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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

#51

Post by bee_rider »

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?

Just from skimming the wikipedia article, it doesn't seem useful for translating. But it is slightly stronger than "The most frequently appearing words in this pile of un-translateable text are the most common words in the language it is written in." It tells you that, for example, the most popular word should be about twice as popular as the second most popular word.

It doesn't tell you what those words are, but it is a pretty specific observation about the frequency/rank relationship. So, as the wikipedia article liked about points out, it can tell us that the Voynich Manuscript was probably written in a language (of course, it could be a cypher of a real language or something made up, like elvish in Lord of the Rings, but it probably isn't just a random collection of symbols because it is unlikely that a random collection of symbols would happen to follow this distribution).

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

#52

Post by Torkel »

jcranmer wrote: post #8

I spent basically the entire article trying to figure out what the "groundbreaking" research actually was... this is a pretty mangled press release rendering of the scientific research, even worse than the kinds you normally see from university research. To its credit, this doesn't promise that we can (or will shortly be able to) actually read Linear A texts, and it actually explicates that we won't be able to do tha…

Yeah, not a good article at all - I bailed half way through and went to the comments here in hope of a tldr/abstract…

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

#53

Post by SiempreViernes »

tlb wrote: post #42
Radim wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You'd have to give up the notion that "prehistoric" refers to some fixed moment in time, but other than that you are of course free to try to change it's meaning.

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

#54

Post by pianoraptor »

jcranmer wrote: post #8

I spent basically the entire article trying to figure out what the "groundbreaking" research actually was... this is a pretty mangled press release rendering of the scientific research, even worse than the kinds you normally see from university research. To its credit, this doesn't promise that we can (or will shortly be able to) actually read Linear A texts, and it actually explicates that we won't be able to do tha…

Thank you for your take on it. I too was hoping for more insights here, having followed the Linear A / Linear B developments from my armchair for many years.

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

#56

Post by lsrinivas »

jcranmer wrote: post #8

I spent basically the entire article trying to figure out what the "groundbreaking" research actually was... this is a pretty mangled press release rendering of the scientific research, even worse than the kinds you normally see from university research. To its credit, this doesn't promise that we can (or will shortly be able to) actually read Linear A texts, and it actually explicates that we won't be able to do tha…

I too was scratching my head about as you put it , "what the groundbreaking research was". The academic review link that you posted was rather useful though it was a little technical.

I think the book needs to be read. But thanks a ton.

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

#57

Post by SemanticStrengh »

wheelinsupial wrote: post #44
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

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…

It's showing that we had to wait for 2021 for them to try it.. Thanks for reporting anyway!

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

#58

Post by Contexti »

vjerancrnjak wrote: post #38
liliumregale wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 repres…

> 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.

In the article, Dr. Ester Salgarella says: "we have not yet identified the linguistic family the Minoan language belongs to (unless it has to be taken as an ‘isolated’ language)"

If we knew that the Minoan language belonged to some extant language family and we had an abundance of data, the mystery of Linear A would already have been solved decades ago.

In general, there's very little data for any of the Palaeo-European languages that got replaced by Indo-European languages.

Linguistic relatives of the Minoan language could have gone extinct when their speakers shifted to Greek or some other Indo-European language. It is also possible that other Minoan languages died out centuries or millenia before the arrival of Indo-Europeans. I don't believe we will ever know.

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

#59

Post by SemanticStrengh »

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

edit: I hope this will make you think twice next time. Using zipf law for linear A has only been attempted for the first time in 2021 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03207615/document so had I commented last year it would have been prio art. I agree the idea is not very original and yet we had to wait that much time for it to be experimented.

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

#60

Post by cge »

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.

In addition to the other comments on difficulties of such analyses, an additional difficulty may be the type of inscriptions in the corpus. We understand Linear B, for example, because it is early Greek. But the texts are not narrative prose or poetry: they're administrative records, mostly lists and inventories. If Linear A texts are of similar types, then trying to decipher the language from them alone may be challenging or impossible, unless it can be linked to a known language: the forms of speech used may simply be too limited.

Trying to understand English grammar by looking only at bare financial statements would likely be extremely hard.

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