7 ms·

Minoan language Linear A linked to Linear B in new research

200 points by qsi 5y ago

shakezula 5y ago
Tl;dr- they haven’t translated anything but they made a big leap with identifying some analogous symbols in Linear B
cpleppert 5y ago
I guess I’m skeptical as to what is being claimed here. There have been various attempts to use the Greek phonetic values and logograms of Linear B to reconstruct Linear A equivalents. The only known sentences partially deciphered are votive formulations. Knowing the sound values doesn’t really help you anyway as we have virtually no information on Linear A at all. It’s pretty hard to understand sign equivalencies if you can’t even understand how a sign is being used. The article is pretty vague; I’m not sure what these sign equivalences are supposed to be.
- est31 5y ago
  I think more details can be found in the book mentioned in the article: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108783477 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108783477
  - _delirium 5y ago
    The book in turn appears to be a revised version of the author's 2018 PhD thesis. The thesis isn't open access, but at least an abstract is here: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/283184 https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/283184 My non-specialist take is that the linked article's explanation of the book/thesis's findings sounds confused. The thesis's abstract is pretty different from what the article seems to be saying.
    - unscaled 5y ago
      You can find more details in an academic review of the book here: https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2021/2021.04.30/ https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2021/2021.04.30/ The OP article is extremely confusing, and the writer itself seems confused. My understanding is that the author of the book (Ester Salgarella) makes the following three claims: Claim 1: Linear A and Linear B are not different scripts, but rather two different writing systems (orthographies) for the same script. She does not claim they are used to write the same language, nor that Minoan (or whatever language is written by LA) is linguistically related to Mycenaean Greek. In this sense the proposed "Aegean Linear Script" is not different than cuneiform, which has originally been developed to write the Sumerian language and has been adapted over time to write such diverse (and unrelated) languages as Akkadian (Eastern Semitic), Hittite (Indo European) and Elamite (isolate?[1]). Claim 2: Linear A does not represent a single writing system, but in fact a collection of regional writing systems. In this context, Linear B can be viewed as just another variant of the same script, adapted to write another language. It notably comes at a later period (probably under different political conditions, i.e. under Mycenaean rule), is more standardized and does not exhibit regional variation. But we can still classify the base script itself as being the same. These first two claims do not seem extremely controversial for me. However, there seems to be a third claim, which is implied in both the abstract of the book, but I'm not sure Salgarella is making this claim directly. That claim could prove more controversial. Claim 3: There is a continuity between regional LA variants and the LB used by Mycenaean Greek-speaking scribes. This seems to imply that the Mycenaean scribes did make a concentrated, singular effort to borrow LA and adapt it to their own language - but rather that some regional variants of LA gradually evolved to standardize the rendering of Greek speech. I assume this started with transliterating Greek names and eventually standardizing the rules for rendering all Greek words using the Aegean Linear Script syllabograms. This system, which has gradually evolved, became standardize as what we call Linear B. I personally think this claim makes sense if we look at the way other scripts (especially complex, logographic-syllabic scripts) have crossed between languages in the past. In the first phase you would usually have bilingual speakers writing in the script's original language and gradually developing better and more formalized adaptations for incorporating their own native language into that script. This is at the very least how Chinese characters have been adapted in Japan, where the standardization process has taken hundreds of years (in fact, you could claim that it is still not over yet). Whether or not this claim has strong evidence I don't know, but is probably the main "breakthrough" of this research. The other ("internet-powered") breakthrough is that the SigLA database[2], I personally feel to be the coolest thing coming out of this research. Having dabbled a little bit with corporas of both deciphered and undeciphered scripts in the past, this is definitely a UX revolution. It seems like such a joy to use. [1]: I know some theories connect Elamite to Dravidian languages through the Elamo-Dravidian family. I can't really comment on how proven that is. [2]: https://sigla.phis.me/browse.html https://sigla.phis.me/browse.html
