Talk:Linear A

Actually, it is deciphered.

Hello,

After the reading of the books about minoan script written bij Peter G. van Soesbergen, I am pretty sure he deciphered a Huge part of the minoan linear a. The website about his books is http://www.minoanscript.nl

Kind regards, Jodocus — Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.167.198.196 (talk) 17:50, 2 October 2017 (UTC)

See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiLyN9T2stY&feature=youtu.be deciphering some Linear A texts by Peter Revesz — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A02:A03F:C30A:1F00:7842:F540:954E:F14B (talk) 12:24, 5 December 2020 (UTC)

Linear B is considered deciphered, even though there are some unknown characters. Linear A is considered undeciphered; some of it is, but much of it isn't. It might be a matter of the meanings of characters and words. Linear B is written in an ancient form of Greek, which is much more known about than the Minoan of Linear A. 64.124.38.140 (talk) 19:16, 9 May 2024 (UTC)

Images for Fractions

It would be cool if there were SVG files for the fraction glyphs like there are for the common glyphs. I looked at the unicode and they are VERY simple. Of course I have No Idea how to do this but maybe someone smarter than I am can do it.Ploversegg (talk) 22:17, 16 March 2022 (UTC)

Someone did this, which is cool.Ploversegg (talk) 22:17, 26 February 2024 (UTC)

Article

I poked at it a bit and hopefully improved it here and there (I thought about merging the sfns into inline refs to make it more maintainable but was too lazy, I also wanted to tighten up the underlying language part a bit more but had squeezed it as hard as I dared).

The one thing I am not happy with was the new Decipherment section. For the earlier work it is "challenging" to compress maybe 130 years of science (with a healthy mix of speculation and wishful thinking) into a couple paragraphs. And the current (leading edge) work does not impress me, though its good to see people thinking outside the usual box, so that could be better as well. If anyone feels up to that task it would be cool.Ploversegg (talk) 01:41, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

I like what you've done with the place! :) With these kinds of articles, I don't think it's really necessary to mention all the research and speculation, and in fact that can be counterproductive. My recommendation would be to trumpet the fact that it's undeciphered (for drive-by readers) and to clearly lay out the knowns and unknowns (for casual readers), and just enough detail about how we know what we know to satisfy someone who's reading a bit more seriously. I can attempt this at some point when I have time and energy, but it won't be soon. Botterweg14 (talk) 02:21, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

Thanks. I'll probably wander away from LA now, maybe create another archaeological site article as a palette cleanser. If someone else hasn't stepped up by the time I come this way again I'll finish up that section. :-) Ploversegg (talk) 15:40, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

I agree this is great work, but also that we need to do some pruning per WP:DUEWEIGHT. Low or zero impact proposals (measured by how often they are cited in secondary sources) should better be kept out. –Austronesier (talk) 19:59, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

Agreed. Usually I do a pass for that sort of thing when I finish but the article wasn't "finished" in my mind I so I had not. I will say, and yes this is a philosophical point, I resist that notion of overweighting "secondary sources" in history/archaeology or science type articles. Leaning on secondary sources in other area, say if you are doing an article on a rock band, makes sense but in these field the sources ARE the primary sources. Wait, how did I get up on my soap box? :-) Anyway, I agree that there is some undersupported speculation in the article, especially in the underlying language section. Ploversegg (talk) 20:17, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

No, no, not secondary sources in the sense of research reviews, but reliable sources of decent quality that mention the primary source. These sources of course can well be primary sources themselves, but they document the scholarly resonance that the primary source we want to cite actually has received. My creed goes: if hardly any decent other source has talked about a piece of research, why should we do so?

