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AI Engineer Claims to Have Cracked Linear A
- akerl_ 3mo agoThis would ruin my Linear A keycaps!
- Kosturdistan 3mo agoA lot of loonies make this claim, but Tom's work is credible enough that it's being reviewed by linguistics experts at Rutgers and Cambridge. Additional validation: his approach produces results. He's translated over 300 words, and that's never been done before, and his solution actually solves some problems in Linear B. Tom is an AI engineer, and Claude Code was key to his work. Disclosures: I know Tom socially, and I wrote the post at the link.
- yorwba 3mo agoThen why is there no link to the actual write-up?
- kelseyfrog 3mo agoYou can use Claude, like the author, to reproduce the result.
- justin_dash 3mo agoUnless if it was done by Fable!
- kelseyfrog 3mo agoThe 'major insight' described in the article predates Fable's release by two week four days. It would be a complicated timeline.
- atrus 3mo agosomehow I suspect it was a bit more involved than: Claude, please solve Linear A.
- smsm42 3mo agoYou also have to add "make no mistakes"!
- fragmede 3mo agoA little bit more. If you ask ChatGPT to "solve linear a" it thinks you mean linear algebra. If you specify that it's the Minoan translation problem, you get a table similar to the one that we get a glimpse of in the without access to the paper, we can't say how much more work the paper has than my gist. https://gist.github.com/fragmede/bbf277d36a2398065f109484f3473684 https://gist.github.com/fragmede/bbf277d36a2398065f109484f34...
- Kosturdistan 3mo agoYou are correct!
- _verandaguy 3mo agoThis isn't really a reasonable approach, is it? The original prompts aren't provided, nor is the original context; even then, you can't really treat a stochastic system like an LLM as a major component in reproducibility.
- ben_w 3mo ago> even then, you can't really treat a stochastic system like an LLM as a major component in reproducibility. If you had the other things, being "stochastic" is not even remotely a show-stopper. Stochastic processes abound and are the reason the mathematics of statistics was developed in the first place, ultimately allowing us to create such things as LLMs. When all the relevant steps gets published, I absolutely expect a lot of people to (attempt to) reproduce this work even though LLMs are stochastic.
- _verandaguy 3mo agoMy issue with this is that it's a form of "soft" reproducibility, where it'll work for many (maybe even most!) people, but that depends on the way the original prompt was formulated (read on) and the state of the random noise in the system. On the prompt formulation; prompts with very similar formulations (in terms of both semantics, hamming distance, or both) can lead to _wildly divergent_ outputs in my experience. It's not rigourous, and when that divergence happens, it's extremely difficult (arguably impossible, by nature of the architecture of transformers) to identify why the divergence happened and where.
- fragmede 3mo agoSure it is. We're humans, not robots (well, I think I am, and I presume you are as well, but for all we know, we could be living in a simulation), so if the non-deterministic system decides to generate code that calls the variable foo one day and bar the next, as long as the code still does what's being asked of it, why do I care that the non deterministic system chose to call the variable something different when run on Tuesday? There's the computer science definition of determinism and the engineering result of "does it work", which are at odds. It's like the halting problem. We haven't solved the computer science definition of the halting problem, but give some C code with a loop that won't terminate to Claude, and it'll call that out as not halting.
- GavinMcG 3mo agoPresumably because it hasn’t yet been published?
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- m0llusk 3mo agoIt seems this is still extremely early in the process. There is an apparent finding that was shared. Evidence which would be the basis for a paper is "being reviewed by linguistics experts at Rutgers and Cambridge". So they are trying to do the right thing by talking about what they believe they have done but holding off publication and serious claims until later. The general idea that written forms can be categorized by systems built with Claude could be applied to other as yet undecipherable languages could be used by other interested investigators just with what is discussed here.
- sillysaurusx 3mo ago> The general idea that written forms can be categorized by systems built with Claude could be applied to other as yet undecipherable languages could be used by other interested investigators just with what is discussed here. Could you rephrase this or explain it more thoroughly? I don’t follow. What does it mean to categorize a written form by systems built with Claude?
- tyingq 3mo agoThe same pattern/tech is generic enough that it might be able to solve other unrelated, and so-far undecipherable, written languages.
