6 ms·

A short introduction to the undeciphered Aegean writing systems

126 points by bigbillheck 5y ago

bigbillheck 5y ago
I notice that something appears to have eaten a 'very' in the page title.
- monocasa 5y ago
  There's a maximum size cap on HN titles, which when combined with the mandate to not editorialize titles means that it's not uncommon to see words expressing vague magnitudes removed.
ggm 5y ago
John Chadwick's "The Decipherment of Linear B" is a fascinating book. Michael Ventris had a sad death, from a car accident at 35. I see it's in kindle. I must get it, can't find my paperback. https://www.amazon.com/Decipherment-Linear-Canto-Classics-ebook-dp-B00J8LQYHA/dp/B00J8LQYHA/ref=mt_other?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid= https://www.amazon.com/Decipherment-Linear-Canto-Classics-eb...
- cdrini 5y ago
  You can also borrow/read it for free from internet archive: https://archive.org/details/deciphermentofli00chad https://archive.org/details/deciphermentofli00chad
  - xdennis 5y ago
    The same book is also available without an account (although the images are lower quality). https://archive.org/details/ChadwickJohnTheDeciphermentOfLinearB1958 https://archive.org/details/ChadwickJohnTheDeciphermentOfLin...
catlifeonmars 5y ago
Asking as a total layperson: have any automated machine translation techniques been applied to undeciphered scripts such as the ones discussed in this article? If so, what was the outcome?
- rutherblood 5y ago
  Just what would the models be trained on? Machine learning requires you to have a corpus of mappings between peices of texts in two languages, each of which have been established to be close in meaning -> thereby requiring there to be no decipherment problem withstanding beforehand. There are a series of problems in decipherment of Minoan scripts from what I understand: 1. The Linear A & Cretan script are undeciphered in the sense that we do not know what phonetics the symbols stand for 2. The Minoan language hypothesized to be written in these scripts is undeciphered in terms of vocabulary (given we do not know the phonetics of the letter symbols) & by extension its semantics. At best a kind of crude syntax can proposed for it based on patterns of the word-symbols in texts of the hypothesized language written in those scripts.
  - monkeybutton 5y ago
    There are plenty of ML models that are trained unsupervised on text. What you would do next with your dead-language BERT, I don't know. But you could definitely make one.
    - melissalobos 5y ago
      One issue is that we don't have a lot of text, not even a megabyte of it(represented as unicode characters). So you could get a language model, but how could you judge its output? Maybe it would be really good at generating more similar text, but that text isn't probably super representative of things we would want to be able to read.
  - didericis 5y ago
    I'm not a linguist and haven't done much machine learning, so forgive my naïveté, but aren't there a couple of core features/structures all languages have? That might not be enough to learn anything/might be what you're saying, but I wonder if there's a way to determine what a plausible grammar is and to try to identify what the nouns are. One you have the nouns, you could try just doing a huge substitution game on different texts in that language and try to see what guesses make the most sense for the most sentences.
jonnycomputer 5y ago
There is a sort of romantic fascination to dedicating yourself to the study of what is probably an impossible puzzle. We'd learn so much if only we had a key. So much history inaccessible to us.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  > We'd learn so much if only we had a key. So much history inaccessible to us. Well, as this post notes, one of the things that makes decipherment difficult is a lack of material. The other side of that coin is that we aren't missing a lot.
  - jonnycomputer 5y ago
    Fair point.
misja111 5y ago
Why are (almost) all these writing systems from Crete? Were people not writing things down on the mainland at that time, or have their writing systems all been deciphered? Or is there some other explanation?
- bradrn 5y ago
  Not a historian, but the obvious explanation is that Crete was the centre of the Minoan civilisation, ‘the first advanced civilisation in Europe’ [0]. The only other scripts in use at the time were various forms of cuneiform in Mesopotamia and Anatolia (for Sumerian, Akkadian, Hittite etc.) and hieroglyphics for Egyptian, all of which have been deciphered. We have far more evidence for those scripts than we do for the various Aegean ones. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minoan_civilization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minoan_civilization
  - hillsboroughman 5y ago
    Makes sense. Another dimension to this is that Minoan language does not appear to have had any resemblance to any form of Greek. The most ancient cultural artifacts from Mycenae seem to be of Minoan inspiration while Crete itself seems to have had intrusive Mycenean characteristics until it was completely supplanted by the Mycenean.

