7 ms·

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
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  You cite a 1965 article. That is practically ancient, and no, its criticism is not particularly significant. In the decades since, Ventris’s decipherment has overwhelmingly been accepted by scholars. That is not to say that all of Ventris’s readings are accepted – many are superseded. But the fact that Linear B records Mycenaean Greek along the general lines that he and Chadwick worked out, has long been beyond doubt in the field. Mycenaean sources and their consensus readings will be discussed in any decent introduction to the history of the Greek language. I can recommend, for example, the relevant chapters in A Companion to the Ancient Greek Language ed. Bakker and in Colvin’s A Historical Greek Reader as fairly accessible to a general audience.
  - thaumasiotes 3y ago
    > You cite a 1965 article. That is practically ancient > the fact that Linear B records Mycenaean Greek along the general lines that he and Chadwick worked out, has long been beyond doubt in the field. What are the major developments since 1965 that strengthened the position of Ventris's decipherment?
    - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
      Most of the Chadwick part of the Chadwick–Ventris collaboration was published after 1965. And I just pointed you to two popular references that, in turn, cite a number of publications from recent decades. I suggest you follow up on that.
      - thaumasiotes 3y ago
        Oh, I certainly will. But I was kind of hoping for some indication that developments of that kind actually occurred; it would be the least surprising thing in the world to see a selection effect in the study of Linear B inscriptions whereby students who couldn't reconcile themselves with the idea that decipherment will happily assign a meaning to any text, even where the actual meaning of the text is known to be different, left the field, while students who didn't mind that stayed in. Over time a strong consensus in favor of the position "no, I didn't waste the last 30 years of my life" is exactly what you'd expect to see. There are no professions in which the professional consensus is "actually, none of this works". But there are many in which that is the truth.
light_hue_1 3y ago
It's really misleading to say "An architect decoded Linear B." When Michael Ventris was working by himself he published junk. A basically crackpot theory that was immediately debunked that Linear B was Etruscan. Then Ventris worked hard to become an insider. Many key observations for the decoding were done by someone else, a classicist, Alice Kober, right before her untimely death. She worked for 20 years on Linear B and put down all of the foundations. The fact that Linear B has grammatical roots and suffixes, the language is inflected, has case, gender, etc. Kober was one of the first people to work systematically finding patterns and documenting her methods. The work Ventirs did would have been impossible without Kober's methods: extending her work is what worked and gave Ventris his main idea. Ventris briefly worked with Kober. It didn't go well. But over time Ventris came to know the key players and to be accepted in the inner circle. One of these players, Emmett Bennett, gave him what Kober did not have: the Pylos tablets. By the time they were published she had died. Ventris extended Kober's work to the Pylos tablets. Her work focused on systematically analyzing groups of characters. When he looked at the results, he made his first critical observation: some groups were unique to the Knossos tablets and others were unique to the Pylos tablets. What if these are place names? There aren't that many places to be had on Knossos and he knew the Greek names. So he looked for possible combinations and used them to guide the decoding. He used Kober's work and the place names, along with help from at least Bennett, to build a rough mapping from some signs to sound. And then he made his second critical observation: what if Linear B is Greek? Since the Greek names for places seemed to appear. Then he could try to decode word after word. And along the way he made his third critical observation: many Myceanean scribes were incredibly sloppy spellers. We can even tell now that some were much better than others, but everything is very messy because even the basic rules of spelling weren't agreed on yet. Not only were characters missing, but a single character could be one of 30+ different syllables at times. Bare statistical methods alone often resulted in a mess because of this. Only small parts of the text could potentially be decoded at this point. None of the classicists that Ventris normally talked to were convinced. That's when John Chadwick, a linguist, heard about Ventris and tried his idea out. Chadwick was an expert in very old Greek, 1000 years older than Plato. Chadwick was quickly convinced by Ventris because while the decodings were very poor for someone who knew classical Greek, they made a lot more sense to him. They worked together for several years to fix up the decoding. An architect did contribute the main idea for the decoding, but an architect that was a connected insider, with a background in Greek and Latin, who had published in the area before, knowledgeable in all of the latest methods, with access to privileged information, in conversation with the experts. The way you put it, it sounds like some random architect somewhere looked at Linear B, worked hard on their own, and came up with the answer. That's not even remotely true.

I mean, yeah, but an architect with advanced classical language training.

