3871 entries. Last updated May 18, 2013.

Linguistics / Translation / Speech Timeline Outline

  • Eras
  • Themes

2,500,000 BCE – 8,000 BCE

<p>Map showing origin and spread of language from southern Africa.  Graphic from the journal Science and the New York Times.</p>
Evidence for the Origin of Language in Southwestern Africa
(Circa 150,000 BCE – 50,000 BCE)

8,000 BCE – 1,000 BCE

One of the Earliest Surviving Examples of Narrative Relief Sculpture and…
(Circa 3,200 BCE)

A pictographic list of titles and professions in ancient Sumeria (top), with the scribe's signature on the reverse side (bottom.) (View Larger)
The Earliest Autograph Signatures
(Circa 3,100 BCE)

<p>Ebla Tablet</p>
The Palace Archive of Ebla, Syria
(2,500 BCE – 2250)

The Urra=hubullu, currently preserved at the Louvre Museum in Paris. (View Larger)
The Earliest Known Dictionaries
(Circa 2,300 BCE)

Sides A (left) and B (right) of the Phaistos Disc. (View Larger)
"The World's First Typewritten Document" - James Chadwick
(Circa 2,000 BCE – 1,700 BCE)

The Rigveda
(Circa 1,700 BCE – 1,100 BCE)

One of the Earliest Known Examples of Writing in Europe
(Circa 1,490 BCE – 1,390 BCE)

ME E29785 of the British Museum: A letter from Burnaburiash, a king of the Kassite dynasty of Babylonia, to Amenhotep IV. The tablet is one of the Amarna Letters. (View Larger)
Archive of Egyptian Diplomatic Correspondence Written in the Diplomatic…
(Circa 1,360 BCE – 1,330 BCE)

The Earliest Chinese Inscriptions that are Indisputably Writing
(Circa 1,200 BCE – 1,050 BCE)

1,000 BCE – 300 BCE

A shard of ancient pottery found in the Elah Fortress, bearing Proto-Canaanite script which might compose the earliest known Hebrew inscription. (View Larger)
Possibly the Earliest Hebrew Inscription
(Circa 1,000 BCE)

The "Chicago Syllabary"
(Circa 900 BCE)

The First Olympic Games
(776 BCE)

The Cup of Nestor. (View Larger)
One of the Oldest Known Examples of Writing in Greek
(Circa 740 BCE – 720 BCE)

The earliest Estruscan abecedarium, the Marsiliana d'Albegna tablet, which dates to c. 700 VCE. (View Larger)
The Marsiliana Tablet Abecedarium
(700 BCE)

The Taylor Prism, ME 91032 of the British Library. (View Larger)
The Taylor Prism and the Sennacherib Prism
(689 BCE – 691 BCE)

The Behistun Inscription. (View Larger)
The Rosetta Stone of Cuneiform Script
(522 BCE – 486 BCE)

An Indian postage stamp, released in 2004, in honor of Pannini.
The Earliest Known Work on Descriptive Linguistics
(Circa 501 BCE)

300 BCE – 30 CE

A vertical, columnar stone inscription roughly six inches long. Image: Boris Beltrán/Science. (View Larger)
The Earliest Known Examples of Maya Script
(Circa 300 BCE)

An edition of the Erya.(View Larger)
The Earliest Surviving Monolingual Dictionary
(Circa 250 BCE)

The Beginning of Latin Literature
(Circa 250 BCE)

30 CE – 500 CE

The Mensa Isiaca or Bembine Table of Isis
(Circa 50 CE)

The New Testament Was Probably Written over Less than a Century
(Circa 65 CE – 150 CE)

The Earliest Runic Inscriptions
(Circa 150 CE)

The Vimose Comb. (View Larger)
The Earliest Known Runic Inscription
(Circa 160 CE)

The Most Widely Used Medieval Grammar
(Circa 350 CE)

The Latest Known Inscription Written in Egyptian Hieroglyphs
(August 24, 394 CE)

Surviving in Only One Deeply Corrupt Renaissance Manuscript
(Circa 450 CE)

500 CE – 600

A page from the Codex Argenteus. (View Larger)
The Codex Argenteus, The Primary Surviving Example of the Gothic Language
(Circa 520)

Justinian. (Click to view larger.)
The Code of Justinian
(529 – 533)

