story actress and John, 36, exchanged vows outdoors at the actor’s family estate in Sun Valley, per TMZ and Page Six.

The bride, who previously called off an engagement to Evan Peters, wore a custom white gown with asymmetrical sleeves by Monique Lhuillier, as reported by Vogue.

A source told Page Six that the 45-minute nuptials took place outdoors in 95-degree weather. 

The outlet reported that Emma’s five-year-old son Rhodes, whom she shares with  ex-boyfriend Garrett Hedlund, walked her down the aisle. 

Julia and Moder married in 2002, before welcoming their brood.

They celebrated their 24th wedding anniversary on July 4, with the Stepmom star marking the occasion on Instagram.

She added black flip-flips and coordinating square-shaped sunglasses while tucking a large, light-colored clutch under her arm

Roberts attended her niece Emma Roberts’s wedding to Cody John on Saturday

The Oscar winner has been married to Danny Moder since 2002

Advertisement

She shared a snapshot smiling alongside her husband as they wore matching Ray Ban sunglasses.

The caption read, ‘TWENTY FOUR. MORE MORE MORE.’

And in early February the actress posted an Instagram snap locked in an embrace with her husband to commemorate his birthday, which was January 31.

She wrote in the caption, ‘My fav day. My fav man. #131 #WLF.’

In spring 2025, Moder marked Mother’s Day by sharing an Instagram photo of his wife and their three kids, writing, ‘Mothers make the coolest stuff. Love these guys.’ 

Alliance MLA David Honeyford said that the figures show many people aren’t aware of the changes

Only 274 people availed of an extended grace period when parking on-street in Lisburn City Centre over five months during a pilot scheme which was extended earlier this month.

In early July, Infrastructure Minister Liz Kimmins confirmed that drivers in Newry and Lisburn who have paid for on-street parking will continue to have up to one hour to return to their cars after their paid parking period expires.

The one-hour grace period was initially introduced as a pilot in late 2025 to provide greater flexibility for people visiting local shops, cafés, and other city centre businesses. During this pilot scheme, more than 1,000 drivers availed of the extra flexibility it provided.

In her response to a written Assembly question from Alliance Lagan Valley MLA David Honeford, Infrastructure Minister Liz Kimmins confirmed that between 8 December 2025 and 30 May 2026, 274 motorists in Lisburn availed of the extended grace period, with 898 in Newry over the same timeframe.

Responding to Mr Honeyford, the Minister said: “Throughout the course of the initial pilot, officials engaged with a range of relevant stakeholders to gather qualitative insights across local communities and businesses. While the feedback received was generally positive, officials were advised that some were not aware of the pilot.

“In response, a number of targeted communication measures were implemented, including the development and installation of informative stickers on all pay and display machines across Lisburn and Newry, and the introduction of messaging on the JustPark app.

“Traffic Attendants do not record vehicles that are parked in compliance with Controlled Parking Zone (CPZ) restrictions; they only log instances where no valid Pay and Display ticket is displayed, before issuing a Penalty Charge Notice (PCN). Consequently, comparable data for parking numbers during the pilot and in previous years is not available.”

The Minister also confirmed that enforcement data indicates a modest reduction in PCNs, falling from 3,274 to 3,119, largely due to fewer fines being handed out after expiry of paid time at a pay and display bay.

She added: “Operational observations also indicate that motorists were aware of the pilot and did avail of the extended grace period, resulting in a change in parking behaviour in both cities through improvements in compliance.”

Mr Honeford said: “This is a really positive initiative that gives people more time to shop, grab a coffee or support local businesses in Lisburn. But when only 274 motorists have used it over six months, we have to ask why.

“The problem is simple. There is no clear signage on the streets or parking machines, and the app doesn’t clearly show people their return time.

“Good ideas only work if people know about them. I’ve written to the Minister asking for better signage and improvements to the app so people can actually benefit from this change.