- afarrell 5y ago
  > The article is pretty vague Yep. I think they are trying to write for too broad of an audience. It is spending a lot of ink trying to get people to care who did not already know a fact like > The discovery of the Rosetta Stone, which was inscribed with writing in both ancient Egyptian and Greek, allowed linguists to finally crack the code of Egyptian hieroglyphics in the 19th century. --------- [EDIT] Actually, a question for those who are better at writing than I: When imagining the reader for your article, why would you assume it included someone who did not know what the Rosetta Stone did on a basic level?
  - bombcar 5y ago
    If you don’t know your audience- it’s often better to assume too little than assume too much. Of course writing on the Internet allows you to simply hyperlink terms that may be unfamiliar.
    - kragen 5y ago
      If you live in Argentina, it's obvious that San Diego is better-known than San Bernardino, but nowhere nearly as well known as Los Angeles, but that most people don't know that Compton is in Los Angeles. If you live in San Bernardino you may not know any of these things, so if you're writing an article for a general audience, you might feel the need to explain to your reader that Los Angeles is a large city in Southern California, especially after someone complains they don't know where San Diego is.
      - bombcar 5y ago
        I used to live near there, and it reminds me that the further you get away from LA the more general "where you're from" becomes. At some point if someone asks where you live you say "LA" even if you're hundreds of miles from there, as it's the reference point they'll know.
      - afarrell 5y ago
        Ah. This makes sense. If the author is heavily involved in the archaeological linguistics community they would indeed not know how well-known the Rosetta Stone is.
- raxxorrax 5y ago
  Was on Crete just before Covid hit. People there told me it is more or less impossible to reconstruct most of the language because there just isn't enough base material for references. He explicitly told me not to believe people that claim they would be able to translate. Although he probably just meant tourist scams and this is on another level of course. Wouldn't recommend Knossos, a bit too oriented at tourists, but there are other ruins that are well worth the visit. I believe there is a picture of a women in the building in the picture, but it was very crudely restored. They just used the next IKEA picture frame they could find. But I wonder what archive they mean when they mention the sources. Cannot have been that much, because the area is rather small.
  - dalbasal 5y ago
    Apologies for being argumentative, but I would recommend Knossos... if you're into archeology. Most mediterranean sites, however ancient their origins, are dominated by classical era artifacts and structures. It's rare to walk around a bronze or even iron age age site that retains the feel of an older era, excepting Egypt of course. I would recommend Petra for similar reasons. It's also much bigger and more impressive. Petra also still has a backwater feel, to contrast with your objection to Knossos.
    - raxxorrax 5y ago
      Yeah, it is still worth a visit, I meant that only in comparison to the other Minoan sites on Crete. There are also some in Malia, but those were in a worse state than others. In Malia you could see another curious and living civilization that drives on motorized bicycles. I believe people called them the British. For the average tourist without too deep knowledge about archaeology (me), I found Phaistos more impressive, especially for that feeling that you mentioned. It isn't restored to that degree, but still impressive how much remains from this ancient civilization. Maybe it was just the vicinity of the city that made Knossos seem not that special in comparison. It isn't too far from Knossos, well worth a trip. I think it was just an hour by car from Knossos. I will certainly put Petra on the list to visit.
      - 5y ago
1cvmask 5y ago
Would we call this language Minoan to be more accurate? Just like we separate Latin from Italian.
- _delirium 5y ago