- Kosturdistan 3mo agoThe only write-up at the moment is my blog post, hopefully that changes in the coming weeks.
- Sniffnoy 3mo agoThe blog post mentions a draft of a manuscript though. I was expecting something like a preprint. He's not willing to post that draft yet?
- Kosturdistan 3mo agoI have seen and read his draft article, he's not comfortable sharing it publicly yet since it's being reviewed by experts.
- ahknight 3mo agoBut the Internet nerds wish to blindly judge something they know nothing about so they can feel better with the assumption that they could have done better somehow. How will they be appeased if the document they will say they have read and understood (without having done either) is not available to point at? How, I ask?!
- qustio 3mo agoIt's entirely reasonable to ask for the underlying research in response to a blog post hyping up an unproven claim in an area notoriously full of amateurs making the same claim that historically fail to stand up to scrutiny. Particularly when the only source is a friend of the author, posting on a blog named "AI Clambake" about "A weekly, human-powered newsletter for advertising folks who want to stay on top of the AI mayhem" and not a publication with any credibility in linguistics. None of that means it can't be true, but some basic skepticism is warranted here. Otherwise we end up in a situation like the LK99 room temperature superconductor where a lot of HN commenters were also upset at the cynical "downers" who just couldn't root for a good thing/progress.
- grey-area 3mo agoAmazing work and refreshing to see a well written and cogent post to summarise it. Would love to hear more about how he used Claude to help solve the puzzle.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- kubb 3mo agoLet's wait until it's been verified.
- mikestorrent 3mo agoYou're absolutely right! We've opened a ticket with the Linear A folks, hopefully they'll get back to us soon with an update as to whether we've got it correct or not. Hang tight!
- saagarjha 3mo agoA Linear ticket, hopefully
- kridsdale1 3mo agoThis comment sure is load bearing.
- mikestorrent 3mo agoIt's the veritable smoking gun
- make3 3mo agoI'd like to push back
- TeMPOraL 3mo agoRegardless, we should stand ready, loaded for bear.
- bawolff 3mo agoHow does an expert even verify something like this?
- sigbottle 3mo agoI mean it's not like anyone could objectively go back in time and query ancient civilizations for what they meant, but presumably it means the verification heuristics, they have currently, pragmatic success, and expert solidarity means that it is "verified"
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- dwroberts 3mo agoYou know him socially but is there a reason you’re writing this rather than him? It looks like he has his own web presence. Cynical read would be you’re stealing his thunder a bit by prematurely announcing this before it’s fully confirmed
- iwontberude 3mo agoWhat thunder? Claude did the work and used a human to interface with experience and causality better.
- ben_w 3mo agoThe thunder is as per the headline. Assuming it passes review. One of the things I find weird with AI is how the dismissals of work that involve AI splits into two camps: like yours, saying the AI did the work while the human played no role and deserves no credit; and those saying the AI rips off its training data while the human using it played no role and deserves no credit.
- iwontberude 3mo agoI exist in both camps. Claude can’t launder human achievement into a different person. Claude stole it, but it’s still in Claude’s possession and is not transferable in any durable sense.
- ben_w 3mo ago> Claude stole it, but it’s still in Claude’s possession and is not transferable in any durable sense. No human, individually or as a team, has been able to solve this to date. To the extent this was Claude solving it itself and thus denying Di Mino any thunder, there was nobody to have stolen anything from. To the extent he has thunder to be stolen, it wasn't ever in Claude's possession.
- iwontberude 3mo ago
- canjobear 3mo ago> Tom's work is credible enough that it's being reviewed by linguistics experts at Rutgers and Cambridge What does this mean? Like he e-mailed it to some people at Rutgers and Cambridge? Or it's under some kind of non-anonymous peer review?
- OutOfHere 3mo agoIs this extendible to a generalizable approach to translate any language pair (without a translation map or translation dataset)?
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- SoftTalker 3mo agoTowards the Star Trek universal translator.....