“We need to move beyond making announcements and make sure policies are properly implemented so they make a real difference for people and for our local businesses.”

For all the latest news, visit the Belfast Live homepage here and sign up to our daily newsletter here.

At the height of the 2015 refugee crisis, a moment of human kindness captured the world’s attention. A young Syrian mother, newly landed by small boat on a beach in Greece, was struggling to feed her child when Militsa (Emilia) Kamvisi, who was then 83, offered to help. The two friends Kamvisi had been sitting with on a nearby bench – Maritsa Mavrapidou and Efstratia Mavrapidou, 85 and 89 respectively – joined in.

A photographer recorded the scene and the three grannies from Lesbos, as they came to be known, became instant symbols of hospitality and welcome. As Kamvisi put it at the time: “What did I do? I didn’t do anything. I just wanted to help the girl, who was wet and tired.”

The poignancy of their gesture was underscored by the fact that all three women were themselves children of refugees. Maritsa Mavrapidou later explained: “Our mothers came here as refugees from Turkey, just across the way, and they were just girls at the time. They came without clothes, with nothing. That’s why we feel sorry for the migrants.”

Their mothers arrived in Greece as part of what historians call the 1922-24 Asia Minor forced displacement. Following the collapse of the Ottoman empire and the Greco-Turkish war that ensued, Greece and the newly founded state of Turkey agreed to the exchange and compulsory displacement of their religious minorities. Around 1.2 million people were expelled from Turkey to Greece and 360,000, from Greece to Turkey.

In my new book, A Century of Asia Minor Refugees in Greece: Flight, Fight, and Fraternity, I show how refugee memory and identity changes through time as it passes from one generation to the next. Refugee memories pass through the different stages of trauma, from silence, to long periods during which memories remain dormant and, ultimately, to a reawakening.

Silent witness

Between 2019 and 2020, I travelled throughout Greece conducting over 260 oral history interviews with refugees from Asia Minor and their descendants of the second, third and fourth generations. Asia Minor, also known as Anatolia, refers to the landmass that makes up the major part of western Turkey today.

Among other questions, I wanted to examine how older migrants define their own identities. I was also interested in how they think about new arrivals.

In 2019, I visited the village of Skala Loutron on Lesbos, a settlement originally built in 1931 for 25 refugee families. Nobody spoke of being from Asia Minor.

Dimitris Papachrisos, a second-generation descendant born in 1952, is the president of the local refugee association and the 1922 Refugee Memorial Museum. He recalled the silence and ignorance of his parents’ generation, describing the history of the village as a well-kept secret among traumatised refugees.

“There was no discussion about who is from Asia Minor and who isn’t, it was something forgotten that nobody talked about. Each person would look to survive,” he explained.

The Greek civil war, which lasted from 1946 to 1949, resulted in entrenched political divisions and social tensions. Refugee descendants struggled to integrate into Greek society. Government policy pushed refugees to give up their own languages and dialects, subsuming their different histories into one national narrative. This silenced any public expression of that past. As a result, until the 1960s, refugee memory only existed in the family.

Neos Milotopos is another village established in 1924 by Cappadocian refugees, most of them from the same village in Turkey. One third-generation descendant, Sophia Kosmoglou, told me her great-grandparents had been massacred in a church in Cappadocia. Her grandparents survived. But nobody spoke of it.

She described how food and culture carried what words could not. “The cuisine is active, meaning we didn’t ever have any pauses,” she said. The Cappadocian food tradition, and her later involvement in the cultural association, led her to discover her family history. The second generation – her parents – threw themselves into the task of surviving; they had to find a way to live, to eat and to raise kids. It was trauma and silence, not stories, that marked this turbulent historical period.

Generational trauma

Between 1967 and 1974, Greece was ruled by a military junta. In 1974, a junta-backed coup against the president of Cyprus triggered the Turkish invasion of Cyprus, which brought the regime to its knees. This ushered in a new era of democracy, and saw the Third Hellenic Republic established.

