

Studying the world's oldest undeciphered writing - vectorbunny
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-19964786#sa-ns_mchannel%3Drss%26ns_source%3DPublicRSS20-sa

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tokenadult
"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.

~~~
dkarl
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.

------
breadbox
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.

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

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

~~~
paganel
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.

------
freehunter
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>

~~~
tokenadult
_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>

is

"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.

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

