Minoan language Linear A linked to Linear B in new research
greekreporter.com
greekreporter.com
The article is pretty vague; I’m not sure what these sign equivalences are supposed to be.
Wouldn't recommend Knossos, a bit too oriented at tourists, but there are other ruins that are well worth the visit. I believe there is a picture of a women in the building in the picture, but it was very crudely restored. They just used the next IKEA picture frame they could find. But I wonder what archive they mean when they mention the sources. Cannot have been that much, because the area is rather small.
Most mediterranean sites, however ancient their origins, are dominated by classical era artifacts and structures. It's rare to walk around a bronze or even iron age age site that retains the feel of an older era, excepting Egypt of course.
I would recommend Petra for similar reasons. It's also much bigger and more impressive. Petra also still has a backwater feel, to contrast with your objection to Knossos.
There are also some in Malia, but those were in a worse state than others. In Malia you could see another curious and living civilization that drives on motorized bicycles. I believe people called them the British.
For the average tourist without too deep knowledge about archaeology (me), I found Phaistos more impressive, especially for that feeling that you mentioned. It isn't restored to that degree, but still impressive how much remains from this ancient civilization. Maybe it was just the vicinity of the city that made Knossos seem not that special in comparison.
It isn't too far from Knossos, well worth a trip. I think it was just an hour by car from Knossos.
I will certainly put Petra on the list to visit.
I'll make an admission, and hopefully my HN anonymity holds... I stopped for baked beans, chips and a pint. I don't really know why I did it, and I'm sorry.
Side note. Backwater (or back alley) tavernas in Crete are amazing. I could spend half my life in them. The "eat where locals eat" applies, but keep in mind that locals don't eat until late. Being empty at 7pm is actually a good sign. Any place that serves stuffed zucchini flowers or goat in yogurt is a good bet. Beware the raki. Just because it's free, doesn't mean you should finish the bottle.
https://smarthistory.org/conservation-knossos/
That said, I do highly recommend it, as well as the museum in Herklion. (I didn't get to visit the Phaistos site; thanks for the recommendation.)
Knossos is great, just get there early. Ignore the signs that explain the rooms. If you notice they say `According to Sleeman this was.... '. But nobody really knows. Late Minoans that stayed there and had lost the capability/technology to build that big, did not know the building' s function either.
Indeed Linear A has too few samples but a code smell for new archeoligical decryptions is when they say it references 'Gods' and this doesn't. We will see though.
Yep. I think they are trying to write for too broad of an audience. It is spending a lot of ink trying to get people to care who did not already know a fact like
> The discovery of the Rosetta Stone, which was inscribed with writing in both ancient Egyptian and Greek, allowed linguists to finally crack the code of Egyptian hieroglyphics in the 19th century.
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[EDIT]
Actually, a question for those who are better at writing than I:
When imagining the reader for your article, why would you assume it included someone who did not know what the Rosetta Stone did on a basic level?
Of course writing on the Internet allows you to simply hyperlink terms that may be unfamiliar.
My non-specialist take is that the linked article's explanation of the book/thesis's findings sounds confused. The thesis's abstract is pretty different from what the article seems to be saying.
The OP article is extremely confusing, and the writer itself seems confused. My understanding is that the author of the book (Ester Salgarella) makes the following three claims:
Claim 1: Linear A and Linear B are not different scripts, but rather two different writing systems (orthographies) for the same script. She does not claim they are used to write the same language, nor that Minoan (or whatever language is written by LA) is linguistically related to Mycenaean Greek. In this sense the proposed "Aegean Linear Script" is not different than cuneiform, which has originally been developed to write the Sumerian language and has been adapted over time to write such diverse (and unrelated) languages as Akkadian (Eastern Semitic), Hittite (Indo European) and Elamite (isolate?[1]).
Claim 2: Linear A does not represent a single writing system, but in fact a collection of regional writing systems. In this context, Linear B can be viewed as just another variant of the same script, adapted to write another language. It notably comes at a later period (probably under different political conditions, i.e. under Mycenaean rule), is more standardized and does not exhibit regional variation. But we can still classify the base script itself as being the same.
These first two claims do not seem extremely controversial for me. However, there seems to be a third claim, which is implied in both the abstract of the book, but I'm not sure Salgarella is making this claim directly. That claim could prove more controversial.
Claim 3: There is a continuity between regional LA variants and the LB used by Mycenaean Greek-speaking scribes. This seems to imply that the Mycenaean scribes did make a concentrated, singular effort to borrow LA and adapt it to their own language - but rather that some regional variants of LA gradually evolved to standardize the rendering of Greek speech. I assume this started with transliterating Greek names and eventually standardizing the rules for rendering all Greek words using the Aegean Linear Script syllabograms. This system, which has gradually evolved, became standardize as what we call Linear B.
I personally think this claim makes sense if we look at the way other scripts (especially complex, logographic-syllabic scripts) have crossed between languages in the past. In the first phase you would usually have bilingual speakers writing in the script's original language and gradually developing better and more formalized adaptations for incorporating their own native language into that script. This is at the very least how Chinese characters have been adapted in Japan, where the standardization process has taken hundreds of years (in fact, you could claim that it is still not over yet).
Whether or not this claim has strong evidence I don't know, but is probably the main "breakthrough" of this research. The other ("internet-powered") breakthrough is that the SigLA database[2], I personally feel to be the coolest thing coming out of this research. Having dabbled a little bit with corporas of both deciphered and undeciphered scripts in the past, this is definitely a UX revolution. It seems like such a joy to use.