  Naming here is a bit complicated. Are we talking about the writing system or the spoken language, for example? The linked article is using some terms in what I'd consider an unusual way (e.g. talking about a "Linear B language", vs. Linear B writing system or script). Linear B is mostly agreed to be a writing system for the Mycenaean Greek language [1], a language that was spoken on both Crete and the Mainland. So it wasn't solely a Minoan language. You could argue that it's sufficiently different from modern Greek to have a different name, but there isn't really a consistently followed rule for naming languages that way. For example, "Old English" is completely incomprehensible to a speaker of modern English, but nonetheless has that name. What language Linear A was used to write is more mysterious. Some researchers do in fact think it corresponded to a separate Minoan language that was not closely related to Greek, but there's no consensus. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycenaean_Greek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycenaean_Greek.
  - unscaled 5y ago
    I'm not an expert in the field, so I might be woefully wrong, but as far I know the Minoan hypothesis (i.e. Linear A encodes a language isolate that we call Minoan) is almost universally accepted nowadays, even though it was not yet the case right after decipherment of Linear B in the 1950s. Most controversies that exist nowadays don't seem to be about Linear A being Minoan, but rather about trying to demonstrate a relation of the Minoan language itself to another language or language family. There have been attempts to link Minoan to Semitic languages , Anatolian languages and Etruscan, among others. Besides these attempts, I guess there still exist a small number of scholars who still argue that Linear A represents some form of Greek, but it's not a very popular opinion. The fact that the language of Linear B is Mycenaean Greek as uncontroversial as the existence of the Indo-Eruopean language family or the fact that hieroglyphs encode ancient Egyptian. Anyone claiming otherwise is probably going to be politely ignored and thrown out of the room.
Clewza313 5y ago
Is there a better source for this? Under all the breathless hype ("astonishingly, the internet itself may be the key that unlocks the link between the languages") it sounds like all that's being claimed -- not even proven -- is stronger evidence that Linear A and Linear B are related.
- pvg 5y ago
  I think this is addressed in the article: “I am afraid there is currently no exact translation of the sign-sequences (= words) attested on Linear A tablets (as well as other document types). This is primarily because we have not yet identified the linguistic family the Minoan language belong
- scrubs 5y ago
  Agree. Any progress is helpful and I'm sure painstakingly hard by smart people. But breakthrough? Nope.
nickcw 5y ago
I you are at all interested in this sort of thing then I recommend this book: John Chadwick - The Decipherment of Linear B It is written for the lay person and describes the process of cracking linear B and some of the human story as well as info about the ancient civilization.
- vixen99 5y ago
  Said book describes the role of Michael Ventris who actually deciphered Linear B. Ventris was an architect who had no formal qualifications in classics, didn't attend university but had an extraordinary propensity for languages. He started working on Linear B when he was at school.
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    His work is not without problems. This has come up in other Linear B threads: https://imgur.com/GPdnYfU https://imgur.com/GPdnYfU https://sci-hub.se/https://www.jstor.org/stable/20162981 https://sci-hub.se/https://www.jstor.org/stable/20162981 > gentle reader, pray perpend the syllable-groups (reference number Dy 401), that run: a-ma wi-ru-qe ka-no to-ro-ja qi-pi-ri-mu a-po-ri. Here we have two specimens of the labio-velars, the syllables with q-, discovered by Ventris, to the astonishment of philologists who had not expected to find them in Bronze Age Greek. qe is, of course, equivalent to Latin -que, Greek te, while qi doubtless here shows the development to a voiced dental noted by Ventris and Chadwick in their "Mycenaean Vocabulary," > The Greek evaluation of the sentence would be, according to Ventris's spelling rules, halmai wiluite kainōs Tholoiai Diphilimus apolis: "With brine and slime in novel fashion at Tholoia (the place of tholoi, beehive tombs) Diphilimus (is) cityless." No doubt this is a record of a Bronze Age tidal wave. > It is by coincidence that the acumen of Mr. Michael C. Stokes, the Edinburgh authority on ancient philosophy, has extracted the Virgilian hexameter, Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris.... > Note that in this sentence one need assume only two of the six words to be names of persons or places, whereas, in the Lin B material as a whole, 75 per cent of the sign-groups have to be, on Ventris's system, evaluated as names I was interested to learn that it is considered significant that Apollo is not attested in the deciphered corpus of Linear B. (Though Paean is.) I was also interested to learn, later, that the obviously Greek Alaksandus of Wilusa, writing in Hittite in the 13th century BC, did guarantee his half of a treaty by invoking the deity "Apaliunas".