In my own field (historical linguistics) you have to wait for genuine secondary sources (like research reviews or handbooks) in 20 year-intervals, so I go by the same principle in articles about linguistic classification and subgrouping. –Austronesier (talk) 20:46, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

Very true. In archaeology the review articles are often much longer and more informative the original work.Ploversegg (talk) 20:49, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

I'm actually gonna stick up for handbook articles (and their kin) as sources. In my experience, they make it so much easier to write cohesive articles, i.e. ones that state what's known in wikivoice and summarize the arguments for different positions where there's genuine disagreement. I'm often reluctant to use regular journal articles to support those kinds of claims, and the alternative is to write "Jones (1995) claims bladibla. Dekker (2001) claims foo. Xiang (2003) claims fnord" which (imo) is suboptimal unless the literature is really just a sea of incommensurate or hard-to-reconcile claims.

FWIW, there is this and also this handbook article on Linear A, though it doesn't focus on decipherment in particular. Botterweg14 (talk) 22:12, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

Tertiary sources?!?! Heavens for-fend. I guess I should stop cleaning out all that old 1911 Encyclopedia Britanica crud or mocking people who try to ref the "encyclopedia iranica"! :-) Ok, more seriously I have no objection to that IF the handbook type is clear where they got the info from. I meant to add that even a few years ago I would have disagreed with you but primary sources ain't what they used to be. With predatory publishing, "special issues" etc, you can get ANYTHING published and it will look all nice and proper to the unobservant. Ploversegg (talk) 22:55, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

Hahahaha I do try to aim for recent and high quality ones (and the ones I linked would certainly qualify). Botterweg14 (talk) 23:25, 29 February 2024 (UTC)

Just thought I'd give @Ploversegg: and @Austronesier: (or anyone else reading this) a heads up that I'm gradually working on a potential rewrite in my sandbox. What I have is far from camera-ready, but you're welcome to edit there or discuss here. Botterweg14 (talk) 17:55, 8 March 2024 (UTC)

Cool. I won't hover over your shoulder but feel free to say if you want me to poke at some small point or other. And is the Minoan Language an isolate? Do seem to be a suspicious number of "isolates" banging around in that period, Sumerian, Elamite, etc.Ploversegg (talk) 02:00, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

Wow, I took a quick peek at Minoan language there is a whole Keftiu/Caphtor thing going which I find pretty odd. That either gets a small mention in the LA article or (I think), should be exorcised from the Minoan language article before it confuses someone. :-) Ploversegg (talk) 04:34, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

I think that we should tranfer the Keftiu piece in Minoan language to Caphtor, and change the redirect target of Keftiu language accordingly. A mention in Linear A only is due if the Keftiu material ever has played a role in one of the attempts to decipher Linear A or to identify the language written in it. –Austronesier (talk) 12:02, 9 March 2024 (UTC)

Syllabograms and ideograms

A table of the signs with assumed syllabic values can easily be added, just as the Linear B article contains one. There seems to be broad agreement about the sound value of numerous syllabograms that are shared with Linear B: see e.g. here, p. 319 (with references) and here, p. 5. Some ideograms are the same as in Linear B, too (a number are identified even in the Unicode Standard document), and could be listed just as they are listed in the Linear B article. The main obstacles to proper 'decipherment' seem to be the unknown logograms and the fact that the language apparently isn't sufficiently closely related to any known language to make it easy to understand or even classify. Anyway, the agnosticism maintained by this article about the sound value of the signs seems peculiar and excessive. 62.73.69.121 (talk) 00:11, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

Assuming is not the same as Knowing. Language glyphs can and have been re-used with different meaning and sounds. There appears to have been at least a half century lapse between the end of Linear A and Linear B. Certainly the designers of Linear B used some of the Linear A glyphs they found lying around. Any notion that those glyphs have the same sound or the same meaning is an Assumption. If you substitute the Linear B sounds in Linear A texts AFAIK you get gibberish. Maybe some are the same, maybe not. That is not Known. Certainly Linear B is built on Mycenae Greek. Its pretty certain that Linear A is not.

I looked at those references. One is built on the idea that the underlying language of Linear A was Hurrian which seems unlikely. The other merely says that in some specific cases in some specific circumstances a glyph may have the same meaning in Linear A and Linear B. That is all.