[1]: I know some theories connect Elamite to Dravidian languages through the Elamo-Dravidian family. I can't really comment on how proven that is.
“I am afraid there is currently no exact translation of the sign-sequences (= words) attested on Linear A tablets (as well as other document types). This is primarily because we have not yet identified the linguistic family the Minoan language belong
It's very neatly annotated, e.g: https://sigla.phis.me/document/ARKH%201a/
and a good starting point to anyone wishing to try their hand on extracting patterns out of the corpus
There has been exciting recent progress in the decipherment of another early writing system, Linear Elamite.[0] In fact, French archæologist/philologist François Desset announced last year that he has deciphered all known Linear Elamite inscriptions.[1] (Someone posted this to HN at the time, but it got no traction.[2])
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Elamite
[1]: https://www.archaeoreporter.com/en/2020/11/27/deciphering-li...
John Chadwick - The Decipherment of Linear B
It is written for the lay person and describes the process of cracking linear B and some of the human story as well as info about the ancient civilization.
https://sci-hub.se/https://www.jstor.org/stable/20162981
> gentle reader, pray perpend the syllable-groups (reference number Dy 401), that run: a-ma wi-ru-qe ka-no to-ro-ja qi-pi-ri-mu a-po-ri. Here we have two specimens of the labio-velars, the syllables with q-, discovered by Ventris, to the astonishment of philologists who had not expected to find them in Bronze Age Greek. qe is, of course, equivalent to Latin -que, Greek te, while qi doubtless here shows the development to a voiced dental noted by Ventris and Chadwick in their "Mycenaean Vocabulary,"
> The Greek evaluation of the sentence would be, according to Ventris's spelling rules, halmai wiluite kainōs Tholoiai Diphilimus apolis: "With brine and slime in novel fashion at Tholoia (the place of tholoi, beehive tombs) Diphilimus (is) cityless." No doubt this is a record of a Bronze Age tidal wave.
> It is by coincidence that the acumen of Mr. Michael C. Stokes, the Edinburgh authority on ancient philosophy, has extracted the Virgilian hexameter, Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris....
> Note that in this sentence one need assume only two of the six words to be names of persons or places, whereas, in the Lin B material as a whole, 75 per cent of the sign-groups have to be, on Ventris's system, evaluated as names
I was interested to learn that it is considered significant that Apollo is not attested in the deciphered corpus of Linear B. (Though Paean is.)
I was also interested to learn, later, that the obviously Greek Alaksandus of Wilusa, writing in Hittite in the 13th century BC, did guarantee his half of a treaty by invoking the deity "Apaliunas".
The point being made is that the standard for interpreting Greek from Linear B is so low that any set of symbols at all can be validly interpreted as a coherent Greek sentence.
As long as 75% of the words are viewed as proper nouns, of course.
For example, the English word "credit card", which is three syllables, is written in Japanese as ku-re-di-t-to-ka-a-do, which is eight. The Ventris hypothesis works in the other direction -- he believes that speakers of phonologically-rich Greek made do with a writing system that could only express much simpler syllables.
Though we have examples of that too; Antiochus of Macedon left an Akkadian inscription reading, as given in Empires of the Word [1], "I am An-ti-'u-ku-us [Antiochus], the great king, the legitimate king, the king of the world, king of E [Babylon], king of all countries, the caretakeer of the temples Esagila and Ezida, the first born of Si-lu-uk-ku [Seleucus], Ma-ak-ka-du-na-a-a [Macedonian], king of Babylon."
Contrast Antiochus' (or his scribes') concern for vowel length when he goes to the trouble of writing Ma-ak-ka-du-na-a-a with the reading of kainoos from ka-no.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/166433.Empires_of_the_Wo...
Linear B is mostly agreed to be a writing system for the Mycenaean Greek language [1], a language that was spoken on both Crete and the Mainland. So it wasn't solely a Minoan language. You could argue that it's sufficiently different from modern Greek to have a different name, but there isn't really a consistently followed rule for naming languages that way. For example, "Old English" is completely incomprehensible to a speaker of modern English, but nonetheless has that name.
What language Linear A was used to write is more mysterious. Some researchers do in fact think it corresponded to a separate Minoan language that was not closely related to Greek, but there's no consensus.
Most controversies that exist nowadays don't seem to be about Linear A being Minoan, but rather about trying to demonstrate a relation of the Minoan language itself to another language or language family. There have been attempts to link Minoan to Semitic languages , Anatolian languages and Etruscan, among others. Besides these attempts, I guess there still exist a small number of scholars who still argue that Linear A represents some form of Greek, but it's not a very popular opinion.
The fact that the language of Linear B is Mycenaean Greek as uncontroversial as the existence of the Indo-Eruopean language family or the fact that hieroglyphs encode ancient Egyptian. Anyone claiming otherwise is probably going to be politely ignored and thrown out of the room.
It gets worse. Imagine you'd like to try to look for possible suffixes corresponding to "the" as an alternative (I don't know any languages that uses other methods, but I'm sure they exist).
Imagine now if your "unknown" language was similar to Norwegian. In Norwegian "the sun" can be either "solen" or "sola" depending on gender, and you can't assume a writer is even consistent (it's bad form to mix different gender for the same word in the same text, but that doesn't stop people), which would throw off your counts/stats.
We have a pretty good catalogue of possible variations based on modern languages, so you certainly could try to construct a theory of a mapping based on known possible options (and you're not wrong to think in that direction as one approach worth testing), but there are many possible variations, so it's unfortunately not an easy one.
Reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_(grammar)#Tables, Maltese uses prefixes.