7 ms·

Exploring Linear A

153 points by mwenge 3y ago

OfSanguineFire 3y ago
Work by amateurs on Linear A does not have a good track record. Since the dawn of the internet era it has drawn more crackpots than almost anything else language-related. Within the professional linguistics community, if someone comes along and claims that he has made any progress towards decipherment, it is generally met with skepticism so strong that one questions that person’s mental health. That said, this website has a caveat that it is for recreational use only, and it points to John Younger’s page at the University of Kansas for something serious. Lay readers on HN should take that caveat very seriously.
- delhanty 3y ago
  Curious, what concrete progress have professional linguists made on deciphering Linear A?
  - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
    None. And that is in spite of massive attempts over the 20th century, including some of the first applications of computers to a problem of this nature. The conclusion drawn from this lack of progress is that the corpus is simply too small for decipherment and/or we lack any surviving relatives for the language that the script recorded.
    - dmarchand90 3y ago
      What kind of corpus do we have? Is it largely fragmented segments with a few symbols?
      - civilitty 3y ago
        > The extant corpus, comprising some 1,427 specimens totalling 7,362 to 7,396 signs, if scaled to standard type, would fit easily on two sheets of paper. [1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_A#Corpus https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_A#Corpus
- heyitsguay 3y ago
  Is this site not just a handy visual catalog of known artifacts and transcriptions? Is there some speculative decipherment implied in the phoneticizations?
- rustymonday 3y ago
  An architect decoded Linear B.
  - dmvdoug 3y ago
    I mean, yeah, but an architect with advanced classical language training.
  - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
    An architect with significant training in the field, who did his work in close collaboration with the professional scholar John Chadwick. Plus that script had a relatively large corpus and, moreover, it encoded an earlier form of a language we already knew (and we already knew the sound values to expect from earlier Greek, like labiovelar consonants, from comparative Indo-European reconstruction). Not the case with Linear A.
  - thaumasiotes 3y ago
    It is not clear why his decipherment is accepted as meaningful. It has faced significant criticism: https://sci-hub.se/https://www.jstor.org/stable/20162981 https://sci-hub.se/https://www.jstor.org/stable/20162981 > The Ventris system thus set forth has been widely accepted by Greek scholars, including many of the highest eminence, in many countries. It has also been widely rejected by scholars of eminence, in varying degrees. > These Ventrisian rules enable bits of a curious sort of Greek to be got out of Lin[ear] B texts; but experiments have shown that bits of English or Latin or other tongues, when spelt out in syllables according to the Ventrisian system, are capable often of yielding bits of Greek just as plausible as anything in the Ventris-Chadwick Documents volume. One eminent Oxonian, dining at a high table, amused himself by taking the names of the Fellows of the College present and turning them into Ventrisian syllables, from which he made a new translation of them into Greek, in which they all turned out to be Greek gods. > 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
- p-e-w 3y ago
  > Work by amateurs on Linear A does not have a good track record. Linear A is completely undeciphered, so amateurs have done exactly as well as professionals. Meanwhile, Egyptian hieroglyphs, cuneiform, and Linear B were all deciphered by people who would be called "amateurs" by today's standards. But hey, why miss an opportunity for elitist gatekeeping, even if the topic is demonstrably one of the least suitable places for it?
  - greggsy 3y ago
    > Linear A is completely undeciphered, so amateurs have done exactly as well as professionals. Academics have absolutely done better than amateurs by virtue of continually validating the fact that it isn’t decipherable. The comment isn’t even bashing amateurs - it’s bashing crackpots, who tend to be allured towards the mysterious, especially if their crackpot ideas won’t be inconvenienced by facts.
    - chickenbittle 3y ago
      Yeah I think it's really important to distinguish between 'amateur', and 'crackpot' here. Like that amateur stumbling upon that never-repeating tile recently. https://www.quantamagazine.org/hobbyist-finds-maths-elusive-einstein-tile-20230404/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/hobbyist-finds-maths-elusive-... It still required academics to confirm it (and I think realize it's significants). In short it's okay to be an academic and it's also okay to be an amateur investigator. Both can and do contribute to the advancement and dissemination of knowledge. Crackpottery and pseudoscience not so much.
retrac 3y ago
For the unfamiliar, Linear A was an ancient script that is associated with the Minoan civilization of the island of Crete, around 1500 - 1800 BC. The later Linear B system encodes archaic Greek, and is very similar to Linear A in glyph form. The Minoan language written with Linear A is probably unrelated to any other language. Phonetic values are necessarily from Linear B or otherwise guesses - it's very likely there was a great deal of overlap, that the symbol representing, for example, the syllable "ni" in Greek, represented a syllable that sounded a lot like "ni" in Minoan. (Linear B is quite unsuited to writing Greek sounds, an indicator that it was borrowed from a very different language.) But since the language of Linear A remains undeciphered, that is really just an educated guess at best.
- djmips 3y ago
  https://greekreporter.com/2022/04/20/minoan-language-linear-a-linear-b/ https://greekreporter.com/2022/04/20/minoan-language-linear-...
shaftoe444 3y ago
Very weird to see this, I went to an exhibition about Knossos in Oxford only today. Good episode here that covers a bit about the language and translation efforts. The translation of Linear B is a very cool story too. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01292ts https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01292ts
fiddlerwoaroof 3y ago
Looks like there’s a parallel site for Linear B: https://linearb.xyz/ https://linearb.xyz/
ocschwar 3y ago
The interface is difficult to deal with, but TIL that Linear A potsherd was found in a Philistine site.
