Comment by romaaeterna | Hacker News Reader

Comment by romaaeterna | Hacker News Reader

The Linear B decipherment is a bit of a con (more on Chadwick's side than poor Ventris, I expect). Ventris' grid method is cryptographic nonsense, of course. (Look in vain for any frequency tabulation.) But Chadwick (one of the best, or at least most self-promoting, Greek lexicographers of his day) seems to have recognized that a loose enough spelling formula, together with an impossibly large lexicon of ancient Greek, is a recipe for infinite decipherment fun.

One Oxfordian liked to take the English names of visiting scholars, turn them into Linear B, and then back into Greek using the very loose Ventris rules, only to find that some Greek god would always come out.

But this example is more fun (courtesy of Michael C. Stokes by way of Douglas Young):

Arma uirumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris...

a-ma wi-ru-qe ka-no to-ro-ja qi-pi-ri-mu a-po-ri

halmai wiluite kainos Tholoiai Diphilimus apolis

ἅλμαι ἰλύι τε καινῶς Θολῳᾳ Διφιλιμος ἄπολις

That is, the first line of Virgil's Aeneid (Latin) -> Linear B -> Greek. My trans: "With brine and slime, at Tholoia [place of beehive tombs], Diphilimus is made a ruined city in an inventive way."

Can you be a bit more clear? Are you arguing Linear B remains undeciphered?

My understanding is that Ventris and Chadwick's decipherment of Linear B was eventually accepted, but its process is questionable since there were still many unknowns that took time to resolve. The parent particularly refers to the 1965 article Is Linear B deciphered? by Douglas Young [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27201234 has an excerpt.

I'm getting flashbacks of getting a right answer for a problem in my high school math class

but then getting points deducted because I didn't use the right method for arriving at the solution

You misunderstand the problem. There's an 80 page article concerned with the spelling of one word and its inflections.

The typical solution would be to squint at it and write down the classical Greek form. That would be roughly equivalent to me talking English in Holland because I'm shy of Dutch, as a German native.

He’s pointing out that the phonetic maps are so loose and nondeterministic that Virgil’s Aeneid’s first line

“Of arms and a man of Troy i sing who first from shores”

Turns into absolutely unrelated gibberish when applying the deciphering phonetic maps, and comparing the meanings.

* nerd alert: I wrote the English with the word order in Latin, which has a endings-based freedom to word order allowing planned beats, in this case dactylic hexameter…Latin rap sort of when i think of it

> He’s pointing out that the phonetic maps are so loose and nondeterministic

This interacts with the highly inflectional nature of Greek; imagine a scheme for deciphering an unknown text into English which allowed the decipherer to insert, at any point, any word that might not be capitalized in standard English title case: to, for, the, of, and, but, with, ..., along with whatever plural or possessive markers they wished.

That's nonsense. Greek has prepositions, conjunctions, and cases that leave little room to interpretation. It is a rather precise language (much more so than English or even Latin).

And if you look a few comments upthread, you'll see that the cases are generally not represented in Linear B as we decipher it. You are free to imagine that a noun is in the case most convenient for you.

Oh, I misunderstood you then. I thought you meant classical Greek in general. My apologies.

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