- retrac 3mo agoI think it is an open question: can an unknown language be cracked -- without any dictionary or grammar or understanding of the language? Just lots and lots of texts, maybe some of it bilingual. It's a common misconception that is what happened with Ancient Egyptian with the Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta Stone was just one of the big pieces of the puzzle. The decoding came when people realized that Coptic (a language written alphabetically and still in use in the Coptic Church today) is actually descended from Ancient Egyptian; as Spanish is to Latin, Coptic is to Ancient Egyptian. Similarly the attempts to decode classical Maya were all dead ends. Until Yuri Knorozov realized that it encoded the ancestor of the Maya languages which are still spoken to this day. (Knorozov's Wikipedia article is worth checking out just for his photo with his cat. [0] IMHO.) I have written before about the La Mojarra 1 stele in Mexico [1]. It looks a lot like Maya. [2] But it isn't Maya. Maybe the difference like between Russian and Latin writing? No one can read it. It's undecipherable. There are some attempts to identify it with a proposed ancient language that would have been related to the modern Mixe-Zoque languages: some of the glyphs that are shared with Maya, when read phonetically, start sounding like a Mixe-Zoque language. But no one has proposed a confident decipherment. There probably isn't enough text. La Mojarra 1 is the only long example of the Isthmian script. Deciphering Akkadian was very difficult, at first. The process started with Persian; old Persian was written in a simplified adapted form of the Mesopotamian cuneiform (wedges on clay). It was a kind of alphabet. And Old Persian was already understood. And there was a bilingual text on a monument carved by Darius I. But even then -- decoding relies so heavily on the fact that Akkadian is a Semitic language distantly related to Hebrew, more distantly, also Ancient Egyptian. So again, we sort of knew what we were looking for. That is all to say: even if the Voynich manuscript (for example) contains real text in an otherwise completely lost language, I'm not sure it is possible even theoretically to translate it. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Knorozov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Knorozov [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Mojarra_Stela_1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Mojarra_Stela_1 [2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:La_Mojarra_Stela_1_Schematics.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:La_Mojarra_Stela_1_S...
- mNovak 3mo agoInteresting writeup. Would be nice to have a couple images of Linear A/B scripts to visualize. Looking on google, they're very daunting!
- Blahah 3mo agolineara.xyz is your friend
- fittingopposite 3mo agoHow do they know how this language was read?
- indiv0 3mo agoCan I get his decipher-forgotten-ancient-text skill? I want to try my hand at the Voynich Manuscript
- NooneAtAll3 3mo agorelevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2151/ https://xkcd.com/2151/
- gorjusborg 3mo agoWow, there really is an XKCD for everything.
- iwontberude 3mo agoSorry but I don’t recognize this as being an achievement by an amateur. This dude had no chance in hell until we trained a model to use his time to suss it out.
- jonahx 3mo agoAssuming this pans out, every other professional linguist in the world has had the option to use Claude or other LLMs, but has not solved this problem, despite the incentives for doing so. It stands to reason the human is adding crucial value.
- Kosturdistan 3mo agoI drilled down on this with Tom. He thinks that it might not have happened without Claude Code, but Claude was used to organize all of the symbols, and to run I think it was 100,000 simulations to assess whether or not he had an actual insight, or if he just randomly got lucky. Claude did NOT crack the code. Significant supporting role though.
- BretonForearm 3mo agoSo Claude Code was used to generate software that ran simulations? I don't think LLMs in and of themselves can execute simulations, esp. a specific, non-single digit count like 100k.
- Kosturdistan 3mo agoI don't know if the agent ran the simulations or if the agent built software that ran the simulations. But Claude was used to run the simulations.
- slopinthebag 3mo agoI feel like that is extremely relevant information. An LLM running "simulations" is nonsense, using an agent (apparently Claude Code) to write simulation software is more realistic. I'm sure you could clarify this since you have a relationship with the person. Curious to see where this goes. Hopefully an update is posted here when it's all said and done :)
- Tuna-Fish 3mo agoThe reason linear A is so difficult is that the total remaining corpus of Linear A text is ~7500 characters, spread out over ~1500 inscriptions. If you have a 4k screen, you can fit all remaining Linear A text on your screen at once, in 14pt high font.
- WithinReason 3mo agoAs observed by archaeologist John Younger, the entire Linear A corpus takes up only 1.84 pages of letter paper when typeset in 12 point font and 1-inch margins.
- dehrmann 3mo agoVery vaguely, it makes it like a one-time pad where it can be anything you want it to be. Not quite, but so little text leaves a lot of options open.