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

OfSanguineFire 3y ago
You cite a 1965 article. That is practically ancient, and no, its criticism is not particularly significant. In the decades since, Ventris’s decipherment has overwhelmingly been accepted by scholars. That is not to say that all of Ventris’s readings are accepted – many are superseded. But the fact that Linear B records Mycenaean Greek along the general lines that he and Chadwick worked out, has long been beyond doubt in the field. Mycenaean sources and their consensus readings will be discussed in any decent introduction to the history of the Greek language. I can recommend, for example, the relevant chapters in A Companion to the Ancient Greek Language ed. Bakker and in Colvin’s A Historical Greek Reader as fairly accessible to a general audience.
- thaumasiotes 3y ago
  > You cite a 1965 article. That is practically ancient > the fact that Linear B records Mycenaean Greek along the general lines that he and Chadwick worked out, has long been beyond doubt in the field. What are the major developments since 1965 that strengthened the position of Ventris's decipherment?
  - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
    Most of the Chadwick part of the Chadwick–Ventris collaboration was published after 1965. And I just pointed you to two popular references that, in turn, cite a number of publications from recent decades. I suggest you follow up on that.
    - thaumasiotes 3y ago
      Oh, I certainly will. But I was kind of hoping for some indication that developments of that kind actually occurred; it would be the least surprising thing in the world to see a selection effect in the study of Linear B inscriptions whereby students who couldn't reconcile themselves with the idea that decipherment will happily assign a meaning to any text, even where the actual meaning of the text is known to be different, left the field, while students who didn't mind that stayed in. Over time a strong consensus in favor of the position "no, I didn't waste the last 30 years of my life" is exactly what you'd expect to see. There are no professions in which the professional consensus is "actually, none of this works". But there are many in which that is the truth.

light_hue_1 3y ago

It's really misleading to say "An architect decoded Linear B." When Michael Ventris was working by himself he published junk. A basically crackpot theory that was immediately debunked that Linear B was Etruscan. Then Ventris worked hard to become an insider. Many key observations for the decoding were done by someone else, a classicist, Alice Kober, right before her untimely death. She worked for 20 years on Linear B and put down all of the foundations. The fact that Linear B has grammatical roots and suffixes, the language is inflected, has case, gender, etc. Kober was one of the first people to work systematically finding patterns and documenting her methods. The work Ventirs did would have been impossible without Kober's methods: extending her work is what worked and gave Ventris his main idea. Ventris briefly worked with Kober. It didn't go well. But over time Ventris came to know the key players and to be accepted in the inner circle. One of these players, Emmett Bennett, gave him what Kober did not have: the Pylos tablets. By the time they were published she had died. Ventris extended Kober's work to the Pylos tablets. Her work focused on systematically analyzing groups of characters. When he looked at the results, he made his first critical observation: some groups were unique to the Knossos tablets and others were unique to the Pylos tablets. What if these are place names? There aren't that many places to be had on Knossos and he knew the Greek names. So he looked for possible combinations and used them to guide the decoding. He used Kober's work and the place names, along with help from at least Bennett, to build a rough mapping from some signs to sound. And then he made his second critical observation: what if Linear B is Greek? Since the Greek names for places seemed to appear. Then he could try to decode word after word. And along the way he made his third critical observation: many Myceanean scribes were incredibly sloppy spellers. We can even tell now that some were much better than others, but everything is very messy because even the basic rules of spelling weren't agreed on yet. Not only were characters missing, but a single character could be one of 30+ different syllables at times. Bare statistical methods alone often resulted in a mess because of this. Only small parts of the text could potentially be decoded at this point. None of the classicists that Ventris normally talked to were convinced. That's when John Chadwick, a linguist, heard about Ventris and tried his idea out. Chadwick was an expert in very old Greek, 1000 years older than Plato. Chadwick was quickly convinced by Ventris because while the decodings were very poor for someone who knew classical Greek, they made a lot more sense to him. They worked together for several years to fix up the decoding. An architect did contribute the main idea for the decoding, but an architect that was a connected insider, with a background in Greek and Latin, who had published in the area before, knowledgeable in all of the latest methods, with access to privileged information, in conversation with the experts. The way you put it, it sounds like some random architect somewhere looked at Linear B, worked hard on their own, and came up with the answer. That's not even remotely true.