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.<p>The article is pretty vague; I’m not sure what these sign equivalences are supposed to be.
Is there a better source for this? Under all the breathless hype ("astonishingly, the internet itself may be the key that unlocks the link between the languages") it sounds like all that's being claimed -- not even proven -- is stronger evidence that Linear A and Linear B are related.
The author of the book -- Ester Salgarella -- has also put together an online searchable corpus of Linear A:<p><a href="https://sigla.phis.me" rel="nofollow">https://sigla.phis.me</a><p>It's very neatly annotated, e.g:
<a href="https://sigla.phis.me/document/ARKH%201a/" rel="nofollow">https://sigla.phis.me/document/ARKH%201a/</a><p>and a good starting point to anyone wishing to try their hand on extracting patterns out of the corpus
This story seems a little bit puffed up.<p>There has been exciting recent progress in the decipherment of another early writing system, Linear Elamite.[0] In fact, French archæologist/philologist François Desset announced last year that he has deciphered all known Linear Elamite inscriptions.[1] (Someone posted this to HN at the time, but it got no traction.[2])<p>[0]: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Elamite" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Elamite</a><p>[1]: <a href="https://www.archaeoreporter.com/en/2020/11/27/deciphering-linear-elamite-the-worlds-oldest-phonetic-writing-system-watch-a-sneak-preview-of-how-to-translate-these-inscriptions/" rel="nofollow">https://www.archaeoreporter.com/en/2020/11/27/deciphering-li...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25345680" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25345680</a>
I you are at all interested in this sort of thing then I recommend this book:<p>John Chadwick -
The Decipherment of Linear B<p>It is written for the lay person and describes the process of cracking linear B and some of the human story as well as info about the ancient civilization.
See also <a href="https://lineara.xyz/" rel="nofollow">https://lineara.xyz/</a> and <a href="https://linearb.xyz/" rel="nofollow">https://linearb.xyz/</a>
Might be more helpful:
<a href="http://www.sci-news.com/archaeology/minoan-linear-a-script-09329.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.sci-news.com/archaeology/minoan-linear-a-script-0...</a>
That was disappointing; the fact that Linear B is descended from Linear A and has inherited many of its signs with more or less variation is not exactly news.