- AaronAPU 3mo agoI wonder, is there a form of analysis which lets you quantify how ambiguous a set of symbols is? Maybe related to entropy? Obviously one symbol can mean literally anything, but you could also have very long strings of symbols with many different meanings.
- red_admiral 3mo agoYes. Somewhere in Claude Shannon's work, called the "unicity distance".
- stringfood 3mo agowhen I first read the title thought he was talking about linear algebra and I was like damn it's not that hard
- stratocumulus0 3mo agoAn in addition to that, a vast majority of documents are lists which consist of a "header" (1 to 3 words) and word-number pairs afterwards. An another common class are small clay seals with 1, 2 characters carved into them. It's likely that in both cases, we may be dealing with abbreviations. Some of the lists end with "ku-ro" and a number that's the sum of all the previous numbers, oddly frequently off by one.
- doubleorseven 3mo agocrossing my fingers for this guy. however, nawaya or what ever examples around it are not part of the Hebrew language.
- drcode 3mo agoDon't know about the situation for this particular example, but keep in mind this type of analysis will necessarily involve extremely archaic dialects of all the involved languages
- atdt 3mo agoYou're incorrect. The letter ו (vav) is pronounced /v/ in modern Hebrew but /w/ in Biblical Hebrew and other ancient Semitic languages, which is why the letter is referred to as Waw and transliterated as 'W'. https://www.biblexika.com/bible-lexicon/navah-h5115 https://www.biblexika.com/bible-lexicon/navah-h5115 https://hebrew-academy.org.il/%D7%93%D7%A3-%D7%9E%D7%99%D7%9C%D7%94/%D7%A0%D6%B8%D7%95%D6%B6%D7%94/ https://hebrew-academy.org.il/%D7%93%D7%A3-%D7%9E%D7%99%D7%9... https://biblehub.com/hebrew/5116.htm https://biblehub.com/hebrew/5116.htm
- stratocumulus0 3mo agoAs an amateur who's been fascinated by this puzzle himself, I will add some context that might be relevant in assessing the plausibility of this claim: - The "Libation Formula", which the author used as the base for his translations, is the most studied piece of writing in Linear A, because it's the only recurring phrase (with grammatical variation) that we have. The corpus is extremely fragmentary, with just a handful of instances of longer text (and even then, the texts are the length of an average sentence in English). The majority of documents available to us are lists (of inventory, personnel, offerings or something of this sort). The longer texts make use of punctuation marks, likely put in between words. This gives us a non-trivial vocabulary, which still does not match that of any known language. - With such fragmentary remaining material, we cannot be sure that a) all the texts we call "Linear A" are written in the same language, and b) the recognizable words are not abbreviations, for example. - The author made an assumption that Linear A symbols which have counterparts in Linear B should have the same phonetic values. This gives us an already known glyph that represented "NA". "Duplicate" glyphs are only found in the P-series, and are assumed to represent syllables which were distinguished by the Linear A language, but not by Greek - such as aspirated/unaspirated P. There is a glyph that stands for "NWA" in Linear B, but instances of it have been found in Linear A as well. - There are countless words with no known etymology in Ancient Greek, assumed to originate from a substrate language or languages spoken in the area at the time Greeks migrated to their present-day homeland. The language of Linear A would be a likely candidate for such substrate. If Linear A were a Semitic language, then we should already be able to establish Semitic etymologies for those words as they were in Greek. Of course it could also be the case that these words came from an another language which did not adopt writing or its writing did not survive to our times.
- _alternator_ 3mo agoThanks for the context; how do you think this impacts plausibility? Presumably the fact that he made progress in a well studied passage is cause for skepticism? What's your take?
- yorwba 3mo agoWell, the reasoning in the article is that if you take A-TA-I-*301-WA-JA, keep only W-J and assume *301 starts with N, then you get a claimed Semitic root N-W-Y related to dwelling, except I wonder whether that shouldn't be N-W-H instead https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D7%A0%D7%95%D7%95%D7%94 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D7%A0%D7%95%D7%95%D7%94 (Semitic isn't my area) so at best one fifth of one word matches two thirds of another therefore iT mUsT bE sEmItIc. A serious attempt at decipherment should at least try to explain the A-TA-I, or any of the other words in the sentence, for that matter.
