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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 an

by 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".
  - jjk166 5y ago
    It seems amazing that one could take an arbitrary sentence from one language, write it in a different script, and then read that script in a third language and get a coherent sentence.
    - thaumasiotes 5y ago
      Well, note that significant information was lost in the transition from Latin to Ventrisian syllables (arma -> ama; wirum -> wiru; Troiae -> toroia; primus -> pirimu; ab -> ap; oris -> ori), and even more was hallucinated in the transition from Ventris to Greek (ama -> halmai; kano -> kainoos; etc. etc.). The point being made is that the standard for interpreting Greek from Linear B is so low that any set of symbols at all can be validly interpreted as a coherent Greek sentence. As long as 75% of the words are viewed as proper nouns, of course.
      - thaumasiotes 5y ago
        You might also consider how a modern language with a very small syllable inventory, Japanese, customarily represents foreign words in its own syllabically-impoverished writing system. For example, the English word "credit card", which is three syllables, is written in Japanese as ku-re-di-t-to-ka-a-do, which is eight. The Ventris hypothesis works in the other direction -- he believes that speakers of phonologically-rich Greek made do with a writing system that could only express much simpler syllables. Though we have examples of that too; Antiochus of Macedon left an Akkadian inscription reading, as given in Empires of the Word [1], "I am An-ti-'u-ku-us [Antiochus], the great king, the legitimate king, the king of the world, king of E [Babylon], king of all countries, the caretakeer of the temples Esagila and Ezida, the first born of Si-lu-uk-ku [Seleucus], Ma-ak-ka-du-na-a-a [Macedonian], king of Babylon." Contrast Antiochus' (or his scribes') concern for vowel length when he goes to the trouble of writing Ma-ak-ka-du-na-a-a with the reading of kainoos from ka-no. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/166433.Empires_of_the_Word https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/166433.Empires_of_the_Wo...
Wildgoose 5y ago
I can second this recommendation. Fascinating book.

by nickcw 5y ago

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".
- jjk166 5y ago
  It seems amazing that one could take an arbitrary sentence from one language, write it in a different script, and then read that script in a third language and get a coherent sentence.
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    Well, note that significant information was lost in the transition from Latin to Ventrisian syllables (arma -> ama; wirum -> wiru; Troiae -> toroia; primus -> pirimu; ab -> ap; oris -> ori), and even more was hallucinated in the transition from Ventris to Greek (ama -> halmai; kano -> kainoos; etc. etc.). The point being made is that the standard for interpreting Greek from Linear B is so low that any set of symbols at all can be validly interpreted as a coherent Greek sentence. As long as 75% of the words are viewed as proper nouns, of course.
    - thaumasiotes 5y ago
      You might also consider how a modern language with a very small syllable inventory, Japanese, customarily represents foreign words in its own syllabically-impoverished writing system. For example, the English word "credit card", which is three syllables, is written in Japanese as ku-re-di-t-to-ka-a-do, which is eight. The Ventris hypothesis works in the other direction -- he believes that speakers of phonologically-rich Greek made do with a writing system that could only express much simpler syllables. Though we have examples of that too; Antiochus of Macedon left an Akkadian inscription reading, as given in Empires of the Word [1], "I am An-ti-'u-ku-us [Antiochus], the great king, the legitimate king, the king of the world, king of E [Babylon], king of all countries, the caretakeer of the temples Esagila and Ezida, the first born of Si-lu-uk-ku [Seleucus], Ma-ak-ka-du-na-a-a [Macedonian], king of Babylon." Contrast Antiochus' (or his scribes') concern for vowel length when he goes to the trouble of writing Ma-ak-ka-du-na-a-a with the reading of kainoos from ka-no. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/166433.Empires_of_the_Word https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/166433.Empires_of_the_Wo...

Wildgoose 5y ago

I can second this recommendation. Fascinating book.