The_rationalist 5y ago
I was wondering, has anyone used the zipf law to help deciphering? E.g one would expect the to be one or the top 3 most used word
- timoth 5y ago
  In general, assuming some (types of) words are more common is reasonable, but the specifics could be tricky. I know it was only an example, but "the", for example, might not exist in the language -- it might not have definite articles, or any articles equivalent to English articles at all.
- lazyasciiart 5y ago
  Not all languages even have articles - Finnish is an example.
- vidarh 5y ago
  A lot of languages lack an equivalent to "the". E.g Norwegian "shop" -> "butikk", "the shop" -> "butikken". Conversely, if you started with a North Germanic language like Norwegian instead of English as your reference, you might be tempted to assume gendered articles. E.g. "en sol" -> "a sun" masculine, "ei sol" -> "a sun" feminine, to confuse matters Norwegian bokmål (Norwegian has two written languages; they're very similar; bokmål is one of them) allows both masculine and feminine most places now (but not all - "butikk"/"shop" is unambiguously masculine - imagine trying to guess at how things like that affects stats without knowing the language), but also has a neuter gender which is less interchangeable. It gets worse. Imagine you'd like to try to look for possible suffixes corresponding to "the" as an alternative (I don't know any languages that uses other methods, but I'm sure they exist). Imagine now if your "unknown" language was similar to Norwegian. In Norwegian "the sun" can be either "solen" or "sola" depending on gender, and you can't assume a writer is even consistent (it's bad form to mix different gender for the same word in the same text, but that doesn't stop people), which would throw off your counts/stats. We have a pretty good catalogue of possible variations based on modern languages, so you certainly could try to construct a theory of a mapping based on known possible options (and you're not wrong to think in that direction as one approach worth testing), but there are many possible variations, so it's unfortunately not an easy one.
theobeers 5y ago
This story seems a little bit puffed up. There has been exciting recent progress in the decipherment of another early writing system, Linear Elamite.[0] In fact, French archæologist/philologist François Desset announced last year that he has deciphered all known Linear Elamite inscriptions.[1] (Someone posted this to HN at the time, but it got no traction.[2]) [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Elamite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Elamite [1]: https://www.archaeoreporter.com/en/2020/11/27/deciphering-linear-elamite-the-worlds-oldest-phonetic-writing-system-watch-a-sneak-preview-of-how-to-translate-these-inscriptions/ https://www.archaeoreporter.com/en/2020/11/27/deciphering-li... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25345680 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25345680
tragomaskhalos 5y ago
That was disappointing; the fact that Linear B is descended from Linear A and has inherited many of its signs with more or less variation is not exactly news.
kristjankalm 5y ago
The author of the book -- Ester Salgarella -- has also put together an online searchable corpus of Linear A: https://sigla.phis.me https://sigla.phis.me It's very neatly annotated, e.g: https://sigla.phis.me/document/ARKH%201a/ https://sigla.phis.me/document/ARKH%201a/ and a good starting point to anyone wishing to try their hand on extracting patterns out of the corpus
Grustaf 5y ago
I always dreamed of being the one to decipher linear a. I almost hope this won’t stick.
- Koshkin 5y ago
  Somehow this reminded me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netochka_Nezvanova_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netochka_Nezvanova_(novel)
  - Grustaf 5y ago
    Not “dreams of a madman” then?…
ZoomZoomZoom 5y ago
Wow, what a terrible piece! Same ideas repeated paragraph after a paragraph. Was the author paid by word count?
ianai 5y ago
Might be more helpful: http://www.sci-news.com/archaeology/minoan-linear-a-script-09329.html http://www.sci-news.com/archaeology/minoan-linear-a-script-0...
- macintux 5y ago
  Thank you, that was much more comprehensible.
mwenge 5y ago
See also https://lineara.xyz/ https://lineara.xyz/ and https://linearb.xyz/ https://linearb.xyz/
- kristjankalm 5y ago
  that's excellent -- couldn't find any background info on the project, do you know the context?

