There are serious problems with the Linear B decipherment from a cryptographical standpoint and a Greek standpoint. Ventris' matrix method was impossible, first of all. It didn't come close to reaching the actual search space. And the character mapping is so incredibly loose that you can translate Greek from any random collocation of linear B characters. Some of the words that Chadwick and Ventris pulled out seem to be unexpected forms for early Greek, compared to linguistic predictions. And the meaning of the texts is often fantastic compared to similar Mesopotamian tablets.
My own opinion is that Ventris and Chadwick were mistaken about the decipherment, and that all of the current work on it is so much garbage.
Saul Levin's 1964 "The Linear B Decipherment Controversy Re-Examined" remains the best critical examination of the matter, which should tell you something about the speed of this field. It is well past time to replicate Ventris' work with a computer approach and see if there is really any signal there.
How much of a Linear B corpus is there? Deciphering Mesopotamian tablets included some experiments in which different people were given the same text to translate, and their agreement on the meaning was taken as evidence that the decipherment was more or less valid.
As long as there's enough Linear B material that we don't need to assume everyone in the field will be familiar with every extant text, it should be fairly straightforward to run that same experiment for Linear B, which would pretty well settle the "the character mapping is so incredibly loose that you can translate Greek from any random collocation of linear B characters" issue.
If you really want to stand behind that wording, you could very easily make up a text ("any random collocation of linear B characters") and see what different people thought it meant.
I don't think that you could get away with it. There's not enough out there. However you'll probably appreciate this similar jest from Michael Stokes (source Douglas Young's "Is Linear B Deciphered" for Arion in 1965).
This is a really excellent article. If you ever wondered how they work out the parts of an ancient written language from basic principals, this shows you how. It's one of the best things I've ever written, I can follow the basic ideas and understand some of the things they are figuring out.
[off topic] I'd go with "read" :). I'd very much prefer if an author called their own work "excellent" rather than admitting they understood some of the things they wrote about, after rereading their own work.
[on topic] This kind of articles makes me think how (in)adequate we are to decipher an alien transmission and language. We'll probably have to rely on "their" vastly superior intellect to make the language understandable for us. We still struggle to understand languages spoken by other humans basically identical to us, whose language evolved in conditions perfectly familiar to us (planet, environment, common concepts, etc.), and lived a mere 3500 years ago.
> Dr Davis is talking about solving Linear A, the undeciphered language of the ancient Minoan civilisation of Crete that flourished around 1700 BCE to 1490 BCE.
In English language, yes.
But this is not even Greek, or Ancient Greek. Also I am not sure if the "icons" are letters (a, b, c, α, β, γ...) or ideograms.
Good luck decyphering this without any kno
I will assume that some contect is needed to start translating the text. E.g. if the tablets are found in a temple, you can start with a vocabulary of 1000 words and then expand the search. There could (?) be a "mixed" approach (technology, history, linguistics) rather than "scan and let the machine combine".
My own opinion is that Ventris and Chadwick were mistaken about the decipherment, and that all of the current work on it is so much garbage.
Saul Levin's 1964 "The Linear B Decipherment Controversy Re-Examined" remains the best critical examination of the matter, which should tell you something about the speed of this field. It is well past time to replicate Ventris' work with a computer approach and see if there is really any signal there.