- fooster 3mo agoAlot of the comments in this thread are disappointing. Rather that celebrating an achievement (whether or it is validated yet), many of you seem to want to put him down, or make it seem like claude did all the work. Claiming that claude did all the work is patently ridiculous. Claude is a tool, like any other. The corpus of linear A is ~7500 characters across ~1500 inscriptions and claude, no matter how smart, doesn't just solve that on its own. What a shame.
- tennfown 3mo ago[flagged]
- evilfred 3mo agothis isn't an achievement, it's yet another amateur crank claiming he solved a famous puzzle, without a paper and without any critical review. many people have claimed to decode Linear A before. just because this guy used an LLM doesn't make it more credible
- Kosturdistan 3mo agoHe has a working draft of a manuscript that may form the basis of a scholarly article, it has been shared with experts, and there is an excerpt of the paper in my blog post. I have also seen and read the paper with my own 2 eyes, I can't publish it though, Tom wants to keep that under wraps while it's reviewed by linguistics experts.
- evilfred 3mo agothe info provided is completely unverifiable.
- BigTTYGothGF 3mo ago> He has a working draft of a manuscript that may form the basis of a scholarly article, it has been shared with experts So did many of the previous attempted solvers.
- loudmax 3mo agoThis is very exciting. Congrats to Tom on the accomplishment. To be clear, this is an attempt at a decipherment. This is not proven, and we shouldn't consider Linear A to be "solved" until experts in the field have reviewed the work. In fact, it probably shouldn't be considered "proof" unless some more Linear A writings are uncovered and these are congruent with the method proposed. All that can be said for certain at this point is that this is an interesting conjecture. But this is a story worth following. This could be the real deal. More research and validation should follow and we should have a better idea in the next few weeks or months whether Linear A has really been solved. At the very least, this is an interesting attempt, and optimistically, it could yield real insight into Minoan culture. Kudos.
- Kosturdistan 3mo agoThanks, I hope Tom is right, but now it's in the hands of the pros.
- WhitneyLand 3mo agoIf confirmed this is really cool and impressive work. Honestly curious how many years before it can be one shotted in a coding harness with Fable.next by someone who’s not a linguistics expert. Develop, test, and rank hypotheses about the phonetic values, morphology, grammar, and possible language family of Linear A using the full available corpus. Do not assume any decipherment is correct. Treat all candidate readings as hypotheses to be scored…”
- danishanish 3mo agoI don’t imagine a model capable of the first part would require being told not to assume a decipherment is correct
- yorwba 3mo agoHumans capable of the first part regularly make the mistake of assuming that their decipherment is correct even if it's not internally consistent and fails to adequately explain most of the data.
- rw_panic0_0 3mo agowould like to hear more about Tom's learning/education path in ML/AI.
- Kosturdistan 3mo agoI haven't talked to him extensively about how he learned his engineering skills, but he is I believe 100% self taught. His background is in copywriting.
- vb-8448 3mo agoI wonder if LLMs trained specifically for this purpose can perform well with "forgotten languages". I know I'm simplifying a lot, but all this deciphering isn't it just some kind of pattern matching?
- cwmma 3mo agoIsn't a big problem with Linear A that there are so few symbols you can "solve" it relatively straightforwardly with no way to tell if you it's correct or not?
- Kosturdistan 3mo agoThe lack of discovered inscriptions does make deciphering it harder, but it is possible!
- bazoom42 3mo agoI wonder how you would even know if you have “cracked” it, given the corpus is so small?
- Kosturdistan 3mo agoYou know you have cracked it because using the proposed system you are able to translate the uncracked language. Also helpful if your proposed system for Linear A makes sense relative to related languages that are not Linear A. Tom's proposed phonetic values work for more than one language.
- bazoom42 3mo agoNot questioning the particular finding, just wondering in general. E.g when linear B or hieroglyphs were cracked, you could check angainst other untranslated texts and see if the translation still made sense.
- evilfred 3mo agoi'm gonna write a blog post now about how my buddy discovered cold fusion and will have a paper out real soon now
- evilfred 3mo ago/r/classics thinks this is bunk btw https://www.reddit.com/r/classics/s/wwiNTytNfA https://www.reddit.com/r/classics/s/wwiNTytNfA
- rich_sasha 3mo agoGotta love the nominative determinism: Tom Di Mino ("of Mino"?) cracks a Minoan language.
