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Minoan language Linear A linked to Linear B in new research

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

#31

Post by capitainenemo »

jcranmer wrote: post #21
SemanticStrengh wrote: post #18

Linear A seems to derive from cretan hyeroglyphs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretan_hieroglyphs What do cretan hyeroglyphs come from? And how does a population create a language? That's absurdly difficult to initiate.

I assume you mean "writing system" and not "language" here. Writing systems were independently invented no fewer than three times (Mesopotamian, Chinese, and Mayan are unquestionably independent inventions) and probably more times, while also being reinvented from scratch numerous times after that (Cherokee being perhaps the most well-documented such reinvention--Sequoyah knew of writing from the Americans, but had n…

"Writing systems were independently invented no fewer than three times (Mesopotamian, Chinese, and Mayan are unquestionably independent inventions)"

…

"Note that being able to represent any phonetic utterance of a language is the distinguishing characteristic between proto-writing and writing."

Huh... does Chinese meet that criteria? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logogram#Differences_in_proces...

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

#32

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl »

escape_goat wrote: post #30
mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really think that in decades of linguists studying Linear A, no one has thought of trying Zipf's law? If scientists have studied something for this long, and you come up with an idea that fits in a single paragraph, it's probably been tried and didn't work. Unless you're the field's leading expert in which case you would be off doing it, not posting it on HN :) Edit: typos

I understand the impulse to point out the obvious, but when the question is asked honestly rather than arrogantly or dismissively, it is even better to wait for someone to provide the specific answer; in this case, the reason that Zipf's law is of no help.

It wasn't my intent to be overly dismissive. But I see this sort of thing all the time, and I find this phenomenon interesting, so I wanted to engage with that aspect of it, specifically.

I agree with you in general though. Dismissing these things out of hand isn't helpful either. But multiple people had already made substantive replies to the actual content of their idea, anyway.

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

#33

Post by edgyquant »

SemanticStrengh wrote: post #18

Linear A seems to derive from cretan hyeroglyphs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretan_hieroglyphs What do cretan hyeroglyphs come from? And how does a population create a language? That's absurdly difficult to initiate.

I think after cave paintings and tally marks modern written language is fairly straightforward. Just requires a need to pack more information smaller which farming provides.

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

#34

Post by yk »

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.

That makes assumptions about the language, for the languages I know: German has three definite articles, Latin doesn't have any, so it is not obvious what looking for "the" would result in either.

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

#35

Post by capitainenemo »

capitainenemo wrote: post #31
jcranmer wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume you mean "writing system" and not "language" here. Writing systems were independently invented no fewer than three times (Mesopotamian, Chinese, and Mayan are unquestionably independent inventions) and probably more times, while also being reinvented from scratch numerous times after that (Cherokee being perhaps the most well-documented such reinvention--Sequoyah knew of writing from the Americans, but had n…

"Writing systems were independently invented no fewer than three times (Mesopotamian, Chinese, and Mayan are unquestionably independent inventions)" … "Note that being able to represent any phonetic utterance of a language is the distinguishing characteristic between proto-writing and writing." Huh... does Chinese meet that criteria? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logogram#Differences_in_proces...

Hm. " Chinese, they are fused with logographic elements used phonetically; such "radical and phonetic" characters make up the bulk of the script. Both languages relegated the active use of rebus to the spelling of foreign and dialectical words. "

I guess that counts.

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

#36

Post by JadeNB »

SemanticStrengh wrote: post #19
luma wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> 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?

I think there are very few assumptions of the form "every reasonable language has […]" that hold up even for all current languages, let alone historical ones.

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

#37

Post by sramsay »

yk wrote: post #34
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.

That makes assumptions about the language, for the languages I know: German has three definite articles, Latin doesn't have any, so it is not obvious what looking for "the" would result in either.

I think people (here and below) are getting hung up on definite articles, but Zipf's Law makes no such observation. It says only that a word's frequency in a natural language corpus tends to be in inverse proportion to its rank in a frequency table.

In English, the most frequent words are articles, but the general observation about word frequency holds across languages (whether those languages have articles or not).

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

#38

Post by vjerancrnjak »

liliumregale wrote: post #26
vjerancrnjak wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is a God (language)-of-the-gaps argument: we can't figure out this rarely language, but maybe we can figure out an entirely unattested language instead, and also learn the correspondence between it and Linear A. Deep learning can predict plenty of phenomena in the world, sure, but it needs data, not aspirations.

> figure out an entirely unattested language

I did not say that. Human languages evolve in similar ways, use similar vocabulary, grammar etc. Linguistics has already unraveled the structure of many languages and the structure of evolution of language through time.

I am not saying DL is THE approach to take, but given that there's only ~10k characters of Linear A, it is hard to tackle the problem without common representation of multiple languages that are close to it. That's the whole point of DL, how to build better and better representations, not how to accurately model uncertainty (which is what you get by doing statistics).

I would say XLM [0] builds a common representation of a collection of languages and then works better on machine translation for languages for which the data is scarce but that are related to the languages in the model. (what it also does is discover and represent the structure of part-of-speech, grammar, entities etc. without being told about those particular things)

Does there exist an abundance of data for languages close to Linear A? If not, then I admire the work of all that try to untangle this with their brains alone.

0: https://github.com/facebookresearch/XLM

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

#39

Post by SemanticStrengh »

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #32
escape_goat wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand the impulse to point out the obvious, but when the question is asked honestly rather than arrogantly or dismissively, it is even better to wait for someone to provide the specific answer; in this case, the reason that Zipf's law is of no help.

It wasn't my intent to be overly dismissive. But I see this sort of thing all the time, and I find this phenomenon interesting, so I wanted to engage with that aspect of it, specifically. I agree with you in general though. Dismissing these things out of hand isn't helpful either. But multiple people had already made substantive replies to the actual content of their idea, anyway.

useless dismissal, I made a question not an affirmation. Besides it allow for an exploration of the search space of solutions, which stimulate the depth of the discussion and might allow finer grained questions that would then become possibly innovative

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

#40

Post by jhgb »

SemanticStrengh wrote: post #19
luma wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Did you just call all Slavs "weird and primitive"?
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