200 points by qsi 5y ago

Tl;dr- they haven’t translated anything but they made a big leap with identifying some analogous symbols in Linear B

I guess I’m skeptical as to what is being claimed here. There have been various attempts to use the Greek phonetic values and logograms of Linear B to reconstruct Linear A equivalents. The only known sentences partially deciphered are votive formulations. Knowing the sound values doesn’t really help you anyway as we have virtually no information on Linear A at all. It’s pretty hard to understand sign equivalencies if you can’t even understand how a sign is being used. The article is pretty vague; I’m not sure what these sign equivalences are supposed to be.

est31 5y ago
I think more details can be found in the book mentioned in the article: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108783477 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108783477
- _delirium 5y ago
  The book in turn appears to be a revised version of the author's 2018 PhD thesis. The thesis isn't open access, but at least an abstract is here: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/283184 https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/283184 My non-specialist take is that the linked article's explanation of the book/thesis's findings sounds confused. The thesis's abstract is pretty different from what the article seems to be saying.
  - unscaled 5y ago
    You can find more details in an academic review of the book here: https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2021/2021.04.30/ https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2021/2021.04.30/ The OP article is extremely confusing, and the writer itself seems confused. My understanding is that the author of the book (Ester Salgarella) makes the following three claims: Claim 1: Linear A and Linear B are not different scripts, but rather two different writing systems (orthographies) for the same script. She does not claim they are used to write the same language, nor that Minoan (or whatever language is written by LA) is linguistically related to Mycenaean Greek. In this sense the proposed "Aegean Linear Script" is not different than cuneiform, which has originally been developed to write the Sumerian language and has been adapted over time to write such diverse (and unrelated) languages as Akkadian (Eastern Semitic), Hittite (Indo European) and Elamite (isolate?[1]). Claim 2: Linear A does not represent a single writing system, but in fact a collection of regional writing systems. In this context, Linear B can be viewed as just another variant of the same script, adapted to write another language. It notably comes at a later period (probably under different political conditions, i.e. under Mycenaean rule), is more standardized and does not exhibit regional variation. But we can still classify the base script itself as being the same. These first two claims do not seem extremely controversial for me. However, there seems to be a third claim, which is implied in both the abstract of the book, but I'm not sure Salgarella is making this claim directly. That claim could prove more controversial. Claim 3: There is a continuity between regional LA variants and the LB used by Mycenaean Greek-speaking scribes. This seems to imply that the Mycenaean scribes did make a concentrated, singular effort to borrow LA and adapt it to their own language - but rather that some regional variants of LA gradually evolved to standardize the rendering of Greek speech. I assume this started with transliterating Greek names and eventually standardizing the rules for rendering all Greek words using the Aegean Linear Script syllabograms. This system, which has gradually evolved, became standardize as what we call Linear B. I personally think this claim makes sense if we look at the way other scripts (especially complex, logographic-syllabic scripts) have crossed between languages in the past. In the first phase you would usually have bilingual speakers writing in the script's original language and gradually developing better and more formalized adaptations for incorporating their own native language into that script. This is at the very least how Chinese characters have been adapted in Japan, where the standardization process has taken hundreds of years (in fact, you could claim that it is still not over yet). Whether or not this claim has strong evidence I don't know, but is probably the main "breakthrough" of this research. The other ("internet-powered") breakthrough is that the SigLA database[2], I personally feel to be the coolest thing coming out of this research. Having dabbled a little bit with corporas of both deciphered and undeciphered scripts in the past, this is definitely a UX revolution. It seems like such a joy to use. [1]: I know some theories connect Elamite to Dravidian languages through the Elamo-Dravidian family. I can't really comment on how proven that is. [2]: https://sigla.phis.me/browse.html https://sigla.phis.me/browse.html