- simonw 3mo ago> Di Mino used Claude Code to build a suite of Python scripts that query, cross-reference, and organize the digitized Linear A corpus (drawn from the GORILA and SigLA databases), enabling systematic hypothesis testing at a scale that would have been impractical to do manually. That's exactly the kind of thing I'd hope Claude would be used for in these kinds of projects - building tools, not black-box "solving" the problem.
- xeonmc 3mo agoIf it had been a proper developer he would've been nerd-sniped into yak-shaving those tools and never get the original work done.
- neonstatic 3mo agoyou don't know that
- topaz0 3mo agoIf you look at his GitHub it does seem like he's obsessed with the tools
- pfdietz 3mo agoNow get to work on Harappan.
- singularity2001 3mo agoIf it turns out to be true, it would open the door a bit for connecting Indo-European languages with Semitic languages. In the beginning of the last century it was believed that these were related. Later this came out of vogue. How could they have been so wrong initially? Because both languages families were entangled, as now there is genetic evidence that both languages spread from very close to the Caucasus. It's probably old news for most but in the last 15 years it became clear that Europe was completely resettled, once by Anatolians and then partly by Indo-Europeans. The language of the Anatolians is still unknown.
- mcswell 3mo ago"How could they have been so wrong initially?" For the same reason that many other proposed reconstructions were (and some still are) so wrong. Chance matches, sometimes actual loanwords, and bias on the part of some people.
- singularity2001 3mo agoWait, I've seen the same libation formula appearing in the Phaistos disc. For those 10 of you who have the fonts installed: 𐇑 𐇘 𐇪 𐇐 | 𐇬 𐇳 𐇖 𐇗𐇽 | 𐇬 𐇗 𐇜 | 𐇬 𐇼 𐇖𐇽 | 𐇥 𐇬 𐇳 𐇖 𐇗𐇽 | 𐇪 𐇱 𐇦 𐇨 | 𐇖 𐇡 𐇲 | 𐇖 𐇼 𐇖𐇽 | 𐇖 𐇡 𐇲 | 𐇥 𐇬 𐇳 𐇖 𐇗𐇽 i-𐇘-wi-jeʳ | ʰau-ni-ti-noʳ au-no-pa au-ndi-tiʳ 𐇥-au-ni-ti-noʳ wa-pi-naᵐwa ti-ru-te ti-nd-tri ti-na-ru-he ʰau-ni-ti-noʳ i-301-wa-ja/e | ʰau-... jaᵘ-di-ki-to i-pi-na-ma si-ru-te ta-na-ra te-ti-u ta-na-te i-da 𐘚 ᴴI 𐘮 WA 𐘱 JA 𐘱 JA 𐘆 DI 𐘸 KI 𐘹 TU 𐘚 ᴴI 𐘢 PI 𐘅 NA 𐙁 MA () I believe the phonetic values for Phaistos here were based on similarity.
- em-bee 3mo agoi had the fonts for the phaistos disk but not linear a. i have no idea why i had that one even installed, but now i have both :-) only that last character () is still missing. which font is that?
- tlogan 3mo agoOk. But where is the table of translations?
- WalterBright 3mo agoAmateurs! I've already translated it: "Thag is a smarty-pants"
- Laurel1234 3mo agoIsn't Minoan highly agglutinative?
- petjuh 3mo agoFrom what I know, the main issue is that the Linear A script corpus is rather small. Another commenter here said it's only 7500 symbols in total, spread around 1500 inscriptions (so on average 5 symbols per inscription). The other thing I find odd, however, is that it's found to be a Semitic language. If it's a Semitic language, I would have expected it to already have been deciphered. And certainly linguists would have already looked at Semitic languages, and looked hard. Also if it were a Semitic language, why wasn't it consonantal but had vowels? Usually Semitic languages (and Egyptian maybe) write only the consonants because their stems are made three consonants and vowels are interweaved to make words. Example semitic root K-T-B and how vowels are added in-between to form words: kataba – He wrote yaktubu – He writes / is writing kitāb – A book kutub – Books kātib – A writer / scribe / clerk maktūb – Written / fate maktab – An office / desk maktabah – A library / bookstore And another such root - D-R-S which means "studying" or "learning." darasa – He studied yadrusu – He studies / is studying dirāsah – A study / school course dāris – A student / learner madrūs – Studied / carefully planned madrasah – A school This system of triliteral roots is the reason why usually Semitic languages don't use vowels. Why would Linear A have consonant+vowel syllabary if it were semitic?
