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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

#61

Post by im3w1l »

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…

Interesting. If they have only very recently tried Zipf's law then there may be some other more advanced stuff they haven't tried.

I'm thinking word embeddings. Like maybe you could do a word embedding based on cooccurence and look for similarly shaped clusters in Linear A and Early Greek.

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

#62

Post by Keysh »

tgv wrote: post #22
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?

Latin doesn't have articles (the/a), and frequently drops the verb. Aramaic encodes the article in a suffix. Arabic and Hebrew omit the vowels, leaving the interpretation depending on contextual clues. There are languages without auxiliary verbs. And there are tons of other constructions that English doesn't have.

Written Arabic and Hebrew often omit vowels; the actual spoken languages do not, of course.

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

#63

Post by irrational »

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?

No. Was the Egyptian civilization (which lasted for 3000 years until the time of the Romans) prehistoric because we could not read the Egyptian hieroglyphics? Did it only cease to be prehistoric once we deciphered the language?

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

#64

Post by ncmncm »

Torkel wrote: post #52
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…

What it specifically fails to deliver is any indication of how "the internet" had any role at all in the work or in any progress made.

The only suggestion of progress was that somebody finally noticed the LB symbols were mostly about the same as LA symbols, so they now can now pronounce the LA texts. There is no hint why that only just happened.

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

#65

Post by ncmncm »

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?

Absolutely. If we can read their script, and they wrote a history, we can read that history. Without, we are reduced to relying on archaeology.

We can read historical texts from Egypt and Mesopotamia from the time the Minoans , er, "flourished". In exactly that sense they are not prehistoric. I think Egyptians mentioned them. (It seems odd if Egyptians did not mention Santorini blowing up and wiping them out, but maybe they did. Somebody must have mentioned "Thera".)

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

#66

Post by tremon »

jnwatson wrote: post #7
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?

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.

If we don't know the language it's encoding, how do we know the Linear A pronunciation is correct, approximately or not? Is this done purely on the assumption that Linear A and Linear B might encode similar phonemes in a similar way?

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

#67

Post by ncmncm »

irrational wrote: post #63
tlb wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No. Was the Egyptian civilization (which lasted for 3000 years until the time of the Romans) prehistoric because we could not read the Egyptian hieroglyphics? Did it only cease to be prehistoric once we deciphered the language?

Yes, exactly. Before we have written history is prehistory. As we get more history, the boundary of prehistory moves back.

So most of the American remnants are prehistoric, despite being coeval with history in the "old world".

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

#68

Post by ncmncm »

inglor_cz wrote: post #49
bloak wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

...assuming it is really language at all, and not just deliberate gibberish.

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

#69

Post by tremon »

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…

this results in the conclusion that Linear B is actually a version of a regional [script, not linguistic] dialect of Linear A that was used to write a different language.

I'm having trouble understanding this. To me this says that Linear A and Linear B are different scripts that express different [spoken] languages, but might share common heritage. Which sounds obvious to me, not groundbreaking, unless they've now identified the common source.

Or are you saying that Linear A and Linear B might be the same script (as in phoneme->symbol encoding), but used to express a different language?

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

#70

Post by bigbillheck »

Keysh wrote: post #62
tgv wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Latin doesn't have articles (the/a), and frequently drops the verb. Aramaic encodes the article in a suffix. Arabic and Hebrew omit the vowels, leaving the interpretation depending on contextual clues. There are languages without auxiliary verbs. And there are tons of other constructions that English doesn't have.

Written Arabic and Hebrew often omit vowels; the actual spoken languages do not, of course.

The problem isn't in deciphering spoken Linear A.
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