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Comment by Radim | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

> 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.

Except that has been known for like... 50 years? 60 years?

Exactly as you say, the fact that many signs are shared by Linear B and Linear A has been known for at least a half of century.

What I understand from the review of the book is that after a more thorough analysis of the graphic variations of various Linear A signs, many more signs inherited by Linear B from Linear A have been identified than before.

Having better and more phonetic readings of Linear A texts increases the hope that the Minoan language could be identified and understood, even if this remains highly unlikely, unless more Linear A texts would be discovered.

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?

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.

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".

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".)

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