3 ms·
He’s pointing out that the phonetic maps are so loose and nondeterministic that Virgil’s Aeneid’s first line “Of arms and a man of Troy i sing who first from s
by jjtheblunt 3y ago
He’s pointing out that the phonetic maps are so loose and nondeterministic that Virgil’s Aeneid’s first line
“Of arms and a man of Troy i sing who first from shores”
Turns into absolutely unrelated gibberish when applying the deciphering phonetic maps, and comparing the meanings.
* nerd alert: I wrote the English with the word order in Latin, which has a endings-based freedom to word order allowing planned beats, in this case dactylic hexameter…Latin rap sort of when i think of it
- thaumasiotes 3y ago> He’s pointing out that the phonetic maps are so loose and nondeterministic This interacts with the highly inflectional nature of Greek; imagine a scheme for deciphering an unknown text into English which allowed the decipherer to insert, at any point, any word that might not be capitalized in standard English title case: to, for, the, of, and, but, with, ..., along with whatever plural or possessive markers they wished.
- burning_hamster 3y agoThat's nonsense. Greek has prepositions, conjunctions, and cases that leave little room to interpretation. It is a rather precise language (much more so than English or even Latin).
- thaumasiotes 3y agoAnd if you look a few comments upthread, you'll see that the cases are generally not represented in Linear B as we decipher it. You are free to imagine that a noun is in the case most convenient for you.
- burning_hamster 3y agoOh, I misunderstood you then. I thought you meant classical Greek in general. My apologies.