Set in stone

Last Words gathers sixteen languages that nobody speaks any more and lays them out like a Roman mosaic floor: a map in tesserae, an emblem for each, and a small panel with your own name in their scripts.

What “dead” means here

A language dies when the last people who grew up speaking it are gone. Some of these vanished completely and were dug back out of the ground; others, like Coptic, still live on in a church liturgy; a few, like Old Norse or Ancient Egyptian, changed so slowly into their descendants that the line between “dead” and “grown up” is a matter of taste. We include them because the ancient form itself is no longer anyone's mother tongue.

About the sounds

No recording exists of any of these languages. Pronunciations are reconstructed from spelling habits, from how neighbours transcribed names and loanwords, from related living languages and from the sound laws that link them. Where scholars disagree, the articles say so. Treat every “say it roughly” as a respectful guess, not a recording.

About your name

The name panels follow each script's own habits: syllables for cuneiform and Linear B, consonants only for Phoenician, Ugaritic and Sabaean, one-consonant signs inside a cartouche for Egyptian, a stone edge for ogham. Ancient scribes faced the same problem with foreign names and solved it in more than one way, so these are playful transcriptions, not the only right answer.

Credits

Ancient scripts are set in Google's Noto fonts; headings in Forum by Denis Masharov; text in Alegreya Sans by Juan Pablo del Peral (Huerta Tipográfica). All are licensed under the SIL Open Font License. Coastlines come from Natural Earth (public domain) via the world-atlas package. Every mosaic is generated in your browser from hand-drawn cartoons: each stone is placed by a small program that follows the outlines, the way an ancient mosaicist laid rows along a figure.

Last Words is one of the encyclopedias in the Whyarium. It is a non-commercial hobby project; if you spot a mistake, the fault is ours, not the scholars'.