
How do you crack the code to a lost ancient script? - yread
https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/how-do-you-crack-the-code-to-a-lost-ancient-script
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romaaeterna
There are serious problems with the Linear B decipherment from a
cryptographical standpoint and a Greek standpoint. Ventris' matrix method was
impossible, first of all. It didn't come close to reaching the actual search
space. And the character mapping is so incredibly loose that you can translate
Greek from any random collocation of linear B characters. Some of the words
that Chadwick and Ventris pulled out seem to be unexpected forms for early
Greek, compared to linguistic predictions. And the meaning of the texts is
often fantastic compared to similar Mesopotamian tablets.

My own opinion is that Ventris and Chadwick were mistaken about the
decipherment, and that all of the current work on it is so much garbage.

Saul Levin's 1964 "The Linear B Decipherment Controversy Re-Examined" remains
the best critical examination of the matter, which should tell you something
about the speed of this field. It is _well_ past time to replicate Ventris'
work with a computer approach and see if there is really any signal there.

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thaumasiotes
How much of a Linear B corpus is there? Deciphering Mesopotamian tablets
included some experiments in which different people were given the same text
to translate, and their agreement on the meaning was taken as evidence that
the decipherment was more or less valid.

As long as there's enough Linear B material that we don't need to assume
everyone in the field will be familiar with every extant text, it should be
fairly straightforward to run that same experiment for Linear B, which would
pretty well settle the "the character mapping is so incredibly loose that you
can translate Greek from any random collocation of linear B characters" issue.

If you really want to stand behind that wording, you could very easily make up
a text ("any random collocation of linear B characters") and see what
different people thought it meant.

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romaaeterna
I don't think that you could get away with it. There's not enough out there.
However you'll probably appreciate this similar jest from Michael Stokes
(source Douglas Young's "Is Linear B Deciphered" for Arion in 1965).

[https://imgur.com/GPdnYfU](https://imgur.com/GPdnYfU)

Article source:
[https://www.jstor.org/stable/20162981](https://www.jstor.org/stable/20162981)

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NotSammyHagar
This is a really excellent article. If you ever wondered how they work out the
parts of an ancient written language from basic principals, this shows you
how. It's one of the best things I've ever written, I can follow the basic
ideas and understand some of the things they are figuring out.

~~~
quietbritishjim
Not trying to be pedantic, I'm really a bit confused here:

> It's one of the best things I've ever written

Do you mean one of the best things you've ever _read_? Or did you just call
your own work "really excellent"?

~~~
close04
> and understand some of the things

[off topic] I'd go with "read" :). I'd very much prefer if an author called
their own work "excellent" rather than admitting they understood some of the
things they wrote about, after rereading their own work.

[on topic] This kind of articles makes me think how (in)adequate we are to
decipher an alien transmission and language. We'll probably have to rely on
"their" vastly superior intellect to make the language understandable for us.
We still struggle to understand languages spoken by other humans basically
identical to us, whose language evolved in conditions perfectly familiar to us
(planet, environment, common concepts, etc.), and lived a mere 3500 years ago.

~~~
NotSammyHagar
Again I'm sorry, I made a mistake, I was not the author. I meant to say "it
was one of the best articles I had read".

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pronoiac
This isn’t about computer scripts, btw.

> Dr Davis is talking about solving Linear A, the undeciphered language of the
> ancient Minoan civilisation of Crete that flourished around 1700 BCE to 1490
> BCE.

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meitham
For a second I thought this was AskHN!

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cyborgx7
E is the most used letter, right? Just find the symbol that appears the most
often and that is probably an E. /s

~~~
HenryBemis
In English language, yes. But this is not even Greek, or Ancient Greek. Also I
am not sure if the "icons" are letters (a, b, c, α, β, γ...) or ideograms.

Good luck decyphering this without any kno

I will assume that some contect is needed to start translating the text. E.g.
if the tablets are found in a temple, you can start with a vocabulary of 1000
words and then expand the search. There could (?) be a "mixed" approach
(technology, history, linguistics) rather than "scan and let the machine
combine".

