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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

#41

Post by seoaeu »

sramsay wrote: post #37
yk wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

"The most frequently appearing words in this pile of un-translateable text are the most common words in the language it is written in" seems like it falls somewhere between blindingly obvious, and entirely useless. Unless you have some clue what those words mean, how does that observation help you?

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

#42

Post by tlb »

Radim wrote: post #5
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…

I don't know about "deliberately". Might be just a confused, inarticulate piece by a confused reporter. When an article opens with " the Minoan language known as Linear A " (no, it's a script) and " Linear B developed later in the prehistoric period " (an oxymoron, prehistoric = pre-literary)… you know not to expect much. Did anyone manage to parse out what is even being claimed in this article?

Is it not fair to call an society where writing existed but we can't read it prehistoric? From our perspective, we have no written history. Or is the distinction that they themselves could read it and therefore acted with historical awareness?

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

#43

Post by adrian_b »

jcranmer wrote: post #15
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.

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.

If all that text would have been that of a story, there would still have been a chance to decipher it.

Even worse than the small number of texts is that all, or almost all, are just bookkeeping records, so they contain few words besides numbers, symbols for useful goods, e.g. wine, olive oil, barley, wool and so on, and proper names of places or people.

So even if there might be a few hundreds of texts, most just reproduce the same phrases, only with different numbers and names substituted in them.

Any statistics on this handful of stereotype phrases will offer no information about the statistics of the words of the Minoan language as used in a normal conversation or story telling.

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

#44

Post by wheelinsupial »

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #24
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.

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

Neither of these areas are my field, so I could be entirely misunderstanding this preprint [1] from 2021. The preprint mentions using Zipf's law in the objectives section on attempting to deciphering Linear A.

The literature survey section mentions there have been good results using computational methods in 2020 to automatically decipher Linear B. The discussion section mentions "To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to discuss and show computational analysis of Linear A."

Again, neither of these are my fields, but it looks like if these linguists have tried to use Zipf's law or other computational methods unsuccessfully in deciphering Linear A, the results weren't published. (Or a poor literature survey, or other explanations...) I'm not an academic either, so I don't know what the practices are for publishing unsuccessful results.

[1] https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03207615/document

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

#45

Post by jcranmer »

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?

Weird, perhaps; primitive, no.

One of the historical issues with linguistics is that it analyzed every language as if it were Classical Latin or Classical Greek, and if that language had elements that didn't work out... well, that can't be proper then, can it? You still see some residuum of this in English prescriptivist poppycock, like the prohibition against ending sentences in prepositions.

As linguists actually started inventorying world languages, it became more and more clear that there is a very wide dichotomy of grammatical features that don't necessarily translate well to familiar languages. There are vanishingly few features that are actually universal to all languages--the noun may well be the only universal part of speech. That a language doesn't choose to mark a feature in a particular way doesn't make it more primitive than another language. English doesn't have a numerical classifier... is it more primitive than an Australian Aboriginal language? Or is it more primitive than Japanese for not having a way to mark register (~ politeness)?

(FWIW, Linear B is used to write Mycenaean Greek, and this has been known for ~70 years.)

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

#46

Post by bloak »

eklitzke wrote: post #29
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.

I'm skeptical of the claim that this would work at all even if there was a larger corpus. Let's say you had a million pages of classical Chinese text, but absolutely no context about what the text meant or was about. By looking at it closely and using statistical analysis you could certainly determine various rules of the grammar, and you might even be able to guess that certain characters are grammatical constructio…

My guess is that if you had a really big, wide-ranging and high-quality corpus of a completely unknown human language then you probably would be able to decipher and translate it. If you could deduce or guess the grammatical structure the next step might be to look at which nouns can be subjects of which verbs, for example, and it might then be possible to guess which nouns refer to humans and which verbs describe actions that can normally only be performed by a human, and then ... well, there's lots of statistical stuff you can do with a really huge corpus ... It's an interesting problem to think about but it's not a problem we're ever likely to encounter in real life. It's more likely we'll discover a corpus of some alien, non-human language than a huge corpus of a completely unknown human language.

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

#47

Post by jhgb »

JadeNB wrote: post #36
SemanticStrengh wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Anyone claiming "surely every language needs X" had better look at Riau Indonesian (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riau#Language) first to check if that language has X. If it doesn't, then X is almost certainly not required for communication.

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

#48

Post by sramsay »

seoaeu wrote: post #41
sramsay wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

"The most frequently appearing words in this pile of un-translateable text are the most common words in the language it is written in" seems like it falls somewhere between blindingly obvious, and entirely useless. Unless you have some clue what those words mean, how does that observation help you?

It doesn't (in this case), and I didn't say it did. And there's nothing "blindingly obvious" about the ubiquity of the Zipf curve.

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

#49

Post by inglor_cz »

bloak wrote: post #46
eklitzke wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm skeptical of the claim that this would work at all even if there was a larger corpus. Let's say you had a million pages of classical Chinese text, but absolutely no context about what the text meant or was about. By looking at it closely and using statistical analysis you could certainly determine various rules of the grammar, and you might even be able to guess that certain characters are grammatical constructio…

My guess is that if you had a really big, wide-ranging and high-quality corpus of a completely unknown human language then you probably would be able to decipher and translate it. If you could deduce or guess the grammatical structure the next step might be to look at which nouns can be subjects of which verbs, for example, and it might then be possible to guess which nouns refer to humans and which verbs describe ac…

The Voynich manuscript is fairly extensive (over 200 pages), illustrated, and we still do not know what the heck of a language it is written in.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript

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

#50

Post by inglor_cz »

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?

LOL, my native language (Czech) has no articles, but it is so flexive and permits so many subtle, meaning-carrying changes in sequence of words in a sentence that it is actually hard to carry over some of those subtleties into written English.

The only thing "robotic" about it is the fact that "robot" is a Czech word that was adopted worldwide.

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