Shaped by this era of ever-increasing social unrest, mobilisation and the international “memory boom” of the 1980s, third-generation refugee descendants began to dig into their families’ histories. Reflecting on this collective reawakening, Kosmoglou said that the “trauma is still present”.

This chimes with what Stratis Balaskas, whom I interviewed on Lesbos, told me. His father had arrived on the island as an unaccompanied minor at the age of six in 1922. Balaskas is Lesbos-born and yet he told me that still today, he feels he is only on the island because “the boat brought us here”.

In the 1980s, Balaskas went to Turkey to find his ancestral home. Within a day, he had found his ancestral home and recovered belongings his family had left behind. The caretaker of his grandfather’s fields, the current owner of the house, had kept them for years. When Balaskas brought them back to Lesbos, his father said: “Take them, keep them, they are yours, they are not mine. I don’t want you to tell me anything again.”

Between 1930 and 1975, scholars at the Centre for Asia Minor Studies in Athens conducted 5,000 interviews with refugees, a selection of which is recorded in the five-volume Greek language book, Η Έξοδος (The Exodus). Many said the same thing: they didn’t wish to talk about or hear of what they had experienced. Living through it was enough.

Younger generations, by contrast, feel a greater urgency to collect stories before they are lost. Niki Chontronikola, who was born on Lesbos in 1992, began building her family tree at the age of 14. From her father, she told me she had “gotten the message, to feel proud”.

By the time her generation came of age, Greece’s membership of the European Union and the country’s abrupt shift from an emigration to an immigration country in the 1990s, through to Europe’s 2015 migration crisis, had created an environment of globalisation, secularisation, Europeanisation and multiculturalism. Old distinctions no longer had the same strength; hybrid identities were emerging.

Reflecting on this multiplicity, Chontronikola said: “When I’m here, I want to say I’m from Asia Minor. When I’m in the rest of Greece, I say I’m from Lesbos. And when I’m abroad, I’m forced to say Greece and then Lesbos.”

Almost 60 years her senior, Vasos Vogiatzoglou captured this same century-long journey in a single confession. As the “oglou” suffix of his surname makes clear, he was born in 1935 in Nea Ionia, one of Athens’s best-known Asia Minor refugee settlements, to refugee parents.

“When I was a kid at school,” he told me, “I used to mutter my last name. I was ashamed to say ‘oglou’. I’m proud of it now.”

The afterlife of the Greek-Turkish population exchange can be traced in other cases of forced displacement, from the 1947 Partition of India to the 1948 Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In light of ongoing wars, migration crises and climate displacement, the question of whether or not to remember – and quite how memory and identity are shaped and reshaped – echoes with new urgency

The first 100 people through the door will receive free wings

Wingstop is celebrating National Wing Day by giving out free wings in Belfast.

The chicken chain is hosting its biggest ever chicken wing giveaway, handing out 20,000 free wings across the UK and Ireland on Wednesday.

The first 100 guests through the doors of the Boucher Crescent restaurant will receive a free portion of 10 wings, no purchase necessary.

Rather than picking locations at random, Wingstop analysed where fans order the most wings across the UK and Ireland, revealing the country’s biggest wing-loving communities, with Belfast ranking 11th on the top 20 list.

Wingstop opened its doors for the first time in Northern Ireland in March this year, before opening a second store in May.

Chris Sherriff, CEO at Wingstop UKI, said: “National Wing Day is the perfect moment for us to connect with our community.

“Nobody loves wings like our fans, so we looked at where the obsession runs deepest and decided those communities deserved something back.

“Bringing 1,000 free wings to Belfast is our way of celebrating the people who have made Wingstop a local favourite. Thank you!”

Advertisement

The promotion is available on a first-come, first-served basis on Wednesday July 29 only.

