For the unfamiliar, Linear A was an ancient script that is associated with the Minoan civilization of the island of Crete, around 1500 - 1800 BC. The later Linear B system encodes archaic Greek, and is very similar to Linear A in glyph form. The Minoan language written with Linear A is probably unrelated to any other language.<p>Phonetic values are necessarily from Linear B or otherwise guesses - it's very likely there was a great deal of overlap, that the symbol representing, for example, the syllable "ni" in Greek, represented a syllable that sounded a lot like "ni" in Minoan. (Linear B is quite unsuited to writing Greek sounds, an indicator that it was borrowed from a very different language.) But since the language of Linear A remains undeciphered, that is really just an educated guess at best.
Work by amateurs on Linear A does not have a good track record. Since the dawn of the internet era it has drawn more crackpots than almost anything else language-related. Within the professional linguistics community, if someone comes along and claims that he has made any progress towards decipherment, it is generally met with skepticism so strong that one questions that person’s mental health. That said, this website has a caveat that it is for recreational use only, and it points to John Younger’s page at the University of Kansas for something serious. Lay readers on HN should take that caveat very seriously.
I sometimes wonder how much further we well be able to lift the veil of ignorance covering early civilizations (assuming our ongoing existence, cultural interest in the past and ever more powerful technologies in the aeons to come).<p>Clearly there must be additional Linear A inscriptions in Crete and possibly elsewhere. The cost of finding them enters a spiral of diminishing returns, but that <i>may</i> be remedied at some point.<p>But, even so, there is no guarantee that even with all surving artefacts uncovered we would be able to reconstruct the language.<p>Pressumably that "edge of knowledgeable history" calculus plays across many regions and sometimes ignorance is annoyingly "close" to the modern era. Even long after the invention of writing the vast majority of human culture was not recorded and is essentially lost.
Very weird to see this, I went to an exhibition about Knossos in Oxford only today.<p>Good episode here that covers a bit about the language and translation efforts. The translation of Linear B is a very cool story too.<p><a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01292ts" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01292ts</a>
I like writing systems and scripts especially obscure or ancients ones. It never even dawned on me to think of my local region as I did ancient Egypt, Greece, Italy etc.<p>I was talking to a friend he is Mi'Kmaq here in Canada we call the people here First Nations in the USA it's Native American. He said that the Mi'Kmaq had an old writing system. I checked into it and it predates any contact with Europeans and is one of the very few writing systems by native peoples here. It's called suckerfish writing or suckerfish script the name inspired by the tracks the fish makes in sand.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mi%EA%9E%8Ckmaw_hieroglyphic_writing" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mi%EA%9E%8Ckmaw_hieroglyphic_w...</a>
Looks like there’s a parallel site for Linear B: <a href="https://linearb.xyz/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://linearb.xyz/</a>
On a related note, the Heraklion Archaeological Museum on Crete is fantastic. 100% worth going if you like old stuff. One of the things on display is the Phaistos Disc, one of the best preserved relics depicting Linear A.<p><a href="https://maps.app.goo.gl/rwJVDVDjaoNJjaNH8?g_st=ic" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://maps.app.goo.gl/rwJVDVDjaoNJjaNH8?g_st=ic</a><p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaistos_Disc" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaistos_Disc</a>
Via this post I found the book "The Riddle of the Labyrinth" about the people who deciphered Linear B. Thank you Hacker News, looking forward to reading this!
Related thought: Imagine we received a lot of text in an alien language with a radio telescope, with no "Rosetta stone" to decipher it. Say, 1 TB worth of text.<p>Now we add to that data another 1 TB of English text, and train an LLM on the 2 TB of data. Then we ask the model (in English) to translate some text from the alien language to English.<p>Would it work?