126 points by bigbillheck 5y ago

bigbillheck 5y ago

I notice that something appears to have eaten a 'very' in the page title.

monocasa 5y ago
There's a maximum size cap on HN titles, which when combined with the mandate to not editorialize titles means that it's not uncommon to see words expressing vague magnitudes removed.

ggm 5y ago

John Chadwick's "The Decipherment of Linear B" is a fascinating book. Michael Ventris had a sad death, from a car accident at 35. I see it's in kindle. I must get it, can't find my paperback. https://www.amazon.com/Decipherment-Linear-Canto-Classics-ebook-dp-B00J8LQYHA/dp/B00J8LQYHA/ref=mt_other?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid= https://www.amazon.com/Decipherment-Linear-Canto-Classics-eb...

cdrini 5y ago
You can also borrow/read it for free from internet archive: https://archive.org/details/deciphermentofli00chad https://archive.org/details/deciphermentofli00chad
- xdennis 5y ago
  The same book is also available without an account (although the images are lower quality). https://archive.org/details/ChadwickJohnTheDeciphermentOfLinearB1958 https://archive.org/details/ChadwickJohnTheDeciphermentOfLin...

catlifeonmars 5y ago

Asking as a total layperson: have any automated machine translation techniques been applied to undeciphered scripts such as the ones discussed in this article? If so, what was the outcome?

rutherblood 5y ago
Just what would the models be trained on? Machine learning requires you to have a corpus of mappings between peices of texts in two languages, each of which have been established to be close in meaning -> thereby requiring there to be no decipherment problem withstanding beforehand. There are a series of problems in decipherment of Minoan scripts from what I understand: 1. The Linear A & Cretan script are undeciphered in the sense that we do not know what phonetics the symbols stand for 2. The Minoan language hypothesized to be written in these scripts is undeciphered in terms of vocabulary (given we do not know the phonetics of the letter symbols) & by extension its semantics. At best a kind of crude syntax can proposed for it based on patterns of the word-symbols in texts of the hypothesized language written in those scripts.
- monkeybutton 5y ago
  There are plenty of ML models that are trained unsupervised on text. What you would do next with your dead-language BERT, I don't know. But you could definitely make one.
  - melissalobos 5y ago
    One issue is that we don't have a lot of text, not even a megabyte of it(represented as unicode characters). So you could get a language model, but how could you judge its output? Maybe it would be really good at generating more similar text, but that text isn't probably super representative of things we would want to be able to read.
- didericis 5y ago
  I'm not a linguist and haven't done much machine learning, so forgive my naïveté, but aren't there a couple of core features/structures all languages have? That might not be enough to learn anything/might be what you're saying, but I wonder if there's a way to determine what a plausible grammar is and to try to identify what the nouns are. One you have the nouns, you could try just doing a huge substitution game on different texts in that language and try to see what guesses make the most sense for the most sentences.

jonnycomputer 5y ago

There is a sort of romantic fascination to dedicating yourself to the study of what is probably an impossible puzzle. We'd learn so much if only we had a key. So much history inaccessible to us.

thaumasiotes 5y ago
> We'd learn so much if only we had a key. So much history inaccessible to us. Well, as this post notes, one of the things that makes decipherment difficult is a lack of material. The other side of that coin is that we aren't missing a lot.
- jonnycomputer 5y ago
  Fair point.

misja111 5y ago

Why are (almost) all these writing systems from Crete? Were people not writing things down on the mainland at that time, or have their writing systems all been deciphered? Or is there some other explanation?

bradrn 5y ago
Not a historian, but the obvious explanation is that Crete was the centre of the Minoan civilisation, ‘the first advanced civilisation in Europe’ [0]. The only other scripts in use at the time were various forms of cuneiform in Mesopotamia and Anatolia (for Sumerian, Akkadian, Hittite etc.) and hieroglyphics for Egyptian, all of which have been deciphered. We have far more evidence for those scripts than we do for the various Aegean ones. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minoan_civilization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minoan_civilization
- hillsboroughman 5y ago
  Makes sense. Another dimension to this is that Minoan language does not appear to have had any resemblance to any form of Greek. The most ancient cultural artifacts from Mycenae seem to be of Minoan inspiration while Crete itself seems to have had intrusive Mycenean characteristics until it was completely supplanted by the Mycenean.