Studying the world's oldest undeciphered writing | Hacker News Reader

Studying the world's oldest undeciphered writing

bbc.co.uk

49 pointsvectorbunny12 comments

"Why they should make the intellectual leap to embrace writing and then at the same time re-invent it in a different local form remains a puzzle."

There is an example from a much more recent period of history that is well known to scholars of world scripts. Cherokee writing as developed by Sequoyah was based on the example of English writing known to Sequoyah from European settlement in America, but the letter forms

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary

are not entirely identical, and indeed Sequoyah's writing system is a syllabary rather than an alphabet.

The work on Proto-Elamite described in the submitted article is quite interesting.

Sequoyah is an interesting example. He had access to English printing and knew that it encoded the English language, but he didn't know exactly how, since he couldn't read or write English. He couldn't read or write any language in any script, so in the process of creating a script for Cherokee, he had to independently invent the concept of the syllabary. The proto-Elamite script might also have been invented by someone who know how others used the Mesopotamian script but wasn't literate in it himself. If you learn to read and write one language you'd want to re-use as much of that knowledge as possible when writing a second language (e.g., using romaji to write Japanese) but there's no loss in creating an entirely new script if you aren't literate in any existing writing system.

For folks who are interested in this even more, this is a fantastic site about written languages.

http://www.omniglot.com/

and a great text

http://www.amazon.com/Languages-World-Introduction-Asya-Pere...

I am more familiar with:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Aboriginal_syllabics

In this case, it was created because the latin alphabet did not map nicely to the sounds in Ojibwe. Apparently, it was partly "inspired by the success of Sequoyah's Cherokee syllabary."

Rongorongo from Easter Island seems to be either another example of this or an independent invention of writing. It is also undeciphered. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rongorongo

The "DIY black dome" object mentioned briefly in the article is used to create "polynomial texture map" images. If you're unfamiliar with it, it's a very cool technique. http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/ptm/ has details, but in brief: an object is photographed multiple times from one camera position but multiple lighting positions. Software can then programmatically interpolate to how the image would look from all lighting positions. It's a way to improve on basic texture-mapping for games, of course, but it's mostly proving useful in archaeology, allowing more people to interact virtually with precious objects. PTM images can also be provide "impossible" views of objects -- e.g. giving every pixel a different lighting angle so as to maximize contrast.

I assumed at first they were talking about Linear A[1]. Ah well.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_A

I was hoping for the same thing. The Minoans are fascinating, I started reading about them sometime this summer just before my summer vacation to the Cyclades. Particularly I think that their art has a certain feeling or touch that has not been reproduced since then.

Why was the headline changed? The original headline [1] used the headline from the article, "Breakthrough in world's oldest undeciphered writing". For some reason it was changed either by the author or by a moderator to a meaning that is completely different.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/agIfl.png

OP did not alter the headline.

Why was the headline changed?

That is a puzzler. The OP submitted the article with the original article title (that's how I saw the submission when it was a new submission). The guideline here

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"If the original title includes the name of the site, please take it out, because the site name will be displayed after the link anyway.

"If the original title begins with a number or number + gratuitous adjective, we'd appreciate it if you'd crop it. E.g. translate '10 Ways To Do X' to 'How To Do X,' and '14 Amazing Ys' to 'Ys.' Exception: when the number is meaningful, e.g. 'The 5 Platonic Solids.'

"Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait."

The last paragraph quoted above appears to be the newest revision to the Hacker News guidelines, just a few months old, and perhaps that guideline revision is so new that some curators here have habits that go back to an older version of the guidelines, which suggested more rationales for retitling articles on the part of submitters or curators. I really like original article titles whenever possible, myself,

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4624933

and the BBC is a very reliable source with reasonable titles.

Perhaps it's because it's not actually a breakthrough? I'm kinda surprised the BBC called it that.

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