Minoan language Linear A linked to Linear B in new research

https://greekreporter.com/2022/04/20/minoan-language-linear-a-linear-b/

by clouddrover • 4 years ago

207 90 4 years ago

bradrn• 4 years ago

Article from 2021, duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27191364

turndown• 4 years ago

I am afraid there is currently no exact translation of the sign-sequences (= words) attested on Linear A tablets (as well as other document types). This is primarily because we have not yet identified the linguistic family the Minoan language belongs to (unless it has to be taken as an ‘isolated’ language)

Seems as though they may have made some kind of advancement in the relationship between symbols, but as always we do not have nearly enough written material to approach deciphering.

AprilArcus• 4 years ago

This article is a reasonable summary of the status quo in Linear A studies since 1956, but the reporter seemingly deliberately obfuscates the nature and scope of Dr. Ester Salgarella's new contribution.

It appears to be the creation of an online corpus in collaboration Dr. Simon Castellan, linked near the bottom of the article: https://sigla.phis.me/

This will be a great resource and is an important work, but it appears that today we are no closer to deciphering Linear A than we have ever been.

Radim• 4 years ago

I don't know about "deliberately". Might be just a confused, inarticulate piece by a confused reporter.

When an article opens with "the Minoan language known as Linear A" (no, it's a script) and "Linear B developed later in the prehistoric period" (an oxymoron, prehistoric = pre-literary)… you know not to expect much.

Did anyone manage to parse out what is even being claimed in this article?

jnwatson• 4 years ago

The author found a relationship between Linear B (the script) and Linear A (the script) to the point of being able to approximately pronounce Linear A. The actual language written in that Linear A script, Minoan, is still unknown, but this provides some important tools to better understand it.

tlb• 4 years ago

Is it not fair to call an society where writing existed but we can't read it prehistoric? From our perspective, we have no written history. Or is the distinction that they themselves could read it and therefore acted with historical awareness?

mwenge• 4 years ago

https://lineara.xyz/ is also worth a look

CamperBob2• 4 years ago

That's cool as hell (note that https://linearb.xyz also exists.)

SemanticStrengh11• 4 years ago

can't they use the zipf law ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law The decreasing exponential law should allow to find "the" and some closed form POS words, so yeah determiners, prepositions and conjonctions.

jcranmer5• 4 years ago

The total extant corpus of Linear A amounts to fewer than 10,000 characters (and this is, I believe, the largest corpus of any undeciphered script).

There's not enough text to do statistical analysis.

luma• 4 years ago

Can we assume that any of those features would be part of this language?

vjerancrnjak3• 4 years ago

I wonder can they construct a deep learning model that encodes human languages from script shapes and then somehow figure out the God language from which Linear A script/language is derived.

There's too little data for Linear A. But it might be enough if there's a God language oracle waiting to be fed new descendant languages.

mtlmtlmtlmtl3• 4 years ago

You really think that in decades of linguists studying Linear A, no one has thought of trying Zipf's law?

If scientists have studied something for this long, and you come up with an idea that fits in a single paragraph, it's probably been tried and didn't work. Unless you're the field's leading expert in which case you would be off doing it, not posting it on HN :)

Edit: typos

heavenlyblue• 4 years ago

I think the issue with Linear A is that the amount of preserved units of culture in that language is incredibly small, so whichever the statistics you can obtain from it are limited in use.

eklitzke• 4 years ago

I'm skeptical of the claim that this would work at all even if there was a larger corpus. Let's say you had a million pages of classical Chinese text, but absolutely no context about what the text meant or was about. By looking at it closely and using statistical analysis you could certainly determine various rules of the grammar, and you might even be able to guess that certain characters are grammatical constructions representing things like conjunctions and prepositions. But this isn't really going to let you translate anything.

yk• 4 years ago

That makes assumptions about the language, for the languages I know: German has three definite articles, Latin doesn't have any, so it is not obvious what looking for "the" would result in either.

cge• 4 years ago

In addition to the other comments on difficulties of such analyses, an additional difficulty may be the type of inscriptions in the corpus. We understand Linear B, for example, because it is early Greek. But the texts are not narrative prose or poetry: they're administrative records, mostly lists and inventories. If Linear A texts are of similar types, then trying to decipher the language from them alone may be challenging or impossible, unless it can be linked to a known language: the forms of speech used may simply be too limited.