How many Assumptions were made made for Egyptian Hieroglyphics and Linear B which looked reasonable at the time but turned out in retrospect to be tragically wrong? Many.Ploversegg (talk) 02:03, 27 March 2024 (UTC)

On the contrary, all 'knowing' is nothing but assuming - everything can turn out to be wrong in retrospect, and all we can do is retell what scholars believe at present, this is what Wikipedia's job is per WP:NPOV and WP:V. If we had been writing Wikipedia in the 19th century, we would have and should have endorsed the misconceptions that were dominant at among scholars at that the time. We have no right to be more sceptical than the experts are, that would be WP:Original Research. As for the references, you clearly haven't 'looked' at them well enough. The first reference doesn't just say that 'in some specific cases in some specific circumstances a glyph may have the same meaning in Linear A and Linear B'. It presents a complete syllabary on p. 319, and it sources it to two other publications by leading experts dealing with this issue, Younger and Davis. The second reference also contains such a syllabary, and that syllabary isn't 'built on on the idea that the underlying language is Hurrian' - it's the other way around, the arguments that the language is Hurrian are built on readings using a syllabary and interpretations of logograms deduced from Linear B, which just goes to show that this scholar, too, subscribes to these same interpretations. You don't have to accept that the language is Hurrian to accept the syllabary and the logograms. Peter Schrijver's article, which this Wikipedia article cites, makes a completely different case, namely that the language is Hattic, but it also starts from the same principle of reading syllabograms and logograms as in Linear B (p. 341-342). All of this just goes to show that pretty much everybody working with Linear A shares the idea that the syllabograms and logograms stand for roughly the same things as their counterparts in Linear B (another proof of the same: [1]: 'Linear B took most of its signs from Linear A, and because we can read Linear B, we can actually pronounce Linear A inscriptions'). Another recent book, by Ester Salgarella ([2]), goes even further in the same direction, basically arguing that 'Linear A' and 'Linear B' are essentially the same script in two stages of its development; and given how many of the signs are the same, this doesn't seem unreasonable. What we see here is a scholarly consensus if there ever was one, and Wikipedia is supposed to reflect the scholarly consensus.--62.73.69.121 (talk) 21:29, 28 March 2024 (UTC)

I'm a little squeamish about including a table that presents the presumed values in Wikivoice. But FWIW, I have an unfinished rewrite waiting in my sandbox where I report what appears to be the current consensus / lack thereof regarding the phonetic values. Botterweg14 (talk) 01:39, 29 March 2024 (UTC)

Well, it can be included in 'non-Wikivoice' then, as in 'scholars A, B and C assume', if you absolutely insist; but 'Wikivoice' means just 'most scholars say' in any case. As far as I can see, there is no 'lack (of current consensus) regarding the phonetic values': see my references above. You write that 'this does not amount to a decipherment since it results in words that are uninterpretable', citing a 2022 article by Salgarella; I would be interested to how her statement was worded, because, as I said, the main thrust of her 2020 book (Aegean linear script(s): rethinking the relationship between Linear A and Linear B) is that Linear B and Linear A are essentially the same script, and Linear B obviously is deciphered. It seems to me that there is a confusion here between decipherment of a script and 'decipherment'/understanding of a language; we could have texts in an unknown language written in the Latin or Greek alphabet and still not understand them (reading in them with Latin and Greek sound values would 'result in words that are uninterpretable'), but it would be odd to say that 'the script is undeciphered' on that basis. It's as if people for some reason expect the language to be Greek or something else well-known and easily understandable, and the very fact that what comes out is not Greek (it's 'gibberish', as put by Ploversegg above) is seen as discrediting the sound values. The ancient Near East and Mediterranean were full of language isolates or members of tiny and obscure families; if anything, I would be surprised if Minoan, which clearly had been indigenous to Crete for a long time, was closely related to any other well-known language. We were lucky that Linear B happened to be in a variety of something as well-known as Greek - that is the exception, not the norm, and expecting the same kind of 'decipherment' story to take place with Linear A is highly unrealistic. Scholars' readings of Sumerian, Elamite and Hurrian are essentially based on the values known from Akkadian cuneiform (with greater or lesser subsequent modifications based on later evidence), and the only reason why this results in words that are 'interpretable' is because we happen to have some bilingual texts.--62.73.69.121 (talk) 09:52, 29 March 2024 (UTC)

