Linear A is the undeciphered script with the largest repertoire, about 8000 characters in total, and the largest single fragment is like 300 characters long. It's like trying to understand English given random clippings of signs and maybe a whole sentence from a book that in total amount to 5 or 6 pages of text. And we have a head-start--we make the educated guess of Linear A's phonetic values by comparing to Linear B, which was derived from it. The situation for the other undeciphered scripts is even worse.
It's hard to see how LLMs can help here because the problem with understanding these scripts is we just lack enough data to make any conclusions. And LLMs are famously reliant on being very data-hungry.
Rongorongo has roughly double that number of glyphs. The descendant (Rapa Nui) of the language it encodes is still spoken, and there's a whole family of related languages. But we haven't made much headway in deciphering it. Linear A has one advantage though: we have some understanding of how the script works, and can (or think we can) pronounce parts of the text. There's also Etruscan, which is partially deciphered (about 250 words are understood with any certainty), but it has no surviving relatives and only a couple of bilingual texts, one very short and the other not a literal translation of the known language. So all we have to go on is textual and archaeological context.
Different languages have similar words, people make similar expressions and do similar things. I think everything to solve the puzzle is there its just impossibly hard.
But who knows, there might be embarresingly obvious things we just didnt notice.
At least we will get funny halucinations of the quality of Hindu Rongorongo. lol
Cuneiform does strike me as potentially the most awesome application of AI. Very exciting. (Second only to talking with animals.)
The spoken language corresponding to Linear A is probably unrelated to the spoken language (Greek) represented by Linear B. If Linear A represents a spoken language--and this is by no means certain--then it is the native language of the Minoans, which has long since been lost. So unfortunately we don't have much to go on.
It's hard to see how LLMs can help here because the problem with understanding these scripts is we just lack enough data to make any conclusions. And LLMs are famously reliant on being very data-hungry.