10 ms·
Minoan language Linear A linked to Linear B in new research
- bradrn 4y agoArticle from 2021, duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27191364 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27191364
- turndown 4y ago>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 belongs to (unless it has to be taken as an ‘isolated’ language) Seems as though they may have made some kind of advancement in the relationship between symbols, but as always we do not have nearly enough written material to approach deciphering.
- AprilArcus 4y agoThis article is a reasonable summary of the status quo in Linear A studies since 1956, but the reporter seemingly deliberately obfuscates the nature and scope of Dr. Ester Salgarella's new contribution. It appears to be the creation of an online corpus in collaboration Dr. Simon Castellan, linked near the bottom of the article: https://sigla.phis.me/ https://sigla.phis.me/ This will be a great resource and is an important work, but it appears that today we are no closer to deciphering Linear A than we have ever been.
- mwenge 4y agohttps://lineara.xyz/ https://lineara.xyz/ is also worth a look
- CamperBob2 4y agoThat's cool as hell (note that https://linearb.xyz https://linearb.xyz also exists.)
- Radim 4y agoI don't know about "deliberately". Might be just a confused, inarticulate piece by a confused reporter. When an article opens with "the Minoan language known as Linear A" (no, it's a script) and "Linear B developed later in the prehistoric period" (an oxymoron, prehistoric = pre-literary)… you know not to expect much. Did anyone manage to parse out what is even being claimed in this article?
- jnwatson 4y agoThe author found a relationship between Linear B (the script) and Linear A (the script) to the point of being able to approximately pronounce Linear A. The actual language written in that Linear A script, Minoan, is still unknown, but this provides some important tools to better understand it.
- tremon 4y agoIf we don't know the language it's encoding, how do we know the Linear A pronunciation is correct, approximately or not? Is this done purely on the assumption that Linear A and Linear B might encode similar phonemes in a similar way?
- jcranmer 4y ago> The author found a relationship between Linear B (the script) and Linear A (the script) to the point of being able to approximately pronounce Linear A. Except that has been known for like... 50 years? 60 years?
- adrian_b 4y agoExactly as you say, the fact that many signs are shared by Linear B and Linear A has been known for at least a half of century. What I understand from the review of the book is that after a more thorough analysis of the graphic variations of various Linear A signs, many more signs inherited by Linear B from Linear A have been identified than before. Having better and more phonetic readings of Linear A texts increases the hope that the Minoan language could be identified and understood, even if this remains highly unlikely, unless more Linear A texts would be discovered.
- SemanticStrengh 4y agocan't they use the zipf law ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law The decreasing exponential law should allow to find "the" and some closed form POS words, so yeah determiners, prepositions and conjonctions.
- jcranmer 4y agoThe total extant corpus of Linear A amounts to fewer than 10,000 characters (and this is, I believe, the largest corpus of any undeciphered script). There's not enough text to do statistical analysis.
- adrian_b 4y agoIf all that text would have been that of a story, there would still have been a chance to decipher it. Even worse than the small number of texts is that all, or almost all, are just bookkeeping records, so they contain few words besides numbers, symbols for useful goods, e.g. wine, olive oil, barley, wool and so on, and proper names of places or people. So even if there might be a few hundreds of texts, most just reproduce the same phrases, only with different numbers and names substituted in them. Any statistics on this handful of stereotype phrases will offer no information about the statistics of the words of the Minoan language as used in a normal conversation or story telling.
- luma 4y agoCan we assume that any of those features would be part of this language?
- SemanticStrengh 4y agoa language without thoses would be hella weird and primitive, like stereotypical robotic talking. To answer you question, I don't know, do linear B have them?
- tgv 4y ago
- thom 4y agoWork has been done on using Markov models etc to predict missing symbols in these texts. But it feels like with all the data now available, and the fact that some signs' meanings are known, we must be able to at least reduce the constellation of possible meanings of some of the unknown signs. There are only so many things it was possible to say about olives in the ancient world, and presumably the semantic space wouldn't be so different to other vaguely contemporaneous languages (not just Linear B). Does anybody know of any work in this direction?