afarrell 5y ago
> The article is pretty vague Yep. I think they are trying to write for too broad of an audience. It is spending a lot of ink trying to get people to care who did not already know a fact like > The discovery of the Rosetta Stone, which was inscribed with writing in both ancient Egyptian and Greek, allowed linguists to finally crack the code of Egyptian hieroglyphics in the 19th century. --------- [EDIT] Actually, a question for those who are better at writing than I: When imagining the reader for your article, why would you assume it included someone who did not know what the Rosetta Stone did on a basic level?
- bombcar 5y ago
  If you don’t know your audience- it’s often better to assume too little than assume too much. Of course writing on the Internet allows you to simply hyperlink terms that may be unfamiliar.
  - kragen 5y ago
    If you live in Argentina, it's obvious that San Diego is better-known than San Bernardino, but nowhere nearly as well known as Los Angeles, but that most people don't know that Compton is in Los Angeles. If you live in San Bernardino you may not know any of these things, so if you're writing an article for a general audience, you might feel the need to explain to your reader that Los Angeles is a large city in Southern California, especially after someone complains they don't know where San Diego is.
    - bombcar 5y ago
      I used to live near there, and it reminds me that the further you get away from LA the more general "where you're from" becomes. At some point if someone asks where you live you say "LA" even if you're hundreds of miles from there, as it's the reference point they'll know.
    - afarrell 5y ago
      Ah. This makes sense. If the author is heavily involved in the archaeological linguistics community they would indeed not know how well-known the Rosetta Stone is.
raxxorrax 5y ago
Was on Crete just before Covid hit. People there told me it is more or less impossible to reconstruct most of the language because there just isn't enough base material for references. He explicitly told me not to believe people that claim they would be able to translate. Although he probably just meant tourist scams and this is on another level of course. Wouldn't recommend Knossos, a bit too oriented at tourists, but there are other ruins that are well worth the visit. I believe there is a picture of a women in the building in the picture, but it was very crudely restored. They just used the next IKEA picture frame they could find. But I wonder what archive they mean when they mention the sources. Cannot have been that much, because the area is rather small.
- dalbasal 5y ago
  Apologies for being argumentative, but I would recommend Knossos... if you're into archeology. Most mediterranean sites, however ancient their origins, are dominated by classical era artifacts and structures. It's rare to walk around a bronze or even iron age age site that retains the feel of an older era, excepting Egypt of course. I would recommend Petra for similar reasons. It's also much bigger and more impressive. Petra also still has a backwater feel, to contrast with your objection to Knossos.
  - raxxorrax 5y ago
    Yeah, it is still worth a visit, I meant that only in comparison to the other Minoan sites on Crete. There are also some in Malia, but those were in a worse state than others. In Malia you could see another curious and living civilization that drives on motorized bicycles. I believe people called them the British. For the average tourist without too deep knowledge about archaeology (me), I found Phaistos more impressive, especially for that feeling that you mentioned. It isn't restored to that degree, but still impressive how much remains from this ancient civilization. Maybe it was just the vicinity of the city that made Knossos seem not that special in comparison. It isn't too far from Knossos, well worth a trip. I think it was just an hour by car from Knossos. I will certainly put Petra on the list to visit.
    - 5y ago

