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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 languag

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.

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.