I don't deeply disagree with anything you're saying, but the hedging I'm suggesting comes from the scholars themselves, e.g. Salgarella describes the sounds values as "reasonably secure". I like the way you handled the uncertainty in your table, though I've moved it to the "Decipherment" subsection. Botterweg14 (talk) 20:51, 30 March 2024 (UTC)

Well, I've been bold and made the tables of syllabograms and logograms, following closely the model of the Linear B article, which, after all, lists basically the same signs. There are some divergences between the sources on some of the signs, which I've reflected partly in the table by writing 'disputed' and adding question marks. A neater-looking option might be simply to stick only to Davis' version, who is probably the best of the cited sources (Raison & Pope are a bit older, and I suspect that there might be some accidental errors in Fang et al.), but I couldn't find the glyph or even the Bennett number for at least one of his sign shapes (ju).--62.73.69.121 (talk) 20:19, 29 March 2024 (UTC)

Davis' 2014 Work on the Libation Formulae

I probably shouldn't've added a section on this, but I did. I reason thus: if it were kosher, then it would already be here. But I don't even see a Talk section on it. So, fire away. Washi (talk) 19:51, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

...and then I read the VERIFIABILITY article, and removed my section. I'll paste it here for everyone's amusement. Washi (talk) 19:55, 23 July 2024 (UTC)

Libation Formula Analysis

Per Davis 2011/2014, pp. 368-380.

The Libation Formula is on inscribed, dedicated, objects. By analyzing the formulae, Davis deduced that Linear A is mainly a Verb-Subject-Object (VSO) language.

The words typically follow a sequence, of which the first three can stand on their own. Any remaining words never vary, but also never stand alone.

   VERB                     SUBJECT                OBJECT                       4                  5              6             Source
   ----------------------   ---------------------  --------------------------   ------------------ -------------- ------------- ---------
   A-TA-  I-*301 -WA-JA     O-SU-QA-RE             JA-SA-SA-RA-ME               U-NA-KA-NA-SI      I-PI-NA-MA     SI-RU-TE      (TL Za 1)
   TA-NA- I-*301 -U-TI-NU   I-NA-TA-I-ZU-DI-SI-KA  JA-SA-SA-RA-ME                                                               (IO Za 6)
   A-TA-  I-*301 -WA-JA     A-DI-KI-TE[ ] SI-[     JA-SA-SA-]RA-ME[ ]A-[ ]-NE   U-NA-RU-KA[ ]JA-SI A-PA-DU-PA-[   JA[  JA-PA-QA (PK Za 12)
          GIVE?             (Name)                 DEDICATION                   REQUESTING

A "VERB" variant also appears on a pithos found in a rural farmhouse (ZA Zb 3):

  .2: A-TA- I-*301 -DE-KA

The implication is that I-*301, the root verb, is common. Davis suggests something like "give".

The "SUBJECT" is always different, which suggests the person giving the offering.

Davis then takes the second half of TL Za 1 and suggests:

   U-NA-KA-NA-SI         I-PI-NA-MA            SI-RU-TE
   REQUEST(participle)   FAVOR(singular)       DIVINE(genitive)

Moreover, I-DA is on IO Za 2 and Za 11, KO Za 1, PK Za 9 and Za 18, and SY Za 1, where it seems to substitute for A-SA-SA-RA, "dedication"; I-DA may therefore mean simply "this thing" (Davis 2011/2014 p. 374-375).