700 – 800

The Oldest Surviving Book in the German Language
(765 – 775)

The parchment on which the Veronese Riddle is written. (View Larger)
The First Sample of an Early Italian Language
(Circa 775 – 825)

800 – 900

<p>The Rök Runestone, believed to be the earliest Sweedish writing, makes reference to Ostrogothic King, Theodoric the Great.</p>
The First Written Swedish Literature
(Circa 800)

The First Surviving Book Written Entirely in English
(Circa 890)

900 – 1000

Massive Byzantine Encyclopedic Dictionary
(Circa 950)

1000 – 1100

The First Truly Recognizable Dictionary
(Circa 1040 – 1050)

A Chinese statue of Pi Sheng. (View Larger)
The Invention of Movable Type in China
(Circa 1041 – 1048)

1200 – 1300

Perhaps the First Grammar of a Romance Language
(Circa 1240)

Folio 54r of the Worms Mahzor, upon which, in the interstices of the first word in the Prayer for Dew, is inscribed the oldest known Yiddish text: a small blessing in the form of a rhymed couplet, directed towards those who are charged with the seemingly onerous task of carrying the heavy Mahzor from the house of the owner to the synagogue. (View Larger)
The Oldest Surviving Literary Document in Yiddish
(1272)

John of Monte Corvino.
The First European Patrons of the Art of Printing?
(1294)

1300 – 1400

Folio 3r of the Psałterz Floriansk. (View Larger)
The Earliest Surviving Example of Old Polish Literature
(Circa 1375)

1400 – 1450

A statue of Leon Lattista Alberti in the Uffizi museum. (View Larger)
The Earliest Grammar of a Romance Language
(1437 – 1441)

A depiction of the Donation of Constantine in the Apostolic Palace, Vatican City, by an artist of Raphael's studio. (View Larger)
Lorenzo Valla Proves that the Donation of Constantine is a Forgery
(1440)

1450 – 1500

An Intermediate Form Between a Collection of Prints and a Blockbook
(Circa 1460 – 1465)

Gutenberg's Last Production? An Early Form of Stereotyping?
(1460 – 1469)

Probably the First Printed Book with an Index
(November 10, 1470)

The First Basic Greek Grammar and the First Book Printed in Greek
(Circa 1471)

The First Technical Dictionary
(1473 – 1474)

The Earliest Printing of Any Book of the Bible in Greek
(1481)

The Earliest Work Printed in England to Contain Color Printing
(1486)

The First Printed Grammar of a Vernacular
(August 18, 1492)

1500 – 1550

The Transition from Latin to the Vernacular in the 16th Century
(Circa 1500 – 1600)

The First Modern Dictionary: the Most Successful and Widely Reprinted Reference Work of the Early Modern Period
(1502)

One of the First General Reference Works Produced for the Printed Book Market
(1503)

1550 – 1600

The First Book Printed in a Goidelic Language
(April 24, 1567)

First Complete Slavic Bible
(July 20, 1580 – August 12, 1581)

The First Book Written by a European Printed in China
(1583 – 1584)

The Vigenere Cipher
(1586)

1600 – 1650

The First Bibliography Published in the New World
(1606)

Descartes Discusses the Idea of an Artificial Language
(1629)

1650 – 1700

Possibly the Earliest Model for Machine Translation
(1661)

The First Complete Bible Published in the Western Hemisphere
(1661 – 1663)

A Universal Language Based on a Classification Scheme or Ontology, and a Universal System of Measurement
(1668)

Leibniz on Binary Arithmetic
(March 15, 1679 – 1705)

1700 – 1750

Popol Vuh, The Book of the People, Known from a Single Manuscript
(1701 – 2012)

The First Book Printed by Muslims Using Movable Type
(1729)

1750 – 1800

The First Extensive Treatise on the Peruvian Knot-Based Counting Language, the Quipu
(1750)

The Copiale Cipher is Decrypted: Initiation into a Secret Society of Oculists
(Circa 1760 – 1780)

Reforming the Teaching of English in the United States
(1783 – 1785)

Foundation of Comparative Linguistics
(February 2, 1786 – 1788)

The First Successful Speech Synthesizer
(1791)

The Rosetta Stone
(July 15, 1799)

1800 – 1850

Phasing Out Latin as the International Language
(1800)