The first 100 guests in line at opening time across will receive a ten-piece wing portion, hand-sauced and tossed in any of Wingstop’s iconic flavours, from Lemon Pepper and Garlic Parmesan to the fiery Atomic and sweet-heat Mango Habanero.

Doors open at 11:00 AM across all participating sites and guests are encouraged to head down early to secure their spot.

Wingstop has two further locations in Northern Ireland in Dundonald and Craigavon, with plans to open another spot in the heart of Belfast city centre.

For all the latest news, visit the Belfast Live homepage here and sign up to our daily newsletter here.

The PM is to introduce a ‘fundamental shakeup’ to technical education

Prime Minister Andy Burnham is set to unveil a raft of sweeping education reforms aiming to tackle the youth unemployment crisis and put technical education ‘on an equal footing’ with academic routes.

The Makerfield MP has long been a champion of technical education, launching the proposed Greater Manchester Baccalaureate during his tenure as Greater Manchester mayor which would ‘guide students’ towards technical roles with local employers.

And this latest national policy announcement follows a report delivered by a former Labour minister on the so-called ‘lost generation’, which found that qualifications alone are ‘no longer enough to secure a good job’, with around an estimated million 16-to-24 year olds not in education, employment or training.

Click here to get the biggest stories straight to your inbox in our Daily Newsletter

Alan Milburn’s report published at the end of May painted what Downing Street called a ‘stark picture’ of a ‘system that too often leaves young people leaving school without the skills, experience or connections they need to step into the world of work’.

The Prime Minister is to prioritise funding into technical education and establish routes which will provide students from year 10 onwards, so that there are ‘no dead ends’ for young people coming out of the education system.

From September 2028, year 10 students will have the chance to combine core academic subjects with a technical education and work experience linked to available jobs in their area, ‘skilling them up with the specific knowledge and capabilities that local employers need’.

Set to be part of the government’s devolution programme, local leaders, schools and employers will shape the new pathways, rather than a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach ‘designed in Whitehall’.

The reforms aim to do away with the technical route being treated as an ‘optional add-on’ or a ‘less valued alternative’ to the academic path.

And they are expected to shape Ofsted inspections too, with changes to the way schools are measured to increase recognition for places providing ‘high quality technical education’.

The Prime Minister said: “For too long in this country, students have been told that you must take the academic path to do well and to be respected.

“The whole school system has been built around it and that has let down young people seeking technical qualifications.

Advertisement

“I want an education system based on parity between academic and technical which gives all young people a clear path in life. From today, Britain will value the hard hat every bit as much as the graduation cap.

“In a fundamental change to the education system, we will introduce prestigious routes that will give students the chance to combine the core academic subjects with the skills, technical knowledge and experience they need to get quality, well-paid jobs where they live.

“My message to young people is this – whether you choose construction, coding or classics, or maths, manufacturing or mechanics, you’ll get the skills you need and be given the respect you deserve.

“Fixing the youth unemployment crisis in Britain will require a major shake-up in how we do things – and that’s what this government will do. I want to ensure that our education system leaves no dead ends for our young people.”

Advertisement

The measures have been praised by other regional mayors – but the shadow education secretary Laura Trott told PA that the measures ‘don’t come close’ to ‘undoing the damage Labour has done’ to the job market.

“Labour measures are making it too expensive to hire young people, and destroying jobs with their jobs tax and employer red tape,” she said.

General Secretary of the NAHT school leaders union Paul Whiteman said: “We welcome the ambition to strengthen technical and vocational education…

Advertisement

“However, this announcement sets out a direction of travel rather than detailed proposals, and schools will need much greater clarity about what it means in practice and over funding.”

General Secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders Pepe Di’Iasio said they are pleased the Government is treating this as an “urgent priority”, but the timing of the announcement is “unfortunate”.

He said: “To make major educational policy announcements in the middle of the summer holiday is wrong, particularly when there is so little detail.”