1cvmask 5y ago

Would we call this language Minoan to be more accurate? Just like we separate Latin from Italian.

_delirium 5y ago
Naming here is a bit complicated. Are we talking about the writing system or the spoken language, for example? The linked article is using some terms in what I'd consider an unusual way (e.g. talking about a "Linear B language", vs. Linear B writing system or script). Linear B is mostly agreed to be a writing system for the Mycenaean Greek language [1], a language that was spoken on both Crete and the Mainland. So it wasn't solely a Minoan language. You could argue that it's sufficiently different from modern Greek to have a different name, but there isn't really a consistently followed rule for naming languages that way. For example, "Old English" is completely incomprehensible to a speaker of modern English, but nonetheless has that name. What language Linear A was used to write is more mysterious. Some researchers do in fact think it corresponded to a separate Minoan language that was not closely related to Greek, but there's no consensus. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycenaean_Greek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycenaean_Greek.
- unscaled 5y ago
  I'm not an expert in the field, so I might be woefully wrong, but as far I know the Minoan hypothesis (i.e. Linear A encodes a language isolate that we call Minoan) is almost universally accepted nowadays, even though it was not yet the case right after decipherment of Linear B in the 1950s. Most controversies that exist nowadays don't seem to be about Linear A being Minoan, but rather about trying to demonstrate a relation of the Minoan language itself to another language or language family. There have been attempts to link Minoan to Semitic languages , Anatolian languages and Etruscan, among others. Besides these attempts, I guess there still exist a small number of scholars who still argue that Linear A represents some form of Greek, but it's not a very popular opinion. The fact that the language of Linear B is Mycenaean Greek as uncontroversial as the existence of the Indo-Eruopean language family or the fact that hieroglyphs encode ancient Egyptian. Anyone claiming otherwise is probably going to be politely ignored and thrown out of the room.

Clewza313 5y ago

Is there a better source for this? Under all the breathless hype ("astonishingly, the internet itself may be the key that unlocks the link between the languages") it sounds like all that's being claimed -- not even proven -- is stronger evidence that Linear A and Linear B are related.

pvg 5y ago
I think this is addressed in the article: “I am afraid there is currently no exact translation of the sign-sequences (= words) attested on Linear A tablets (as well as other document types). This is primarily because we have not yet identified the linguistic family the Minoan language belong
scrubs 5y ago
Agree. Any progress is helpful and I'm sure painstakingly hard by smart people. But breakthrough? Nope.

nickcw 5y ago

I you are at all interested in this sort of thing then I recommend this book: John Chadwick - The Decipherment of Linear B It is written for the lay person and describes the process of cracking linear B and some of the human story as well as info about the ancient civilization.

vixen99 5y ago
Said book describes the role of Michael Ventris who actually deciphered Linear B. Ventris was an architect who had no formal qualifications in classics, didn't attend university but had an extraordinary propensity for languages. He started working on Linear B when he was at school.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  His work is not without problems. This has come up in other Linear B threads: https://imgur.com/GPdnYfU https://imgur.com/GPdnYfU https://sci-hub.se/https://www.jstor.org/stable/20162981 https://sci-hub.se/https://www.jstor.org/stable/20162981 > gentle reader, pray perpend the syllable-groups (reference number Dy 401), that run: a-ma wi-ru-qe ka-no to-ro-ja qi-pi-ri-mu a-po-ri. Here we have two specimens of the labio-velars, the syllables with q-, discovered by Ventris, to the astonishment of philologists who had not expected to find them in Bronze Age Greek. qe is, of course, equivalent to Latin -que, Greek te, while qi doubtless here shows the development to a voiced dental noted by Ventris and Chadwick in their "Mycenaean Vocabulary," > The Greek evaluation of the sentence would be, according to Ventris's spelling rules, halmai wiluite kainōs Tholoiai Diphilimus apolis: "With brine and slime in novel fashion at Tholoia (the place of tholoi, beehive tombs) Diphilimus (is) cityless." No doubt this is a record of a Bronze Age tidal wave. > It is by coincidence that the acumen of Mr. Michael C. Stokes, the Edinburgh authority on ancient philosophy, has extracted the Virgilian hexameter, Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris.... > Note that in this sentence one need assume only two of the six words to be names of persons or places, whereas, in the Lin B material as a whole, 75 per cent of the sign-groups have to be, on Ventris's system, evaluated as names I was interested to learn that it is considered significant that Apollo is not attested in the deciphered corpus of Linear B. (Though Paean is.) I was also interested to learn, later, that the obviously Greek Alaksandus of Wilusa, writing in Hittite in the 13th century BC, did guarantee his half of a treaty by invoking the deity "Apaliunas".