- hudsonhs 3y ago
  Hacker News is a Philistine site.
  - djmips 3y ago
    Too good to downvote...
dghughes 3y ago
I like writing systems and scripts especially obscure or ancients ones. It never even dawned on me to think of my local region as I did ancient Egypt, Greece, Italy etc. I was talking to a friend he is Mi'Kmaq here in Canada we call the people here First Nations in the USA it's Native American. He said that the Mi'Kmaq had an old writing system. I checked into it and it predates any contact with Europeans and is one of the very few writing systems by native peoples here. It's called suckerfish writing or suckerfish script the name inspired by the tracks the fish makes in sand. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mi%EA%9E%8Ckmaw_hieroglyphic_writing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mi%EA%9E%8Ckmaw_hieroglyphic_w...
- AlotOfReading 3y ago
  The traditional definitions by linguist tend to exclude anything that can't represent "all oral communication" as proto- or partial writing systems, which are often pejoratively labeled mnemonic systems. Systems that can represent the full range of spoken expression are labeled "true" or "full" writing. This had the convenient side effect of neatly classifying all the American writing systems as protowriting in the early 20th century, as well as some more controversial examples like Chinese. Some of those have since been walked back (e.g. Mayan), but most remain in that limbo. We have a somewhat better understanding today that there was a huge variety of visual communication systems across the Americas prior to European contact, but properly redefining the term "writing" to include them is a slow, ongoing process.
VectorLock 3y ago
Probably getting a bit more popular notice after the mention in the latest Indiana Jones movie (at least, they mentioned Linear B a few times)
nologic01 3y ago
I sometimes wonder how much further we well be able to lift the veil of ignorance covering early civilizations (assuming our ongoing existence, cultural interest in the past and ever more powerful technologies in the aeons to come). Clearly there must be additional Linear A inscriptions in Crete and possibly elsewhere. The cost of finding them enters a spiral of diminishing returns, but that may be remedied at some point. But, even so, there is no guarantee that even with all surving artefacts uncovered we would be able to reconstruct the language. Pressumably that "edge of knowledgeable history" calculus plays across many regions and sometimes ignorance is annoyingly "close" to the modern era. Even long after the invention of writing the vast majority of human culture was not recorded and is essentially lost.
- p-e-w 3y ago
  > Clearly there must be additional Linear A inscriptions in Crete and possibly elsewhere. There are probably many of them in storage in various museums and antiquities departments. The vast majority of ancient inscriptions ever found are uncatalogued, and some have never even been looked at. This includes inscriptions in languages we already know how to read. I remember reading long ago somewhere that well over 90% of all known Egyptian hieroglyphics texts haven't been translated yet. Therefore, my guess is that once AI is good enough to do classification and translation automatically, there will be rapid progress, without requiring any new discoveries.
davedx 3y ago
Via this post I found the book "The Riddle of the Labyrinth" about the people who deciphered Linear B. Thank you Hacker News, looking forward to reading this!
marthasimons2 3y ago
[dead]
cubefox 3y ago
Related thought: Imagine we received a lot of text in an alien language with a radio telescope, with no "Rosetta stone" to decipher it. Say, 1 TB worth of text. Now we add to that data another 1 TB of English text, and train an LLM on the 2 TB of data. Then we ask the model (in English) to translate some text from the alien language to English. Would it work?
- DemocracyFTW2 3y ago
  No. You always need some kind of Rosetta stone or other relationship to a known language plus some context and 'plausible guesses' to understand an unknown language. Sure if I gave you III,IIII;VII — II,II;IIII — VI,II;VIII you would be able to guess that these are elementary number signs in what amounts to a rudimentary table of additions. That much would be true whether the snippet is from a potshard of an ancient civilization or received from outer space via a radio antenna. But outside of context—and nothing would be more out of context than an extraterrestrial culture—you cannot even tell with certainty whether I stands for 'one' or 'ten' or 'twelve' or 'thousand', and here we've already reached the end of what a text per se can tell you about its meaning if the signs are not clearly pictorial (and even pictorial scripts like early Chinese or Egyptian hieroglyphs are already conventionalized to the degree that for quite a number of signs in either script we are to this day not sure what they depict). Your idea can not work unless the data that you feed the language model with correlated items. It can't. Imagine I feed a predictor with a long list of images on the one hand and, on the other hand, a long list of randomly ordered image descriptions that may or may not match the images. Do you think you could learn a foreign language that way? You absolutely need the image of a donkey be associated with the name for that animal in the foreign language, and the algorithm is no different.
  - cubefox 3y ago
    Those are good reasons, yet the language model discussed above would presumably understand Alienese just as well as it would understand English. So if an LLM understands the meaning of an expression X and of an expression Y, wouldn't it be able to tell how similar those meanings are? > here we've already reached the end of what a text per se can tell you about its meaning if the signs are not clearly pictorial Note that language models today seem to be quite good at understanding English, even though they are only trained on symbolic text, not on any images.
im3w1l 3y ago
I wonder if LLM's would be able to crack it. They should have a decent shot I feel.
devoutsalsa 3y ago
On a related note, the Heraklion Archaeological Museum on Crete is fantastic. 100% worth going if you like old stuff. One of the things on display is the Phaistos Disc, one of the best preserved relics depicting Linear A. https://maps.app.goo.gl/rwJVDVDjaoNJjaNH8?g_st=ic https://maps.app.goo.gl/rwJVDVDjaoNJjaNH8?g_st=ic https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaistos_Disc https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaistos_Disc

