Hacker News Reader

Comment by Tuna-Fish | Hacker News Reader

The reason linear A is so difficult is that the total remaining corpus of Linear A text is ~7500 characters, spread out over ~1500 inscriptions.

If you have a 4k screen, you can fit all remaining Linear A text on your screen at once, in 14pt high font.

View on HN

An in addition to that, a vast majority of documents are lists which consist of a "header" (1 to 3 words) and word-number pairs afterwards. An another common class are small clay seals with 1, 2 characters carved into them. It's likely that in both cases, we may be dealing with abbreviations.

Some of the lists end with "ku-ro" and a number that's the sum of all the previous numbers, oddly frequently off by one.

They hadn't yet decided whether to count from 0 or from 1.

Surprisingly this comes up more then you'd think, for instance in Ancient Rome, tomorrow is two days away so all the dates are off by one from what you'd think it was. They mainly count down and it goes, 5, 4, 3, day before, day.

I noticed that when I read Tom Holland's new translation of The Lives of the Caesars. All the dates were in the form "N days before Kalends/Ides".

I think it comes up in the Gospels, too, e.g. "on the third day" after the resurrection.

“Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration.” — Stan Kelly-Bootle (first person to obtain a postgraduate degree in computer science)

It would be amusing if archaeologists in the future also end up spending countless hours trying to decipher my shopping lists and poor math skills

Imagine if the first archeological discovery they made was tax forms from different countries. What would they think of us, haha.

ku-ro obviously means "carry in" :)

My French teacher told me a story of a Norwegian man who married a French woman. A few months after she'd moved to Norway, my French teacher had come to visit thrm.

When she was leaving, the woman said "pose, pose". My French teacher was puzzled, and asked why she'd said that, and the woman asked if it didn't mean "au revoir" in Norwegian?

Because it was what the cashier at the grocery store said to her every time.

It means (carrier) bag.

In Biblical Hebrew, "Kulo" means "All of it (with the kollel)". The kollel is an extra 1 added to a sum of numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gematria#Other_methods

That's one of the reasons. Another, and more important one, is that we don't know the language that the script transcribes. The claim above is that it's Hebrew.

I have no idea why Minoans would speak Hebrew, there's no indication as far as I'm aware of extensive cultural exchange between the Minoan civ and Hebrew-speaking people, but there's a very clear hierarchy of difficulty to translate dead scripts. From easier to harder:

a) We know what language the script transcribes and how the script transcribes it (e.g. what symbol means what word or sound).

b1) We don't what language the script transcribes but we know how the script transcribes it (e.g. it's a syllabary or an abjad etc).

b2) We know what language the script transcribes but we don't know how the script transcribes it (e.g. Egyptian hieroglyphics).

c) We don't know what language the script transcribes nor do we know how it transcribes it.

b1) and b2) are more or less of similar difficulty.

Linear A goes to category c) above. We know next to nothing about the script or the language, other than the fact the former was reused in linear B to transcribe Mycenean Greek.

Semitic, not Hebrew. Hebrew is one language in the semitic group, alongside Arabic, Amharic and many more. They were much more spread out in the west before the iron age, with most people in Asia Minor belonging to the group. Some of the earliest states used the languages, and they spread alongside the idea of states.

You're right of course but the article above is unclear about whether the claim is that Linear A transcribes Hebrew or a different Semitic language.

First it says that the language of Linear A is a semitic language that is a precursor to biblical Hebrew:

>> Di Mino believes that Linear A belongs to an extinct Semitic language that was a precursor to biblical Hebrew, the way that Latin is a precursor to Italian.

But then it compares the Linear A language directly to Hebrew. For example:

>> Once deciphered, Di Mino saw that the prayer was similar to subsequent Hebrew prayers but was addressed to a Goddess.

So maybe I'm confused. The claim that the Minoans spoke a semitic language sounds less odd than claiming they spoke straight-up biblical Hebrew.

Very vaguely, it makes it like a one-time pad where it can be anything you want it to be. Not quite, but so little text leaves a lot of options open.

I wonder, is there a form of analysis which lets you quantify how ambiguous a set of symbols is? Maybe related to entropy?

Obviously one symbol can mean literally anything, but you could also have very long strings of symbols with many different meanings.

Yes. Somewhere in Claude Shannon's work, called the "unicity distance".

As observed by archaeologist John Younger, the entire Linear A corpus takes up only 1.84 pages of letter paper when typeset in 12 point font and 1-inch margins.

when I first read the title thought he was talking about linear algebra and I was like damn it's not that hard

I would love to have this image available!

I’d send it to you but you probably wouldn’t understand it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com