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The 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
by Tuna-Fish 4mo ago
The 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 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo 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 4mo agoYes. Somewhere in Claude Shannon's work, called the "unicity distance".
- stringfood 4mo agowhen I first read the title thought he was talking about linear algebra and I was like damn it's not that hard
- stratocumulus0 4mo 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.
- _kst_ 4mo agoThey hadn't yet decided whether to count from 0 or from 1.
- cwmma 4mo agoSurprisingly this comes up more then you'd think, for instance in Ancient Rome, tomorrow is two days away so all the dates are off by one from what you'd think it was. They mainly count down and it goes, 5, 4, 3, day before, day.
- codebaobab 4mo agoI noticed that when I read Tom Holland's new translation of The Lives of the Caesars. All the dates were in the form "N days before Kalends/Ides".
- mcswell 4mo agoI think it comes up in the Gospels, too, e.g. "on the third day" after the resurrection.
- kps 4mo ago“Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration.” — Stan Kelly-Bootle (first person to obtain a postgraduate degree in computer science)
- humodz 4mo agoIt would be amusing if archaeologists in the future also end up spending countless hours trying to decipher my shopping lists and poor math skills
- neonstatic 4mo agoImagine if the first archeological discovery they made was tax forms from different countries. What would they think of us, haha.
- 4mo ago
- elbasti 4mo agoI would love to have this image available!
- tclancy 4mo agoI’d send it to you but you probably wouldn’t understand it.
- YeGoblynQueenne 4mo agoThat's one of the reasons. Another, and more important one, is that we don't know the language that the script transcribes. The claim above is that it's Hebrew. I have no idea why Minoans would speak Hebrew, there's no indication as far as I'm aware of extensive cultural exchange between the Minoan civ and Hebrew-speaking people, but there's a very clear hierarchy of difficulty to translate dead scripts. From easier to harder: a) We know what language the script transcribes and how the script transcribes it (e.g. what symbol means what word or sound). b1) We don't what language the script transcribes but we know how the script transcribes it (e.g. it's a syllabary or an abjad etc). b2) We know what language the script transcribes but we don't know how the script transcribes it (e.g. Egyptian hieroglyphics). c) We don't know what language the script transcribes nor do we know how it transcribes it. b1) and b2) are more or less of similar difficulty. Linear A goes to category c) above. We know next to nothing about the script or the language, other than the fact the former was reused in linear B to transcribe Mycenean Greek.
- Tuna-Fish 4mo agoSemitic, not Hebrew. Hebrew is one language in the semitic group, alongside Arabic, Amharic and many more. They were much more spread out in the west before the iron age, with most people in Asia Minor belonging to the group. Some of the earliest states used the languages, and they spread alongside the idea of states.
- YeGoblynQueenne 4mo agoYou're right of course but the article above is unclear about whether the claim is that Linear A transcribes Hebrew or a different Semitic language. First it says that the language of Linear A is a semitic language that is a precursor to biblical Hebrew: >> 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. But then it compares the Linear A language directly to Hebrew. For example: >> Once deciphered, Di Mino saw that the prayer was similar to subsequent Hebrew prayers but was addressed to a Goddess. So maybe I'm confused. The claim that the Minoans spoke a semitic language sounds less odd than claiming they spoke straight-up biblical Hebrew.