[HN Gopher] Exploring Linear A ___________________________________________________________________ Exploring Linear A Author : mwenge Score : 36 points Date : 2023-07-16 19:47 UTC (3 hours ago) (HTM) web link (lineara.xyz) (TXT) w3m dump (lineara.xyz) | shaftoe444 wrote: | Very weird to see this, I went to an exhibition about Knossos in | Oxford only today. | | Good episode here that covers a bit about the language and | translation efforts. The translation of Linear B is a very cool | story too. | | https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01292ts | OfSanguineFire wrote: | Work by amateurs on Linear A does not have a good track record. | Since the dawn of the internet era it has drawn more crackpots | than almost anything else language-related. Within the | professional linguistics community, if someone comes along and | claims that he has made any progress towards decipherment, it is | generally met with skepticism so strong that one questions that | person's mental health. That said, this website has a caveat that | it is for recreational use only, and it points to John Younger's | page at the University of Kansas for something serious. Lay | readers on HN should take that caveat very seriously. | delhanty wrote: | Curious, what concrete progress have professional linguists | made on deciphering Linear A? | OfSanguineFire wrote: | None. And that is in spite of massive attempts over the 20th | century, including some of the first applications of | computers to a problem of this nature. The conclusion drawn | from this lack of progress is that the corpus is simply too | small for decipherment and/or we lack any surviving relatives | for the language that the script recorded. | dmarchand90 wrote: | What kind of corpus do we have? Is it largely fragmented | segments with a few symbols? | rustymonday wrote: | An architect decoded Linear B. | dmvdoug wrote: | I mean, yeah, but an architect with advanced classical | language training. | OfSanguineFire wrote: | 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 wrote: | 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 | | > 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 kainos 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 | heyitsguay wrote: | Is this site not just a handy visual catalog of known artifacts | and transcriptions? Is there some speculative decipherment | implied in the phoneticizations? | retrac wrote: | For the unfamiliar, Linear A was an ancient script that is | associated with the Minoan civilization of the island of Crete, | around 1500 - 1800 BC. The later Linear B system encodes archaic | Greek, and is very similar to Linear A in glyph form. The Minoan | language written with Linear A is probably unrelated to any other | language. | | Phonetic values are necessarily from Linear B or otherwise | guesses - it's very likely there was a great deal of overlap, | that the symbol representing, for example, the syllable "ni" in | Greek, represented a syllable that sounded a lot like "ni" in | Minoan. (Linear B is quite unsuited to writing Greek sounds, an | indicator that it was borrowed from a very different language.) | But since the language of Linear A remains undeciphered, that is | really just an educated guess at best. | ocschwar wrote: | The interface is difficult to deal with, but TIL that Linear A | potsherd was found in a Philistine site. | fiddlerwoaroof wrote: | Looks like there's a parallel site for Linear B: | https://linearb.xyz/ ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-07-16 23:00 UTC)