153 points by mwenge 3y ago

Work by amateurs on Linear A does not have a good track record. Since the dawn of the internet era it has drawn more crackpots than almost anything else language-related. Within the professional linguistics community, if someone comes along and claims that he has made any progress towards decipherment, it is generally met with skepticism so strong that one questions that person’s mental health. That said, this website has a caveat that it is for recreational use only, and it points to John Younger’s page at the University of Kansas for something serious. Lay readers on HN should take that caveat very seriously.

delhanty 3y ago
Curious, what concrete progress have professional linguists made on deciphering Linear A?
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  None. And that is in spite of massive attempts over the 20th century, including some of the first applications of computers to a problem of this nature. The conclusion drawn from this lack of progress is that the corpus is simply too small for decipherment and/or we lack any surviving relatives for the language that the script recorded.
  - dmarchand90 3y ago
    What kind of corpus do we have? Is it largely fragmented segments with a few symbols?
    - civilitty 3y ago
      > The extant corpus, comprising some 1,427 specimens totalling 7,362 to 7,396 signs, if scaled to standard type, would fit easily on two sheets of paper. [1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_A#Corpus https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_A#Corpus
heyitsguay 3y ago
Is this site not just a handy visual catalog of known artifacts and transcriptions? Is there some speculative decipherment implied in the phoneticizations?
rustymonday 3y ago
An architect decoded Linear B.
- dmvdoug 3y ago
  I mean, yeah, but an architect with advanced classical language training.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  An architect with significant training in the field, who did his work in close collaboration with the professional scholar John Chadwick. Plus that script had a relatively large corpus and, moreover, it encoded an earlier form of a language we already knew (and we already knew the sound values to expect from earlier Greek, like labiovelar consonants, from comparative Indo-European reconstruction). Not the case with Linear A.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  It is not clear why his decipherment is accepted as meaningful. It has faced significant criticism: https://sci-hub.se/https://www.jstor.org/stable/20162981 https://sci-hub.se/https://www.jstor.org/stable/20162981 > The Ventris system thus set forth has been widely accepted by Greek scholars, including many of the highest eminence, in many countries. It has also been widely rejected by scholars of eminence, in varying degrees. > These Ventrisian rules enable bits of a curious sort of Greek to be got out of Lin[ear] B texts; but experiments have shown that bits of English or Latin or other tongues, when spelt out in syllables according to the Ventrisian system, are capable often of yielding bits of Greek just as plausible as anything in the Ventris-Chadwick Documents volume. One eminent Oxonian, dining at a high table, amused himself by taking the names of the Fellows of the College present and turning them into Ventrisian syllables, from which he made a new translation of them into Greek, in which they all turned out to be Greek gods. > 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
p-e-w 3y ago
> Work by amateurs on Linear A does not have a good track record. Linear A is completely undeciphered, so amateurs have done exactly as well as professionals. Meanwhile, Egyptian hieroglyphs, cuneiform, and Linear B were all deciphered by people who would be called "amateurs" by today's standards. But hey, why miss an opportunity for elitist gatekeeping, even if the topic is demonstrably one of the least suitable places for it?
- greggsy 3y ago