Trying to understand English grammar by looking only at bare financial statements would likely be extremely hard.

scheme271• 4 years ago

The language might not have that. E.g. latin doesn't have a word that corresponds to "the". Languages may indicate conjunctions or some types of prepositions or determiners by changing the case of a noun or the conjungation of a verb.

bigbillheck3• 4 years ago

Zipf's law is a statement about the results of a frequency analysis. Frequency analysis has been a core part of Linear A efforts for a long time, as you'd expect considering how important it was to Ventris in deciphering Linear B.

See for example "On the Language of Linear A" from 1958 (https://gredos.usal.es/bitstream/handle/10366/73246/On_the_L...) or "Greek-like Elements in Linear A" from 1963 (https://grbs.library.duke.edu/article/viewFile/11991/4031). For something more recent, there's "Linear A and Linear B: Structural and contextual concerns" from 2017 (https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/200196986.pdf). (One of the authors of that one, Steele, also has a blog: https://crewsproject.wordpress.com/tag/linear-a/)

thom• 4 years ago

Work has been done on using Markov models etc to predict missing symbols in these texts. But it feels like with all the data now available, and the fact that some signs' meanings are known, we must be able to at least reduce the constellation of possible meanings of some of the unknown signs. There are only so many things it was possible to say about olives in the ancient world, and presumably the semantic space wouldn't be so different to other vaguely contemporaneous languages (not just Linear B). Does anybody know of any work in this direction?

jcranmer5• 4 years ago

I spent basically the entire article trying to figure out what the "groundbreaking" research actually was... this is a pretty mangled press release rendering of the scientific research, even worse than the kinds you normally see from university research.

To its credit, this doesn't promise that we can (or will shortly be able to) actually read Linear A texts, and it actually explicates that we won't be able to do that. But that's pretty much the limit of credit due to this article.

Linear A's connection to Linear B has been hypothesized since... well, at least as far back as when I was taught it in school, which considering how long it takes textbooks to update themselves to state-of-the-art archaeology may as well be time immemorial.

What it looks like the actual "groundbreaking" research here is, based on the sleuthing done in the previous version of the article that leads to an academic review of the work in question (here: https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2021/2021.04.30/). The layman's version is that it's a detailed analysis of the structural elements of the script to propose how the (unknown) language was encoded into Linear A, combined with some analysis of how individual glyphs varied in time and space--and this results in the conclusion that Linear B is actually a version of a regional [script, not linguistic] dialect of Linear A that was used to write a different language.

Torkel• 4 years ago

Yeah, not a good article at all - I bailed half way through and went to the comments here in hope of a tldr/abstract…

ncmncm7• 4 years ago

What it specifically fails to deliver is any indication of how "the internet" had any role at all in the work or in any progress made.

The only suggestion of progress was that somebody finally noticed the LB symbols were mostly about the same as LA symbols, so they now can now pronounce the LA texts. There is no hint why that only just happened.

pianoraptor• 4 years ago

Thank you for your take on it. I too was hoping for more insights here, having followed the Linear A / Linear B developments from my armchair for many years.

lsrinivas• 4 years ago

I too was scratching my head about as you put it , "what the groundbreaking research was". The academic review link that you posted was rather useful though it was a little technical.

I think the book needs to be read. But thanks a ton.

tremon3• 4 years ago

this results in the conclusion that Linear B is actually a version of a regional [script, not linguistic] dialect of Linear A that was used to write a different language.

I'm having trouble understanding this. To me this says that Linear A and Linear B are different scripts that express different [spoken] languages, but might share common heritage. Which sounds obvious to me, not groundbreaking, unless they've now identified the common source.

Or are you saying that Linear A and Linear B might be the same script (as in phoneme->symbol encoding), but used to express a different language?

jamesfinlayson• 4 years ago

Or are you saying that Linear A and Linear B might be the same script (as in phoneme->symbol encoding), but used to express a different language?

That was my understanding but I didn't think that was a new hypothesis - I remember reading years ago that they were a very similar alphabet (for lack of a better word) and that linear B was just the locals using their alphabet to write ancient Greek.

