[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)