  > Linear A is completely undeciphered, so amateurs have done exactly as well as professionals. Academics have absolutely done better than amateurs by virtue of continually validating the fact that it isn’t decipherable. The comment isn’t even bashing amateurs - it’s bashing crackpots, who tend to be allured towards the mysterious, especially if their crackpot ideas won’t be inconvenienced by facts.
  - chickenbittle 3y ago
    Yeah I think it's really important to distinguish between 'amateur', and 'crackpot' here. Like that amateur stumbling upon that never-repeating tile recently. https://www.quantamagazine.org/hobbyist-finds-maths-elusive-einstein-tile-20230404/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/hobbyist-finds-maths-elusive-... It still required academics to confirm it (and I think realize it's significants). In short it's okay to be an academic and it's also okay to be an amateur investigator. Both can and do contribute to the advancement and dissemination of knowledge. Crackpottery and pseudoscience not so much.

retrac 3y ago

For the unfamiliar, Linear A was an ancient script that is associated with the Minoan civilization of the island of Crete, around 1500 - 1800 BC. The later Linear B system encodes archaic Greek, and is very similar to Linear A in glyph form. The Minoan language written with Linear A is probably unrelated to any other language. Phonetic values are necessarily from Linear B or otherwise guesses - it's very likely there was a great deal of overlap, that the symbol representing, for example, the syllable "ni" in Greek, represented a syllable that sounded a lot like "ni" in Minoan. (Linear B is quite unsuited to writing Greek sounds, an indicator that it was borrowed from a very different language.) But since the language of Linear A remains undeciphered, that is really just an educated guess at best.

djmips 3y ago
https://greekreporter.com/2022/04/20/minoan-language-linear-a-linear-b/ https://greekreporter.com/2022/04/20/minoan-language-linear-...

shaftoe444 3y ago

Very weird to see this, I went to an exhibition about Knossos in Oxford only today. Good episode here that covers a bit about the language and translation efforts. The translation of Linear B is a very cool story too. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01292ts https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01292ts

fiddlerwoaroof 3y ago

Looks like there’s a parallel site for Linear B: https://linearb.xyz/ https://linearb.xyz/

ocschwar 3y ago

The interface is difficult to deal with, but TIL that Linear A potsherd was found in a Philistine site.

hudsonhs 3y ago
Hacker News is a Philistine site.
- djmips 3y ago
  Too good to downvote...

dghughes 3y ago

I like writing systems and scripts especially obscure or ancients ones. It never even dawned on me to think of my local region as I did ancient Egypt, Greece, Italy etc. I was talking to a friend he is Mi'Kmaq here in Canada we call the people here First Nations in the USA it's Native American. He said that the Mi'Kmaq had an old writing system. I checked into it and it predates any contact with Europeans and is one of the very few writing systems by native peoples here. It's called suckerfish writing or suckerfish script the name inspired by the tracks the fish makes in sand. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mi%EA%9E%8Ckmaw_hieroglyphic_writing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mi%EA%9E%8Ckmaw_hieroglyphic_w...

AlotOfReading 3y ago
The traditional definitions by linguist tend to exclude anything that can't represent "all oral communication" as proto- or partial writing systems, which are often pejoratively labeled mnemonic systems. Systems that can represent the full range of spoken expression are labeled "true" or "full" writing. This had the convenient side effect of neatly classifying all the American writing systems as protowriting in the early 20th century, as well as some more controversial examples like Chinese. Some of those have since been walked back (e.g. Mayan), but most remain in that limbo. We have a somewhat better understanding today that there was a huge variety of visual communication systems across the Americas prior to European contact, but properly redefining the term "writing" to include them is a slow, ongoing process.

