jw1815 wrote:
It's fun to learn about ancient languages and their cultural and linguistic connections. It's fun to speculate on their relationships. But philology and epigraphy are very specialized fields for amateurs to delve into. For amateurs like you and I to follow the work of the world's philologists and epigraphists on tracing an unknown language like Linear A requires some knowledge of the varieties of language structures; distinguishing morphemes and phonemes; the substitution patterns of phonemes from one language to another within the same linguistic family; the difference between loan words and native words and how those differences are determined; the varieties of written forms of languages (syllabic, alphabetic, hieroglyphic, ideograms, etc.); the adaptations of one language’s writing system to a totally different language; grammatical inflections, e.g. conjugations and declensions; and the methods of comparison and decipherment used by epigraphists. Some knowledge of the cultures being considered and their time periods is also useful.
Hey, enough with the amateur stuff - try dilettante instead.
You left out of your list a knowledge of basic cryptography and information theory, and concepts such as phonetic loading. Otherwise you would have caught my mention of "playing" with "toys".
As I expected enough written materials to be recovered from Thera to enable Linear A to be broken, I read through nearly everything on Linear A that was available earlier. I found other ways in along the way, other ways than standard cryptography. Even though my work on the psuedo-glosses of the spiral inscriptions was pretty good (and you have never seen that), Brown's work was the essential break.
Speaking of time periods and cultures, ever notice how Linear B inscriptions are always analyzed in terms of Greek, when Hittite is closer in time? For that matter, ever notice the complete lack of work on Mycenean Greek/Hittite cognates?
jw1815 wrote:
To make a definitive statement about which philologist or epigraphist is “absolutely” correct above all others on a complex project like the identification and decipherment of Minoan Linear A requires more understanding of language families than demonstrated in your comment that mutual understandability is a useful guide to language families.
I agree, and I hope you found my comments above on cryptography and information theory both educational and informative. I stand by my comment on mutual understandability, and I stand by my observation on Brown's breakthrough work.
jw1815 wrote:
So, with all due respect to your right to your own views on the origins of Linear A, I accept the view of the majority of the world’s philologists and epigraphists on ancient languages that the linguistic family and specific individual language of Linear A have not yet been determined, nor the script itself yet been deciphered.
Thanks for showing respect, but scientific "truth" is not determined by majority vote.
Data and paradigms that explain the data do.
For example, I was writing about the comet impacts that killed the mammoth some 6 years before Firestone and Kennett published their field work, and this "debate" is still going to continue for another 2 weeks, with die hards continuing on for 20 years at least.
To give you an idea of how slowly scientific paradigms change, the effects of the Chicxulub impact were being challenged a year ago, and no one had any idea of the impact of a fragmented comet, nor of the Shiva crater.
My experience is that someday most people do finally catch up.
By the way, culturally the use of spiral dedicatory inscriptions pretty much limited the solution space.