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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

#71

Post by scheme271 »

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 language might not have that. E.g. latin doesn't have a word that corresponds to "the". Languages may indicate conjunctions or some types of prepositions or determiners by changing the case of a noun or the conjungation of a verb.

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

#72

Post by tremon »

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).

How does this definition use "word"? In analytic languages, most words always appear in the same form, so counting them is relatively easy. But for inflected languages, does this require being able to distinguish the roots of words in order to count them accurately?

It's not just about the presence or absence of articles and prepositions, but about different declensions of the same word. If this analysis requires knowing that homo, hominis, hominem and homine all refer to the same word and should be counted as one, how does it help with analyzing a text for which we don't know the grammar?

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

#73

Post by Maursault »

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

After seeing your comment, I watched a TED Ed about it[1], and now I am convinced, for it to have survived for so long, it is a relic and time forgot why it was saved. It's Leonardo Da Vinci's childhood notebook, has to be, there is no other explanation for why it would have been kept since the 15th Century. So it's likely to be derivative of Italian, Latin, and other languages he spoke and wrote. No, wait... it very well could have been created by some other weird kid from the 15th Century no one's heard of. Come on.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NS4CbBJQ84

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

#74

Post by ncmncm »

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...

The Chinese writing system is a syllabary, but with a large number of symbols that map to ~1200 spoken syllables, and memorized spelling rules for which to use, often with "just-so" stories about logograms as memory aids.

Strangely, many, perhaps most users of it think it is not a syllabary. This is largely because it is what they were told as children, and it makes little difference in use, within bounds of Mandarin.

People who speak other Chinese languages, which Mandarin speakers are taught to think of as dialects (i.e. basically the same as Mandarin but for variant pronunciation), know better. It is common among Mandarin speakers to believe they can read texts in these other "dialects", not realizing that what they read has been translated to Mandarin. (Writing "in dialect" is done very rarely, except for transcribed loan words, because it is not taught; the elaborate spelling rules for Mandarin would not work, as is.)

The CCP encourages this misapprehension.

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

#75

Post by ncmncm »

edgyquant wrote: post #33
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.

The less you know about something, the simpler it seems.

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

#76

Post by jamesfinlayson »

tremon wrote: post #69
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 id…

> 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?

That was my understanding but I didn't think that was a new hypothesis - I remember reading years ago that they were a very similar alphabet (for lack of a better word) and that linear B was just the locals using their alphabet to write ancient Greek.

I believe something similar was done in Germany a few hundred years ago - the Bible was written in Hebrew script that encoded German words.

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

#77

Post by bigbillheck »

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…

That looks like an extremely underwhelming bit of research.

Some thoughts:

1. Figure 2 is titled "Evolutionary Tree of ancient scripts reconstructed using Neighbor Joining algorithm in ClustalW2 (Daggumati et al., 2019)", however checking the references (a) that figure does not appear in the cited paper (b) the cited paper does not use ClustalW2 (c) the scripts in the cited paper do not match those in the figure.

2. Speaking of references, they include Classen, M., & Safrany, L. (1975). Endoscopic papillotomy and removal of gall stones. This seems like an odd choice. Why did they include this? I have no idea, I can't find any cite to it in the text.

3. Immediately after "When text is rendered by a computer, the characters in the text can not all be displayed, because no font that supports them is available to the computer" they write: "The Python package Matplotlib also does not render the font as of the current version 3.3.4." I would have thought that rendering with matplotlib would have counted as "render[ing] by a computer". Please also note Figure 5, which has a screenshot of a python script and a matplotlib plot; the former displays 5 (presumed) Linear A characters correctly while the latter has only boxes. Perhaps they meant 'there is no font in which all Linear A characters are present'. (And I should point out that in less than sixty seconds of searching I discovered that--as you might expect--matplotlib can use user-specified .ttf fonts)

(Sorry I know this point is long but another thing bothering me: why bother sticking with unicode codepoints when they could have instead just assigned integers to each character?)

4. For reasons that escape me, they chose to use a word cloud in Figure 15 ("Word cloud of locations the Linear A tablets were found by the number of symbols gathered from each") instead of, for example, a table. Why is 'HT' in there at least twice? Why is 'KH' in there at least six times?

I could go on but I'll stop here and say that if I were reviewing this for a journal it would be an immediate rejection.

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

#78

Post by bigbillheck »

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.

Zipf's law is a statement about the results of a frequency analysis. Frequency analysis has been a core part of Linear A efforts for a long time, as you'd expect considering how important it was to Ventris in deciphering Linear B.

See for example "On the Language of Linear A" from 1958 (https://gredos.usal.es/bitstream/handle/10366/73246/On_the_L...) or "Greek-like Elements in Linear A" from 1963 (https://grbs.library.duke.edu/article/viewFile/11991/4031). For something more recent, there's "Linear A and Linear B: Structural and contextual concerns" from 2017 (https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/200196986.pdf). (One of the authors of that one, Steele, also has a blog: https://crewsproject.wordpress.com/tag/linear-a/)

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

#79

Post by contingencies »

tremon wrote: post #69
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 id…

IMHO grandparent is saying Linear B is a different, yet related script that appears to be directly derived from a regional variant of Linear A.

A script can be used to write arbitrary languages, and does not imply a fully identical mapping to phonemes when used for these different languages. Examples include use of the Arabic script[0] to write Uighur, Urdu, or Farsi.

Generally an existing script is adopted for a new language through transliteration, often the addition of diacritics or new glyphs. Further examples would be Vietnamese or the numerous abugidas of Southeast Asia. When an existing script is used without adaptation by a speaker of another language attempting phonetic transliteration, it is generally very lossy.[2] This is why we have IPA, which is also lossy and not widely understood.[3]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_script [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abugida [2] https://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2013/07/02/the-fore... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe...

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

#80

Post by CamperBob2 »

mwenge wrote: post #9
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…

https://lineara.xyz/ is also worth a look

That's cool as hell (note that https://linearb.xyz also exists.)
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