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Comment by cpleppert | Hacker News Reader

I guess I’m skeptical as to what is being claimed here. There have been various attempts to use the Greek phonetic values and logograms of Linear B to reconstruct Linear A equivalents. The only known sentences partially deciphered are votive formulations. Knowing the sound values doesn’t really help you anyway as we have virtually no information on Linear A at all. It’s pretty hard to understand sign equivalencies if you can’t even understand how a sign is being used.

The article is pretty vague; I’m not sure what these sign equivalences are supposed to be.

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Was on Crete just before Covid hit. People there told me it is more or less impossible to reconstruct most of the language because there just isn't enough base material for references. He explicitly told me not to believe people that claim they would be able to translate. Although he probably just meant tourist scams and this is on another level of course.

Wouldn't recommend Knossos, a bit too oriented at tourists, but there are other ruins that are well worth the visit. I believe there is a picture of a women in the building in the picture, but it was very crudely restored. They just used the next IKEA picture frame they could find. But I wonder what archive they mean when they mention the sources. Cannot have been that much, because the area is rather small.

Apologies for being argumentative, but I would recommend Knossos... if you're into archeology.

Most mediterranean sites, however ancient their origins, are dominated by classical era artifacts and structures. It's rare to walk around a bronze or even iron age age site that retains the feel of an older era, excepting Egypt of course.

I would recommend Petra for similar reasons. It's also much bigger and more impressive. Petra also still has a backwater feel, to contrast with your objection to Knossos.

Yeah, it is still worth a visit, I meant that only in comparison to the other Minoan sites on Crete.

There are also some in Malia, but those were in a worse state than others. In Malia you could see another curious and living civilization that drives on motorized bicycles. I believe people called them the British.

For the average tourist without too deep knowledge about archaeology (me), I found Phaistos more impressive, especially for that feeling that you mentioned. It isn't restored to that degree, but still impressive how much remains from this ancient civilization. Maybe it was just the vicinity of the city that made Knossos seem not that special in comparison.

It isn't too far from Knossos, well worth a trip. I think it was just an hour by car from Knossos.

I will certainly put Petra on the list to visit.

Total tangent, but iirc, the lonely planet recommends driving past Malia without stopping... because of the "sunburnt british teens on quads" problem you mention.

I'll make an admission, and hopefully my HN anonymity holds... I stopped for baked beans, chips and a pint. I don't really know why I did it, and I'm sorry.

Heh, to be honest we stopped there too. Our first time English breakfast was in Greece. I thought it funny that so many restaurants in the city had it on the menu. Felt a bit bad for ignoring the local cuisine, but it was quite tasty.

Sugar, pork fat and white bread... It's cheating, but it works.

Side note. Backwater (or back alley) tavernas in Crete are amazing. I could spend half my life in them. The "eat where locals eat" applies, but keep in mind that locals don't eat until late. Being empty at 7pm is actually a good sign. Any place that serves stuffed zucchini flowers or goat in yogurt is a good bet. Beware the raki. Just because it's free, doesn't mean you should finish the bottle.

The Knossos site is remarkable, but like so much early archaeology, the reconstruction is more imaginative than factual, and somewhat destructive. There's a nice overview of the pros and cons at:

https://smarthistory.org/conservation-knossos/

That said, I do highly recommend it, as well as the museum in Herklion. (I didn't get to visit the Phaistos site; thanks for the recommendation.)

Knossos area ftom the ruins until the mountains what you saw is only what has been dug up. It would need thousands of years with the current yearly budget to dig up the area. For Mycenes which is not Minoan and a lot smaller the estimation was that they would need 200 years to excavate the whole city.

Knossos is great, just get there early. Ignore the signs that explain the rooms. If you notice they say `According to Sleeman this was.... '. But nobody really knows. Late Minoans that stayed there and had lost the capability/technology to build that big, did not know the building' s function either.

Indeed Linear A has too few samples but a code smell for new archeoligical decryptions is when they say it references 'Gods' and this doesn't. We will see though.

> The article is pretty vague

Yep. I think they are trying to write for too broad of an audience. It is spending a lot of ink trying to get people to care who did not already know a fact like

> The discovery of the Rosetta Stone, which was inscribed with writing in both ancient Egyptian and Greek, allowed linguists to finally crack the code of Egyptian hieroglyphics in the 19th century.