- mcswell 3mo agoYour post shows exactly why it would be useful to write vowels in Semitic languages: to distinguish among the different tenses, passive/active, nominalizations etc.---in other words, to distinguish the various words that happen to be based on a single root.
- peterfirefly 3mo agoTrue, but Arabic and Hebrew use a large number of implicit vowels. Only some of the vowels are actually written (except in school books in the early grades). I don't really understand how they can leave out so many vowels and still figure out that "this is past tense", "this is a noun", etc.
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- teleforce 3mo ago>Di Mino believes that Linear A belongs to an extinct Semitic language that was a precursor to biblical Hebrew, the way that Latin is a precursor to Italian. Indus valley script is about 1500 years earlier than Linear A and I hope we can also decipher Indus script using AI or not [1]. It's well overdue although from statistical profiling it's has been proven to be a valid linguistic script believed to be being used for writing system the ancient Harappan language, the likely precursor of modern Dravidian languages for examples Telegus and Tamil. The main reason it's very difficult to decipher is that there's no equivalent Rosetta Stone for Indus script. My hypothesis is that the AI LLM model can be trained or tuned as the logical or virtual version of the venerable Rosetta stone hence can be used to decipher ancient writing system. [1] Indus script: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_script
- mcswell 3mo ago"...it's has been proven to be a valid linguistic script..." No, it has NOT been proven to be a writing system for a language. Indeed the very link you cite [1] says: "... difficult to judge whether or not they [the Indus symbols] constituted a writing system used to record a Harappan language..." "There are doubts whether the Indus script records a written language or is instead a system of non-linguistic signs or proto-writing similar to merchant's marks and house marks, and to the contemporary accounting tokens and numerical clay tablets of Mesopotamia. Due to the brevity of inscriptions, some researchers have questioned whether Indus symbols can even express a spoken language." In sum, whether it's a writing system for some language is still debated.
- teleforce 3mo ago>"...it's has been proven to be a valid linguistic script..." No, it has NOT been proven to be a writing system for a language. Indeed the very link you cite [1] says: Actually I was reffering to a 2011 TED Talk on Youtube by a researcher in this field namely Rajesh Rao a computational neuroscientist, entitled "Computing a Rosetta Stone for the Indus script." It's based on the comparison of the statistical distribution and entropy to other well-known languages such as English, Sumerian, and Old Tamil, as well as non-linguistic systems such as DNA sequences, Fortran programming code, and completely random sequences [1]. The researcher personally received a death threat due to this discovery. Why is the discovery or the hypothesis (depending on your perspective) is very controversial, is telling something. My conjecture is that the Dravidian speaking people is displaced further south to the Indian subcontinent by the "newcomers" (Aryan speaking people), similar to how the Wales/Welsh speaking people was driven further eastword in the British Island by the "newcomers" (English speaking people). [1] Rajesh Rao: Computing a Rosetta Stone for the Indus script [video]: https://youtu.be/kwYxHPXIaao https://youtu.be/kwYxHPXIaao
- YeGoblynQueenne 3mo agoThe author and their friend are in the thread so I'll try to not be mean. Caveat: I'm Greek so a kind of natural amateur historian. That is to say I grew up reading about the prehistory and ancient history of Greece, as one does when one is born Greek and a geek. I've seen the Phaistos disk and linear A inscriptions with mine own eyes in Greek museums and I have dreamed of the day they would be translated. I am not at all unsympathetic to the hopes of a Linear A decipherement. However. The claimed decipherment has all the hallmarks of imaginative and fanciful attempts to draw parallels between historical events and entities, that were not really connected, many of them notably inspired by the Hebrew bible. For example, remember when the lost tribes of Israel turned out in the New World [1]? Or how Biblical Sodom was actually destroyed by a comet [2]? Or the time that Venus was ejected from Jupiter and caused the Biblical Cataclysm [3]? Or, for less biblical but no less foundational texts of the Western literary canon, remember when Heinrich Schliemann discovered the Jewels of Helen of Troy [4] and the Death Mask of King Agamemnon [5]? Or of course we could recall any of the claims to decipher the Phaistos Disk [6] or the Dropa Disks from Bayan Kara-Ula [7], and so on I'm sure. All of the above is not to say that a decipherement is impossible. What it is to say is that it currently isn't possible; because we have no idea what the language that Linear A transcribes even is. It's not like the Minoan language is still spoken today in some far-evolved