- jcranmer 4y agoI spent basically the entire article trying to figure out what the "groundbreaking" research actually was... this is a pretty mangled press release rendering of the scientific research, even worse than the kinds you normally see from university research. To its credit, this doesn't promise that we can (or will shortly be able to) actually read Linear A texts, and it actually explicates that we won't be able to do that. But that's pretty much the limit of credit due to this article. Linear A's connection to Linear B has been hypothesized since... well, at least as far back as when I was taught it in school, which considering how long it takes textbooks to update themselves to state-of-the-art archaeology may as well be time immemorial. What it looks like the actual "groundbreaking" research here is, based on the sleuthing done in the previous version of the article that leads to an academic review of the work in question (here: https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2021/2021.04.30/ https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2021/2021.04.30/). The layman's version is that it's a detailed analysis of the structural elements of the script to propose how the (unknown) language was encoded into Linear A, combined with some analysis of how individual glyphs varied in time and space--and this results in the conclusion that Linear B is actually a version of a regional [script, not linguistic] dialect of Linear A that was used to write a different language.
- Torkel 4y agoYeah, not a good article at all - I bailed half way through and went to the comments here in hope of a tldr/abstract…
- ncmncm 4y agoWhat it specifically fails to deliver is any indication of how "the internet" had any role at all in the work or in any progress made. The only suggestion of progress was that somebody finally noticed the LB symbols were mostly about the same as LA symbols, so they now can now pronounce the LA texts. There is no hint why that only just happened.
- pianoraptor 4y agoThank you for your take on it. I too was hoping for more insights here, having followed the Linear A / Linear B developments from my armchair for many years.
- motohagiography 4y agoFeels like a fun intro to comp.sci exercise would be taking texts from ancient languages and writing compression schemes, n-gram analyzers, regular expressions, and symbol call graphs for them. It's a bit like the apocryphal story of some old hackers in the 80s "decoding" a Chinese takeout menu (Jobs/Woz?), but it could get kids interested in archeology in a way that is smarter than that alien TV show.
- changoplatanero 4y agoYou mean like this? https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.06718.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.06718.pdf
- SemanticStrengh 4y agowow has this been applied to linear A?? Nice to see google doing original work. Also the MIT omnipresence is humiliating for other universities, as usual.
- SemanticStrengh 4y agoLinear A seems to derive from cretan hyeroglyphs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretan_hieroglyphs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretan_hieroglyphs What do cretan hyeroglyphs come from? And how does a population create a language? That's absurdly difficult to initiate.
- jcranmer 4y agoI assume you mean "writing system" and not "language" here. Writing systems were independently invented no fewer than three times (Mesopotamian, Chinese, and Mayan are unquestionably independent inventions) and probably more times, while also being reinvented from scratch numerous times after that (Cherokee being perhaps the most well-documented such reinvention--Sequoyah knew of writing from the Americans, but had no other conception of how it worked, and his documentation of the process of developing the Cherokee syllabry is a nice compression of the history of stages of writing systems). It does not seem to be a particularly challenging invention. There appear to be two key hurdles that are required for the development of writing. The first is the creation of a systematic inventory of stylized representations of objects, for example knowing that this symbol represents "sun" and that one represents "eye". In particular, I'd draw the "systematic" inventory here as the challenge--merely representing concepts in visual drawings seems to be a pretty universal capability. The second hurdle is the re-encoding of (some of) these symbols to represent phonetic values in an abstract way. (Note that being able to represent any phonetic utterance of a language is the distinguishing characteristic between proto-writing and writing.) If you actually want to know how language is created, well, there is a recent community of deaf people who spontaneously invented their own sign language de novo, which suggests that language is actually incredibly easy to invent.
- capitainenemo 4y ago"Writing systems were independently invented no fewer than three times (Mesopotamian, Chinese, and Mayan are unquestionably independent inventions)" … "Note that being able to represent any phonetic utterance of a language is the distinguishing characteristic between proto-writing and writing." Huh... does Chinese meet that criteria? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logogram#Differences_in_processing_of_logographic_and_phonologic_writing_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logogram#Differences_in_proces...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- sabr 4y agoTED-Ed made a nice video explaining Linear A https://youtu.be/iePEw_cHp8s https://youtu.be/iePEw_cHp8s
- jl6 4y agoI wonder if a machine learning model could shed some 𐝌 on the decipherment.