The_rationalist 5y ago

I was wondering, has anyone used the zipf law to help deciphering? E.g one would expect the to be one or the top 3 most used word

timoth 5y ago
In general, assuming some (types of) words are more common is reasonable, but the specifics could be tricky. I know it was only an example, but "the", for example, might not exist in the language -- it might not have definite articles, or any articles equivalent to English articles at all.
lazyasciiart 5y ago
Not all languages even have articles - Finnish is an example.
vidarh 5y ago
A lot of languages lack an equivalent to "the". E.g Norwegian "shop" -> "butikk", "the shop" -> "butikken". Conversely, if you started with a North Germanic language like Norwegian instead of English as your reference, you might be tempted to assume gendered articles. E.g. "en sol" -> "a sun" masculine, "ei sol" -> "a sun" feminine, to confuse matters Norwegian bokmål (Norwegian has two written languages; they're very similar; bokmål is one of them) allows both masculine and feminine most places now (but not all - "butikk"/"shop" is unambiguously masculine - imagine trying to guess at how things like that affects stats without knowing the language), but also has a neuter gender which is less interchangeable. It gets worse. Imagine you'd like to try to look for possible suffixes corresponding to "the" as an alternative (I don't know any languages that uses other methods, but I'm sure they exist). Imagine now if your "unknown" language was similar to Norwegian. In Norwegian "the sun" can be either "solen" or "sola" depending on gender, and you can't assume a writer is even consistent (it's bad form to mix different gender for the same word in the same text, but that doesn't stop people), which would throw off your counts/stats. We have a pretty good catalogue of possible variations based on modern languages, so you certainly could try to construct a theory of a mapping based on known possible options (and you're not wrong to think in that direction as one approach worth testing), but there are many possible variations, so it's unfortunately not an easy one.

theobeers 5y ago

This story seems a little bit puffed up. There has been exciting recent progress in the decipherment of another early writing system, Linear Elamite.[0] In fact, French archæologist/philologist François Desset announced last year that he has deciphered all known Linear Elamite inscriptions.[1] (Someone posted this to HN at the time, but it got no traction.[2]) [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Elamite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Elamite [1]: https://www.archaeoreporter.com/en/2020/11/27/deciphering-linear-elamite-the-worlds-oldest-phonetic-writing-system-watch-a-sneak-preview-of-how-to-translate-these-inscriptions/ https://www.archaeoreporter.com/en/2020/11/27/deciphering-li... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25345680 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25345680

tragomaskhalos 5y ago

That was disappointing; the fact that Linear B is descended from Linear A and has inherited many of its signs with more or less variation is not exactly news.

kristjankalm 5y ago

The author of the book -- Ester Salgarella -- has also put together an online searchable corpus of Linear A: https://sigla.phis.me https://sigla.phis.me It's very neatly annotated, e.g: https://sigla.phis.me/document/ARKH%201a/ https://sigla.phis.me/document/ARKH%201a/ and a good starting point to anyone wishing to try their hand on extracting patterns out of the corpus

Grustaf 5y ago

I always dreamed of being the one to decipher linear a. I almost hope this won’t stick.

Koshkin 5y ago
Somehow this reminded me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netochka_Nezvanova_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netochka_Nezvanova_(novel)
- Grustaf 5y ago
  Not “dreams of a madman” then?…

ZoomZoomZoom 5y ago

Wow, what a terrible piece! Same ideas repeated paragraph after a paragraph. Was the author paid by word count?

ianai 5y ago

Might be more helpful: http://www.sci-news.com/archaeology/minoan-linear-a-script-09329.html http://www.sci-news.com/archaeology/minoan-linear-a-script-0...

macintux 5y ago
Thank you, that was much more comprehensible.

mwenge 5y ago

See also https://lineara.xyz/ https://lineara.xyz/ and https://linearb.xyz/ https://linearb.xyz/

kristjankalm 5y ago
that's excellent -- couldn't find any background info on the project, do you know the context?