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Minoan language Linear A linked to Linear B in new research

greekreporter.com

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Re: Minoan language Linear A linked to Linear B in new research

#11

Post by SemanticStrengh »

AprilArcus wrote: post #4

This article is a reasonable summary of the status quo in Linear A studies since 1956, but the reporter seemingly deliberately obfuscates the nature and scope of Dr. Ester Salgarella's new contribution. It appears to be the creation of an online corpus in collaboration Dr. Simon Castellan, linked near the bottom of the article: https://sigla.phis.me/ This will be a great resource and is an important work, but it appe…

can't they use the zipf law ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law The decreasing exponential law should allow to find "the" and some closed form POS words, so yeah determiners, prepositions and conjonctions.

Re: Minoan language Linear A linked to Linear B in new research

#12

Post by motohagiography »

Feels like a fun intro to comp.sci exercise would be taking texts from ancient languages and writing compression schemes, n-gram analyzers, regular expressions, and symbol call graphs for them. It's a bit like the apocryphal story of some old hackers in the 80s "decoding" a Chinese takeout menu (Jobs/Woz?), but it could get kids interested in archeology in a way that is smarter than that alien TV show.

Re: Minoan language Linear A linked to Linear B in new research

#13

Post by adrian_b »

jcranmer wrote: post #10
jnwatson wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author found a relationship between Linear B (the script) and Linear A (the script) to the point of being able to approximately pronounce Linear A. The actual language written in that Linear A script, Minoan, is still unknown, but this provides some important tools to better understand it.

> The author found a relationship between Linear B (the script) and Linear A (the script) to the point of being able to approximately pronounce Linear A. Except that has been known for like... 50 years? 60 years?

Exactly as you say, the fact that many signs are shared by Linear B and Linear A has been known for at least a half of century.

What I understand from the review of the book is that after a more thorough analysis of the graphic variations of various Linear A signs, many more signs inherited by Linear B from Linear A have been identified than before.

Having better and more phonetic readings of Linear A texts increases the hope that the Minoan language could be identified and understood, even if this remains highly unlikely, unless more Linear A texts would be discovered.

Re: Minoan language Linear A linked to Linear B in new research

#14

Post by changoplatanero »

motohagiography wrote: post #12

Feels like a fun intro to comp.sci exercise would be taking texts from ancient languages and writing compression schemes, n-gram analyzers, regular expressions, and symbol call graphs for them. It's a bit like the apocryphal story of some old hackers in the 80s "decoding" a Chinese takeout menu (Jobs/Woz?), but it could get kids interested in archeology in a way that is smarter than that alien TV show.

You mean like this? https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.06718.pdf

Re: Minoan language Linear A linked to Linear B in new research

#15

Post by jcranmer »

SemanticStrengh wrote: post #11
AprilArcus wrote: post #4

This article is a reasonable summary of the status quo in Linear A studies since 1956, but the reporter seemingly deliberately obfuscates the nature and scope of Dr. Ester Salgarella's new contribution. It appears to be the creation of an online corpus in collaboration Dr. Simon Castellan, linked near the bottom of the article: https://sigla.phis.me/ This will be a great resource and is an important work, but it appe…

can't they use the zipf law ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law The decreasing exponential law should allow to find "the" and some closed form POS words, so yeah determiners, prepositions and conjonctions.

The total extant corpus of Linear A amounts to fewer than 10,000 characters (and this is, I believe, the largest corpus of any undeciphered script).

There's not enough text to do statistical analysis.

Re: Minoan language Linear A linked to Linear B in new research

#16

Post by SemanticStrengh »

changoplatanero wrote: post #14
motohagiography wrote: post #12

Feels like a fun intro to comp.sci exercise would be taking texts from ancient languages and writing compression schemes, n-gram analyzers, regular expressions, and symbol call graphs for them. It's a bit like the apocryphal story of some old hackers in the 80s "decoding" a Chinese takeout menu (Jobs/Woz?), but it could get kids interested in archeology in a way that is smarter than that alien TV show.

You mean like this? https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.06718.pdf

wow has this been applied to linear A?? Nice to see google doing original work. Also the MIT omnipresence is humiliating for other universities, as usual.

Re: Minoan language Linear A linked to Linear B in new research

#17

Post by luma »

SemanticStrengh wrote: post #11
AprilArcus wrote: post #4

This article is a reasonable summary of the status quo in Linear A studies since 1956, but the reporter seemingly deliberately obfuscates the nature and scope of Dr. Ester Salgarella's new contribution. It appears to be the creation of an online corpus in collaboration Dr. Simon Castellan, linked near the bottom of the article: https://sigla.phis.me/ This will be a great resource and is an important work, but it appe…

can't they use the zipf law ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law The decreasing exponential law should allow to find "the" and some closed form POS words, so yeah determiners, prepositions and conjonctions.

Can we assume that any of those features would be part of this language?

Re: Minoan language Linear A linked to Linear B in new research

#19

Post by SemanticStrengh »

luma wrote: post #17
SemanticStrengh wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

can't they use the zipf law ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law The decreasing exponential law should allow to find "the" and some closed form POS words, so yeah determiners, prepositions and conjonctions.

Can we assume that any of those features would be part of this language?

a language without thoses would be hella weird and primitive, like stereotypical robotic talking. To answer you question, I don't know, do linear B have them?

Re: Minoan language Linear A linked to Linear B in new research

#20

Post by vjerancrnjak »

SemanticStrengh wrote: post #11
AprilArcus wrote: post #4

This article is a reasonable summary of the status quo in Linear A studies since 1956, but the reporter seemingly deliberately obfuscates the nature and scope of Dr. Ester Salgarella's new contribution. It appears to be the creation of an online corpus in collaboration Dr. Simon Castellan, linked near the bottom of the article: https://sigla.phis.me/ This will be a great resource and is an important work, but it appe…

can't they use the zipf law ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law The decreasing exponential law should allow to find "the" and some closed form POS words, so yeah determiners, prepositions and conjonctions.

I wonder can they construct a deep learning model that encodes human languages from script shapes and then somehow figure out the God language from which Linear A script/language is derived.

There's too little data for Linear A. But it might be enough if there's a God language oracle waiting to be fed new descendant languages.

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