VectorLock 3y ago

Probably getting a bit more popular notice after the mention in the latest Indiana Jones movie (at least, they mentioned Linear B a few times)

nologic01 3y ago

I sometimes wonder how much further we well be able to lift the veil of ignorance covering early civilizations (assuming our ongoing existence, cultural interest in the past and ever more powerful technologies in the aeons to come). Clearly there must be additional Linear A inscriptions in Crete and possibly elsewhere. The cost of finding them enters a spiral of diminishing returns, but that may be remedied at some point. But, even so, there is no guarantee that even with all surving artefacts uncovered we would be able to reconstruct the language. Pressumably that "edge of knowledgeable history" calculus plays across many regions and sometimes ignorance is annoyingly "close" to the modern era. Even long after the invention of writing the vast majority of human culture was not recorded and is essentially lost.

p-e-w 3y ago
> Clearly there must be additional Linear A inscriptions in Crete and possibly elsewhere. There are probably many of them in storage in various museums and antiquities departments. The vast majority of ancient inscriptions ever found are uncatalogued, and some have never even been looked at. This includes inscriptions in languages we already know how to read. I remember reading long ago somewhere that well over 90% of all known Egyptian hieroglyphics texts haven't been translated yet. Therefore, my guess is that once AI is good enough to do classification and translation automatically, there will be rapid progress, without requiring any new discoveries.

davedx 3y ago

Via this post I found the book "The Riddle of the Labyrinth" about the people who deciphered Linear B. Thank you Hacker News, looking forward to reading this!

marthasimons2 3y ago

[dead]

cubefox 3y ago

Related thought: Imagine we received a lot of text in an alien language with a radio telescope, with no "Rosetta stone" to decipher it. Say, 1 TB worth of text. Now we add to that data another 1 TB of English text, and train an LLM on the 2 TB of data. Then we ask the model (in English) to translate some text from the alien language to English. Would it work?

DemocracyFTW2 3y ago
No. You always need some kind of Rosetta stone or other relationship to a known language plus some context and 'plausible guesses' to understand an unknown language. Sure if I gave you III,IIII;VII — II,II;IIII — VI,II;VIII you would be able to guess that these are elementary number signs in what amounts to a rudimentary table of additions. That much would be true whether the snippet is from a potshard of an ancient civilization or received from outer space via a radio antenna. But outside of context—and nothing would be more out of context than an extraterrestrial culture—you cannot even tell with certainty whether I stands for 'one' or 'ten' or 'twelve' or 'thousand', and here we've already reached the end of what a text per se can tell you about its meaning if the signs are not clearly pictorial (and even pictorial scripts like early Chinese or Egyptian hieroglyphs are already conventionalized to the degree that for quite a number of signs in either script we are to this day not sure what they depict). Your idea can not work unless the data that you feed the language model with correlated items. It can't. Imagine I feed a predictor with a long list of images on the one hand and, on the other hand, a long list of randomly ordered image descriptions that may or may not match the images. Do you think you could learn a foreign language that way? You absolutely need the image of a donkey be associated with the name for that animal in the foreign language, and the algorithm is no different.
- cubefox 3y ago
  Those are good reasons, yet the language model discussed above would presumably understand Alienese just as well as it would understand English. So if an LLM understands the meaning of an expression X and of an expression Y, wouldn't it be able to tell how similar those meanings are? > here we've already reached the end of what a text per se can tell you about its meaning if the signs are not clearly pictorial Note that language models today seem to be quite good at understanding English, even though they are only trained on symbolic text, not on any images.

im3w1l 3y ago

I wonder if LLM's would be able to crack it. They should have a decent shot I feel.

devoutsalsa 3y ago

On a related note, the Heraklion Archaeological Museum on Crete is fantastic. 100% worth going if you like old stuff. One of the things on display is the Phaistos Disc, one of the best preserved relics depicting Linear A. https://maps.app.goo.gl/rwJVDVDjaoNJjaNH8?g_st=ic https://maps.app.goo.gl/rwJVDVDjaoNJjaNH8?g_st=ic https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaistos_Disc https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaistos_Disc