form, as was the case for e.g. Egyptian or Mayan or indeed ancient Greek [8]. So we have an unknown script, writing an unknown language, and to make matters worse there are no parallel texts with another ancient language that might help us bridge the gap. What there is, is some rudimentary understanding of the more obvious contents of Linear A texts (mostly, lists of goods) and the fact that some Linear A symbols have been reused in Linear B. But, how were they reused? And what good is that knowledge without knowing anything about the language transcribed by Linear A? I can read German, a language that I don't speak, because I can read Latin script, but the meaning of the script might as well be Greek to me [9]. I'm a computer scientists, I guess, these days [10]. The problem of deciphering Linear A, or the Phaistos Disk, or any other script (that may not even be a script) that transliterates a language that we don't know is a problem of reconstructing information that we don't have, from other information that we don't have. I'm not saying it's completely impossible. I mean, who knows? Maybe we're just missing the right maths. But, what we're really trying to do here is de-noise a message garbled by the passage of time without even a guess as to the language the message is written in. Claude Shannon would tell you that it's a fantasy that is not worth pursuing. You don't have to ask him, you can just read his magnum opus [11] and check out Section 3 titled "The Series of Approximations to English" for an idea of what the mechanics of deciphering a script when the language is known look like with the only technology we have that can do the job reliably. When Turing and the other Brits at Bletchley Park cracked the Enigma code, they at least knew it was, ultimately, a coded form of German. We may have a lot more compute now, and much more advanced tech overall, but there are some barriers that you cannot physically cross, no matter what resources you have. For example, you can't go faster than light and you can't escape the event horizon of a black hole. In the same way you can't translate text written in an unknown script, encoding an unknown language, without any parallel texts with a known language. There is just not enough information to do the job. Worse, if you try, you can endlessly come up with plausible "translations" and convince yourself that you have the right one, but you have no way to know you do. I'm sorry but this claim is just a wild guess trying to link Hebrew to Linear A, without any serious evidence that the two are linked and without any evidence that the link is real, other than "look, I can guess what all the texts say!". _________________ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Indian_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Indian_theory [2] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/destruction-of-city-by-space-rock-may-have-inspired-biblical-story-of-sodom-180978734/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/destruction-of-cit... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worlds_in_Collision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worlds_in_Collision [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priam%27s_Treasure#/media/File:Sophia_Schliemann_wearing_gold_jewelry_(cropped).jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priam%27s_Treasure#/media/File... [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mask_of_Agamemnon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mask_of_Agamemnon [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaistos_Disc_decipherment_claims https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaistos_Disc_decipherment_cla... [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropa_stones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropa_stones [8] I can read ancient Greek. The further back in time it goes, the harder it gets to understand what it means but I can still read the script. It has changed in 5000 years but not enough that I can't read it. Nothing like that ability survived for Linear A. I blame Thera. [9] Except of course then I would understand it. But it's just German to me. [10] I can assure you that took me by surprised, first of all. [11] https://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon/entropy/entropy.pdf https://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shanno...
- ElijahLynn 3mo ago[dead]
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- Slamwart 3mo agoI am curious how the author analyzes other words that scholars have identified as forms of the same verb, which has generally been understood as "give": ta-na-i-301-u-ti-nu (IO Za 6), for instance, or a-ta-i-301-de-ka (ZA Zb 3). As Brent Davis has argued it sure does look like the root is i-*301 with prefixed and suffixed elements, rather than some trilateral n-w-y (also "dwell" and "give" are pretty far apart semantically). Accordingly I would be surprised if the idea that this is a Semitic language makes it through peer review, and leading with such a far-fetched claim doesn't inspire much confidence in the article or the idea that Linear A has been "cracked."