I believe something similar was done in Germany a few hundred years ago - the Bible was written in Hebrew script that encoded German words.

contingencies• 4 years ago

IMHO grandparent is saying Linear B is a different, yet related script that appears to be directly derived from a regional variant of Linear A.

A script can be used to write arbitrary languages, and does not imply a fully identical mapping to phonemes when used for these different languages. Examples include use of the Arabic script[0] to write Uighur, Urdu, or Farsi.

Generally an existing script is adopted for a new language through transliteration, often the addition of diacritics or new glyphs. Further examples would be Vietnamese or the numerous abugidas of Southeast Asia. When an existing script is used without adaptation by a speaker of another language attempting phonetic transliteration, it is generally very lossy.[2] This is why we have IPA, which is also lossy and not widely understood.[3]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_script [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abugida [2] https://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2013/07/02/the-fore... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe...

qiskit• 4 years ago

and this results in the conclusion that Linear B is actually a version of a regional [script, not linguistic] dialect of Linear A that was used to write a different language.

I guess that's nice to know, but hasn't it always been known that linear A and B were "related". Regardless, Linear A still hasn't been deciphered and that's what's ultimately important.

kurupt213• 4 years ago

I was expecting a proposed language, like a dialect of luwian or something. This article is old news

motohagiography• 4 years ago

Feels like a fun intro to comp.sci exercise would be taking texts from ancient languages and writing compression schemes, n-gram analyzers, regular expressions, and symbol call graphs for them. It's a bit like the apocryphal story of some old hackers in the 80s "decoding" a Chinese takeout menu (Jobs/Woz?), but it could get kids interested in archeology in a way that is smarter than that alien TV show.

changoplatanero• 4 years ago

You mean like this? https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.06718.pdf

SemanticStrengh11• 4 years ago

wow has this been applied to linear A?? Nice to see google doing original work. Also the MIT omnipresence is humiliating for other universities, as usual.

SemanticStrengh11• 4 years ago

Linear A seems to derive from cretan hyeroglyphs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretan_hieroglyphs What do cretan hyeroglyphs come from? And how does a population create a language? That's absurdly difficult to initiate.

jcranmer5• 4 years ago

I assume you mean "writing system" and not "language" here.

Writing systems were independently invented no fewer than three times (Mesopotamian, Chinese, and Mayan are unquestionably independent inventions) and probably more times, while also being reinvented from scratch numerous times after that (Cherokee being perhaps the most well-documented such reinvention--Sequoyah knew of writing from the Americans, but had no other conception of how it worked, and his documentation of the process of developing the Cherokee syllabry is a nice compression of the history of stages of writing systems). It does not seem to be a particularly challenging invention.

There appear to be two key hurdles that are required for the development of writing. The first is the creation of a systematic inventory of stylized representations of objects, for example knowing that this symbol represents "sun" and that one represents "eye". In particular, I'd draw the "systematic" inventory here as the challenge--merely representing concepts in visual drawings seems to be a pretty universal capability. The second hurdle is the re-encoding of (some of) these symbols to represent phonetic values in an abstract way. (Note that being able to represent any phonetic utterance of a language is the distinguishing characteristic between proto-writing and writing.)

If you actually want to know how language is created, well, there is a recent community of deaf people who spontaneously invented their own sign language de novo, which suggests that language is actually incredibly easy to invent.

capitainenemo2• 4 years ago

"Writing systems were independently invented no fewer than three times (Mesopotamian, Chinese, and Mayan are unquestionably independent inventions)"

…

"Note that being able to represent any phonetic utterance of a language is the distinguishing characteristic between proto-writing and writing."

Huh... does Chinese meet that criteria? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logogram#Differences_in_proces...

edgyquant• 4 years ago

I think after cave paintings and tally marks modern written language is fairly straightforward. Just requires a need to pack more information smaller which farming provides.

ncmncm7• 4 years ago

The less you know about something, the simpler it seems.

sabr• 4 years ago

TED-Ed made a nice video explaining Linear A https://youtu.be/iePEw_cHp8s

jl6• 4 years ago

I wonder if a machine learning model could shed some 𐝌 on the decipherment.

Minoan language Linear A linked to Linear B in new research

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