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Comment by rendall | Hacker News Reader

> "... the five words written in 40 characters identified as Vasconic, suggest otherwise. The first – and only word – to be identified so far is sorioneku, a forerunner of the modern Basque word zorioneko, meaning good luck or good omen."

How did they know some set of characters meant sorioneku? Is this not the first time they have even seen these characters?

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So it definitely descends from the Phoenician alphabet which is also what the Greek and then Latin alphabets descended from. The Etruscan alphabet, Cyrillic, Arabic, and Hebrew are all related in there as well.

It doesn't seem too far removed from other alphabets in that area. I'm honestly more surprised that they're saying they've only got the first word figured out.

You can visually see the progression of letters in a wonderful "Evolution of the Alphabet" chart from UsefulCharts.[0] Really brings home the relationships that may not be evident without seeing the intermediates.

[0] https://usefulcharts.com/products/evolution-of-the-alphabet

It is variant of the northwestern Iberian alphabet, a derivative of the Phoenician alphabet as you mentioned, and Iberian writing has been decoded for a while now (not the language itself). Iberian used to be written in one of three ways, northwestern and southeastern variants of the Phoenician derivative, and Greek alphabet sometimes.

I'm a native Basque speaker and the first word is obvious and makes all sense (still used these days to wish "happy birthday"), parts of the others have some resemblance to modern words, but it's far from obvious. Not surprising in 2000 years of the evolution of a minority, mostly-non-written language, with a ton of external influence.

(The variation of the alphabet brings over letter T from greek, which does not exist in Iberian as seemingly they didn't use the sound, while Basque uses the T sound.)

> I'm honestly more surprised that they're saying they've only got the first word figured out.

They have figured out the rest of the words, as per the last image in the announcement tweet [1]. It's just that they don't make sense in modern Basque (source being me being a native Basque speaker).

[1]: https://twitter.com/aranzadi/status/1592129224806404097?s=20...

Oh, I see! So upstream quote meant they understood the first word, and transliterated the rest without understanding. Got it. Excellent, thank you.

That makes more sense than them not being able to parse out the sounds of subsequent letters after working out the first word.

There's been so much work done on reconstructing what the proto-Indo-European roots of modern words might have been. I'd imagine they've had less luck with Basque since it doesn't have the wealth of contemporary languages to compare it to.

Huh, at first glance I thought they were runes, but then runes must've had predecessors themselves.

I spent some time looking into this from a post about this artifact yesterday. I had the same response to think abut runes when I looked at it as well. For anyone curious, the characters are evidently from one of several Paleohispanic scripts. The origins of those scripts might be Phoenician and/or Greek, some are read from left to right and some from right to left.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleohispanic_scripts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleohispanic_languages

The alphabet is shared with other Iberian languages, with a couple of unique runes. It is most likely written phonetically but the underlying language is very different.

Nowadays Basque is similarly written phonetically in latin alphabet, and in terms of phonemes, it has almost the same sounds and vowels as Spanish.

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