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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

#81

Post by flurie »

contingencies wrote: post #79
tremon wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Now I'm imagining future archaeologists trying to figure out how modern Turkish relates to the other languages with a Latin script.

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

#82

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl »

SemanticStrengh wrote: post #39
mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Hardly useless, since it apparently inspired people to dig deeper and find more info :)

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

#83

Post by SemanticStrengh »

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

hey this was really interesting to read. I like the aztec hypothesis, anyway hoax or not it seems it has received a tremendous amount of work at a time where half of those concepts hadn't even been discovered, except of course if they had conserved paper for 200 years, which I find not that unlikely tbh.

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

#84

Post by SemanticStrengh »

ncmncm wrote: post #68
inglor_cz wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

entropy analysises seems to indicate it is natural language like so not too much redundancy and not too much noise/randomness.

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

#85

Post by SemanticStrengh »

tremon wrote: post #72
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).

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 kno…

> does this require being able to distinguish the roots of words in order to count them accurately? can be somewhat retrieved via leveisthein distance.

> declensions is there a difference between an inflection and a declension?

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

#86

Post by SemanticStrengh »

ncmncm wrote: post #75
edgyquant wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://youtu.be/sBzrzS1Ag_g

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

#87

Post by bloak »

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

Yes, the Voynich manuscript is worth mentioning here, but it doesn't qualify as a really big, wide-ranging and high-quality corpus: it's about 35 thousand words (if the things that look like words are words), whereas a million words would still be a small corpus by today's standards; it's a single document (for example, it might contain no first-person pronouns, no future tenses, almost no mention of individual people, ...); and we have no idea about the quality (for example, perhaps it was copied by someone who didn't understand it and is such a bad copy that even someone who knows the language and the script would find it hard to understand). Still, it is definitely worth mentioning here.

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

#88

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

ncmncm wrote: post #74
capitainenemo wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

Source please? I'd like to read more about this.

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

#89

Post by vjerancrnjak »

Contexti wrote: post #58
vjerancrnjak wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Yeah, I guess the conclusion is that humans are still much better than DL. :D

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

#90

Post by qiskit »

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…

> and 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 guess that's nice to know, but hasn't it always been known that linear A and B were "related". Regardless, Linear A still hasn't been deciphered and that's what's ultimately important.

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