Webster's Dictionary
(1806 – 1828)

Deciphering the Hieroglyphs
(1822)

The First Indigenous Arabic Press in Egypt
(December 1822)

Deciphering the Hieroglyphs
(1823)

Decipherment of the Mayan System of Counting
(1832)

Probably the First Book on a Secular Subject Printed in Arabic in Middle East
(1836)

1850 – 1875

Origins of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED)
(1857)

The Largest Dictionary in Book Form
(1863)

1875 – 1900

3,500,000 Quotations on Individual Slips of Paper
(1882 – 1884)

The O E D Finally Begins Publication
(February 1, 1884)

"Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology"
(1885)

1930 – 1940

The First Electronic Speech Synthesizer
(1936 – 1939)

1940 – 1950

Does Language Influence Thought?
(April 1940)

The Earliest Work Leading toward Machine Translation
(1947)

Warren Weaver Suggests Applying Cryptanalysis Techniques to Translation
(March 4 – May 9, 1947)

"Nineteen Eighty-Four"
(1949)

The Origin of Statistical Machine Translation
(July 15, 1949)

1950 – 1960

"Language and Communication"
(1951)

Decipherment of Linear B
(1952 – 1953)

The Georgetown-IBM Experiment in Machine Translation
(January 7, 1954)

"The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two. . . "
(April 15, 1955 – 1956)

Chomsky's Hierarchy of Syntactic Forms
(September 1956)

Chomsky's Syntactic Structures
(1957)

Human Versus Machine Intelligence and Communication
(1959)

Origins of Corpus Linguistics
(1959)

The First Digital Poetry
(1959)

First Formal Definition of Hacker
(June 1959)

1960 – 1970

The Viterbi Algorithm
(1967)

"Computational Analysis of Present-Day American English"
(1967)

The Beginning of Automated Essay Scoring
(1967)

The First Dictionary Based on Corpus Linguistics
(1969)

1970 – 1980

Speech Recognition Technology
(1971)

Launching "Messages in a Bottle" into the Cosmic Ocean
(1977)

1980 – 1990

Keyboarding over 350,000,000 Characters
(1983)

The Perseus Digital Library Project
(1985)

WordNet Begins
(1985)

Critique of Computational Linguistics
(1987)

Foundation of Computational Sylistics
(1987)

The Unicode Universal Character Set
(August 29, 1988)

1990 – 2000

The Unicode Standard: Now 107,000 Charcters in 90 Scripts
(October 1991)

Development of Neural Networks
(1993)

Statistical Machine Translation
(1993)

Speech Recognition Technology from 6,700 Characters
(1996)

Using Neural Networks for Word Sense Disambiguation
(1998)

2000 – 2005

OED Online
(March 14, 2000)

ECHO (European Cultural Heritage Online) is Founded
(December 1, 2002)

2005 – 2010

IBM Begins Development of the Watson Question Answering System
(2007)

Second Life is Used for Teaching Foreign Languages
(July 2007)

The World Wide Telecom Web for Illiterate Populations
(August 2007)

Towards the Open Advancement of Question Answering Systems
(April 22, 2009)

IBM's Watson Question Answering System Challenges Humans at Jeopardy
(April 27, 2009)

Wolfram/Alpha is Launched
(May 16, 2009)

Algorithm to Decipher Ancient Texts
(September 2, 2009)

The First Historical Thesaurus
(October 2009)

ICANN Will Allow Web Addresses in Non-Latin Alphabets
(October 30, 2009)

The Film "Avatar" and Visions of Reality, Virtual and Otherwise
(December 10, 2009)

2010 – 2011

"The Never-Ending Language Learning System"
(January 2010)

Google Introduces Translation Feature for Google Goggles
(May 6, 2010)

The First Internet Addresses in Non-Latin Characters
(May 6, 2010)

2011 – 2013

Voice-Activated Translation on Cell Phones
(January 12, 2011)

IBM's Watson Question Answering System Defeats Humans at Jeopardy!
(February 14 – February 16, 2011)

The Impact of Automation on Legal Research
(March 4, 2011)

Google Processes 1,000,000,000 Search Queries Per Day
(March 5, 2011)

100 Million Words Translated per Week by Google Translate
(December 8, 2011)

What Makes Spoken Lines in Movies Memorable
(April 30, 2012)