A short introduction to the undeciphered Aegean writing systems

https://itsallgreektoanna.wordpress.com/2019/01/29/a-very-short-introduction-to-the-undeciphered-aegean-writing-systems/

by bigbillheck • 4 years ago

126 34 4 years ago

itsallgreektoanna.wordpress.com

bigbillheck• 4 years ago

I notice that something appears to have eaten a 'very' in the page title.

monocasa• 4 years ago

There's a maximum size cap on HN titles, which when combined with the mandate to not editorialize titles means that it's not uncommon to see words expressing vague magnitudes removed.

ggm• 4 years ago

John Chadwick's "The Decipherment of Linear B" is a fascinating book. Michael Ventris had a sad death, from a car accident at 35.

I see it's in kindle. I must get it, can't find my paperback.

https://www.amazon.com/Decipherment-Linear-Canto-Classics-eb...

cdrini2• 4 years ago

You can also borrow/read it for free from internet archive:

https://archive.org/details/deciphermentofli00chad

xdennis• 4 years ago

The same book is also available without an account (although the images are lower quality).

https://archive.org/details/ChadwickJohnTheDeciphermentOfLin...

catlifeonmars4• 4 years ago

Asking as a total layperson: have any automated machine translation techniques been applied to undeciphered scripts such as the ones discussed in this article? If so, what was the outcome?

rutherblood• 4 years ago

Just what would the models be trained on? Machine learning requires you to have a corpus of mappings between peices of texts in two languages, each of which have been established to be close in meaning -> thereby requiring there to be no decipherment problem withstanding beforehand.

There are a series of problems in decipherment of Minoan scripts from what I understand: 1. The Linear A & Cretan script are undeciphered in the sense that we do not know what phonetics the symbols stand for 2. The Minoan language hypothesized to be written in these scripts is undeciphered in terms of vocabulary (given we do not know the phonetics of the letter symbols) & by extension its semantics. At best a kind of crude syntax can proposed for it based on patterns of the word-symbols in texts of the hypothesized language written in those scripts.

monkeybutton• 4 years ago

There are plenty of ML models that are trained unsupervised on text. What you would do next with your dead-language BERT, I don't know. But you could definitely make one.

didericis• 4 years ago

I'm not a linguist and haven't done much machine learning, so forgive my naïveté, but aren't there a couple of core features/structures all languages have? That might not be enough to learn anything/might be what you're saying, but I wonder if there's a way to determine what a plausible grammar is and to try to identify what the nouns are. One you have the nouns, you could try just doing a huge substitution game on different texts in that language and try to see what guesses make the most sense for the most sentences.

senorsmile• 4 years ago

There was some interesting insights they've made on the Indus Valley script here: https://youtu.be/a_-obTZO6pY

cdrini2• 4 years ago

All human languages have some commonalities. I remember this headline from 2016, when Google had an AI model that trained on some languages was able to somewhat successfully translate between language pairs it had never seen before:

https://ai.googleblog.com/2016/11/zero-shot-translation-with...

Not sure what the state of research like this is now, or whether it's been applied to stuff like this. I hope so!

EDIT: although it looks like it had seen the languages, but the pair it hadn't translated between.

divbzero• 4 years ago

Are there any commonalities in the type of subject matter considered worthy of recording in written text?

catlifeonmars4• 4 years ago

Just what would the models be trained on? Machine learning requires you to have a corpus of mappings between peices of texts in two languages, each of which have been established to be close in meaning -> thereby requiring there to be no decipherment problem withstanding beforehand.

I was thinking of unsupervised machine translation specifically[1].

[1] https://paperswithcode.com/task/unsupervised-machine-transla...

kitsune_• 4 years ago

Yes, but cultural understanding still trumps this, at least according to some experts, case in point, François Desset has recently deciphered a 4,400 year old Iranian writing system (Linear Elamite) and this is his take on it:

FD: This was the jackpot – the same Elamite or Hatamtite text written on one artefact in cuneiform, and on the other in Linear Elamite. This is a classic knowledge-driven decipherment based on our capability to make connections between Cuneiform and Linear Elamite scripts inscriptions recording the same Hatamtite (or Elamite) language text.
RK: An excellent point, especially in this day and age when many seek to replace knowledge with technology.
FD: Certainly. I wish in this regard to emphasise that I have been asked a lot about computers, statistical data, etc. All hogwash! Knowledge, especially cultural knowledge and of the languages used at the time, some luck, and most important perseverance were essential.

https://www.thepostil.com/francois-desset-on-the-deciphermen...

jonnycomputer2• 4 years ago

There is a sort of romantic fascination to dedicating yourself to the study of what is probably an impossible puzzle.

We'd learn so much if only we had a key. So much history inaccessible to us.

thaumasiotes• 4 years ago

We'd learn so much if only we had a key. So much history inaccessible to us.

Well, as this post notes, one of the things that makes decipherment difficult is a lack of material.

The other side of that coin is that we aren't missing a lot.

jonnycomputer2• 4 years ago

Fair point.

misja111• 4 years ago

Why are (almost) all these writing systems from Crete? Were people not writing things down on the mainland at that time, or have their writing systems all been deciphered? Or is there some other explanation?

bradrn2• 4 years ago

Not a historian, but the obvious explanation is that Crete was the centre of the Minoan civilisation, ‘the first advanced civilisation in Europe’ [0]. The only other scripts in use at the time were various forms of cuneiform in Mesopotamia and Anatolia (for Sumerian, Akkadian, Hittite etc.) and hieroglyphics for Egyptian, all of which have been deciphered. We have far more evidence for those scripts than we do for the various Aegean ones.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minoan_civilization

hillsboroughman• 4 years ago

Makes sense. Another dimension to this is that Minoan language does not appear to have had any resemblance to any form of Greek. The most ancient cultural artifacts from Mycenae seem to be of Minoan inspiration while Crete itself seems to have had intrusive Mycenean characteristics until it was completely supplanted by the Mycenean.

A short introduction to the undeciphered Aegean writing systems

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