---------

[EDIT]

Actually, a question for those who are better at writing than I:

When imagining the reader for your article, why would you assume it included someone who did not know what the Rosetta Stone did on a basic level?

If you don’t know your audience- it’s often better to assume too little than assume too much.

Of course writing on the Internet allows you to simply hyperlink terms that may be unfamiliar.

If you live in Argentina, it's obvious that San Diego is better-known than San Bernardino, but nowhere nearly as well known as Los Angeles, but that most people don't know that Compton is in Los Angeles. If you live in San Bernardino you may not know any of these things, so if you're writing an article for a general audience, you might feel the need to explain to your reader that Los Angeles is a large city in Southern California, especially after someone complains they don't know where San Diego is.

I used to live near there, and it reminds me that the further you get away from LA the more general "where you're from" becomes. At some point if someone asks where you live you say "LA" even if you're hundreds of miles from there, as it's the reference point they'll know.

Ah. This makes sense. If the author is heavily involved in the archaeological linguistics community they would indeed not know how well-known the Rosetta Stone is.

Reading a recent article in Quanta Magazine about (co)homology, I had to ask myself a similar question: Why would you assume that anyone who is reading this does not know what algebra (the subject) is? (Also similarly, I remember some SciAm pieces on the Standard Model assumed that the reader might not have any idea about atoms.)

I think more details can be found in the book mentioned in the article: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108783477

The book in turn appears to be a revised version of the author's 2018 PhD thesis. The thesis isn't open access, but at least an abstract is here: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/283184

My non-specialist take is that the linked article's explanation of the book/thesis's findings sounds confused. The thesis's abstract is pretty different from what the article seems to be saying.

You can find more details in an academic review of the book here: https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2021/2021.04.30/

The OP article is extremely confusing, and the writer itself seems confused. My understanding is that the author of the book (Ester Salgarella) makes the following three claims:

Claim 1: Linear A and Linear B are not different scripts, but rather two different writing systems (orthographies) for the same script. She does not claim they are used to write the same language, nor that Minoan (or whatever language is written by LA) is linguistically related to Mycenaean Greek. In this sense the proposed "Aegean Linear Script" is not different than cuneiform, which has originally been developed to write the Sumerian language and has been adapted over time to write such diverse (and unrelated) languages as Akkadian (Eastern Semitic), Hittite (Indo European) and Elamite (isolate?[1]).

Claim 2: Linear A does not represent a single writing system, but in fact a collection of regional writing systems. In this context, Linear B can be viewed as just another variant of the same script, adapted to write another language. It notably comes at a later period (probably under different political conditions, i.e. under Mycenaean rule), is more standardized and does not exhibit regional variation. But we can still classify the base script itself as being the same.

These first two claims do not seem extremely controversial for me. However, there seems to be a third claim, which is implied in both the abstract of the book, but I'm not sure Salgarella is making this claim directly. That claim could prove more controversial.

Claim 3: There is a continuity between regional LA variants and the LB used by Mycenaean Greek-speaking scribes. This seems to imply that the Mycenaean scribes did make a concentrated, singular effort to borrow LA and adapt it to their own language - but rather that some regional variants of LA gradually evolved to standardize the rendering of Greek speech. I assume this started with transliterating Greek names and eventually standardizing the rules for rendering all Greek words using the Aegean Linear Script syllabograms. This system, which has gradually evolved, became standardize as what we call Linear B.

I personally think this claim makes sense if we look at the way other scripts (especially complex, logographic-syllabic scripts) have crossed between languages in the past. In the first phase you would usually have bilingual speakers writing in the script's original language and gradually developing better and more formalized adaptations for incorporating their own native language into that script. This is at the very least how Chinese characters have been adapted in Japan, where the standardization process has taken hundreds of years (in fact, you could claim that it is still not over yet).

Whether or not this claim has strong evidence I don't know, but is probably the main "breakthrough" of this research. The other ("internet-powered") breakthrough is that the SigLA database[2], I personally feel to be the coolest thing coming out of this research. Having dabbled a little bit with corporas of both deciphered and undeciphered scripts in the past, this is definitely a UX revolution. It seems like such a joy to use.

[1]: I know some theories connect Elamite to Dravidian languages through the Elamo-Dravidian family. I can't really comment on how proven that is.

[2]: https://sigla.phis.me/browse.html

Thanks for the link to the book review and the summary of claims! This is a lot more informative than the original article.

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