I guess I’m skeptical as to what is being claimed here. There have been various attempts to use the Greek phonetic values and logograms of Linear B to reconstruct Linear A equivalents. The only known sentences partially deciphered are votive formulations. Knowing the sound values doesn’t really help you anyway as we have virtually no information on Linear A at all. It’s pretty hard to understand sign equivalencies if you can’t even understand how a sign is being used.
The article is pretty vague; I’m not sure what these sign equivalences are supposed to be.
Was on Crete just before Covid hit. People there told me it is more or less impossible to reconstruct most of the language because there just isn't enough base material for references. He explicitly told me not to believe people that claim they would be able to translate. Although he probably just meant tourist scams and this is on another level of course.
Wouldn't recommend Knossos, a bit too oriented at tourists, but there are other ruins that are well worth the visit. I believe there is a picture of a women in the building in the picture, but it was very crudely restored. They just used the next IKEA picture frame they could find. But I wonder what archive they mean when they mention the sources. Cannot have been that much, because the area is rather small.
Yep. I think they are trying to write for too broad of an audience. It is spending a lot of ink trying to get people to care who did not already know a fact like
> The discovery of the Rosetta Stone, which was inscribed with writing in both ancient Egyptian and Greek, allowed linguists to finally crack the code of Egyptian hieroglyphics in the 19th century.
---------
[EDIT]
Actually, a question for those who are better at writing than I:
When imagining the reader for your article, why would you assume it included someone who did not know what the Rosetta Stone did on a basic level?
Is there a better source for this? Under all the breathless hype ("astonishingly, the internet itself may be the key that unlocks the link between the languages") it sounds like all that's being claimed -- not even proven -- is stronger evidence that Linear A and Linear B are related.
“I am afraid there is currently no exact translation of the sign-sequences (= words) attested on Linear A tablets (as well as other document types). This is primarily because we have not yet identified the linguistic family the Minoan language belong
There has been exciting recent progress in the decipherment of another early writing system, Linear Elamite.[0] In fact, French archæologist/philologist François Desset announced last year that he has deciphered all known Linear Elamite inscriptions.[1] (Someone posted this to HN at the time, but it got no traction.[2])
I you are at all interested in this sort of thing then I recommend this book:
John Chadwick -
The Decipherment of Linear B
It is written for the lay person and describes the process of cracking linear B and some of the human story as well as info about the ancient civilization.
Said book describes the role of Michael Ventris who actually deciphered Linear B. Ventris was an architect who had no formal qualifications in classics, didn't attend university but had an extraordinary propensity for languages. He started working on Linear B when he was at school.
That was disappointing; the fact that Linear B is descended from Linear A and has inherited many of its signs with more or less variation is not exactly news.
Naming here is a bit complicated. Are we talking about the writing system or the spoken language, for example? The linked article is using some terms in what I'd consider an unusual way (e.g. talking about a "Linear B language", vs. Linear B writing system or script).
Linear B is mostly agreed to be a writing system for the Mycenaean Greek language [1], a language that was spoken on both Crete and the Mainland. So it wasn't solely a Minoan language. You could argue that it's sufficiently different from modern Greek to have a different name, but there isn't really a consistently followed rule for naming languages that way. For example, "Old English" is completely incomprehensible to a speaker of modern English, but nonetheless has that name.
What language Linear A was used to write is more mysterious. Some researchers do in fact think it corresponded to a separate Minoan language that was not closely related to Greek, but there's no consensus.
A lot of languages lack an equivalent to "the". E.g Norwegian "shop" -> "butikk", "the shop" -> "butikken". Conversely, if you started with a North Germanic language like Norwegian instead of English as your reference, you might be tempted to assume gendered articles. E.g. "en sol" -> "a sun" masculine, "ei sol" -> "a sun" feminine, to confuse matters Norwegian bokmål (Norwegian has two written languages; they're very similar; bokmål is one of them) allows both masculine and feminine most places now (but not all - "butikk"/"shop" is unambiguously masculine - imagine trying to guess at how things like that affects stats without knowing the language), but also has a neuter gender which is less interchangeable.
It gets worse. Imagine you'd like to try to look for possible suffixes corresponding to "the" as an alternative (I don't know any languages that uses other methods, but I'm sure they exist).
Imagine now if your "unknown" language was similar to Norwegian. In Norwegian "the sun" can be either "solen" or "sola" depending on gender, and you can't assume a writer is even consistent (it's bad form to mix different gender for the same word in the same text, but that doesn't stop people), which would throw off your counts/stats.
We have a pretty good catalogue of possible variations based on modern languages, so you certainly could try to construct a theory of a mapping based on known possible options (and you're not wrong to think in that direction as one approach worth testing), but there are many possible variations, so it's unfortunately not an easy one.
In addition to the grammatical issues other posters have replied with, another issue is that script in tablets probably would drop words that aren't strictly necessary for understanding which may mean very compact writing since the context could allow high compression (e.g. "John green house" or possibly "John g h" could be perfectly clear to the readers, but still mean a million different things if you don't have the context).
In general, assuming some (types of) words are more common is reasonable, but the specifics could be tricky. I know it was only an example, but "the", for example, might not exist in the language -- it might not have definite articles, or any articles equivalent to English articles at all.
[+] [-] cpleppert|4 years ago|reply
The article is pretty vague; I’m not sure what these sign equivalences are supposed to be.
[+] [-] raxxorrax|4 years ago|reply
Wouldn't recommend Knossos, a bit too oriented at tourists, but there are other ruins that are well worth the visit. I believe there is a picture of a women in the building in the picture, but it was very crudely restored. They just used the next IKEA picture frame they could find. But I wonder what archive they mean when they mention the sources. Cannot have been that much, because the area is rather small.
[+] [-] afarrell|4 years ago|reply
Yep. I think they are trying to write for too broad of an audience. It is spending a lot of ink trying to get people to care who did not already know a fact like
> The discovery of the Rosetta Stone, which was inscribed with writing in both ancient Egyptian and Greek, allowed linguists to finally crack the code of Egyptian hieroglyphics in the 19th century.
---------
[EDIT]
Actually, a question for those who are better at writing than I:
When imagining the reader for your article, why would you assume it included someone who did not know what the Rosetta Stone did on a basic level?
[+] [-] est31|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Clewza313|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scrubs|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pvg|4 years ago|reply
“I am afraid there is currently no exact translation of the sign-sequences (= words) attested on Linear A tablets (as well as other document types). This is primarily because we have not yet identified the linguistic family the Minoan language belong
[+] [-] kristjankalm|4 years ago|reply
https://sigla.phis.me
It's very neatly annotated, e.g: https://sigla.phis.me/document/ARKH%201a/
and a good starting point to anyone wishing to try their hand on extracting patterns out of the corpus
[+] [-] theobeers|4 years ago|reply
There has been exciting recent progress in the decipherment of another early writing system, Linear Elamite.[0] In fact, French archæologist/philologist François Desset announced last year that he has deciphered all known Linear Elamite inscriptions.[1] (Someone posted this to HN at the time, but it got no traction.[2])
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Elamite
[1]: https://www.archaeoreporter.com/en/2020/11/27/deciphering-li...
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25345680
[+] [-] nickcw|4 years ago|reply
John Chadwick - The Decipherment of Linear B
It is written for the lay person and describes the process of cracking linear B and some of the human story as well as info about the ancient civilization.
[+] [-] vixen99|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Wildgoose|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mwenge|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kristjankalm|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ianai|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] macintux|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZoomZoomZoom|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shakezula|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tragomaskhalos|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Grustaf|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Koshkin|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1cvmask|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _delirium|4 years ago|reply
Linear B is mostly agreed to be a writing system for the Mycenaean Greek language [1], a language that was spoken on both Crete and the Mainland. So it wasn't solely a Minoan language. You could argue that it's sufficiently different from modern Greek to have a different name, but there isn't really a consistently followed rule for naming languages that way. For example, "Old English" is completely incomprehensible to a speaker of modern English, but nonetheless has that name.
What language Linear A was used to write is more mysterious. Some researchers do in fact think it corresponded to a separate Minoan language that was not closely related to Greek, but there's no consensus.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycenaean_Greek.
[+] [-] The_rationalist|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vidarh|4 years ago|reply
It gets worse. Imagine you'd like to try to look for possible suffixes corresponding to "the" as an alternative (I don't know any languages that uses other methods, but I'm sure they exist).
Imagine now if your "unknown" language was similar to Norwegian. In Norwegian "the sun" can be either "solen" or "sola" depending on gender, and you can't assume a writer is even consistent (it's bad form to mix different gender for the same word in the same text, but that doesn't stop people), which would throw off your counts/stats.
We have a pretty good catalogue of possible variations based on modern languages, so you certainly could try to construct a theory of a mapping based on known possible options (and you're not wrong to think in that direction as one approach worth testing), but there are many possible variations, so it's unfortunately not an easy one.
[+] [-] CogitoCogito|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] timoth|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lazyasciiart|4 years ago|reply