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.
Linear A is completely undeciphered, so amateurs have done exactly as well as professionals. Meanwhile, Egyptian hieroglyphs, cuneiform, and Linear B were all deciphered by people who would be called "amateurs" by today's standards.
But hey, why miss an opportunity for elitist gatekeeping, even if the topic is demonstrably one of the least suitable places for it?
Academics have absolutely done better than amateurs by virtue of continually validating the fact that it isn’t decipherable.
The comment isn’t even bashing amateurs - it’s bashing crackpots, who tend to be allured towards the mysterious, especially if their crackpot ideas won’t be inconvenienced by facts.
When Michael Ventris was working by himself he published junk. A basically crackpot theory that was immediately debunked that Linear B was Etruscan. Then Ventris worked hard to become an insider.
Many key observations for the decoding were done by someone else, a classicist, Alice Kober, right before her untimely death. She worked for 20 years on Linear B and put down all of the foundations. The fact that Linear B has grammatical roots and suffixes, the language is inflected, has case, gender, etc. Kober was one of the first people to work systematically finding patterns and documenting her methods. The work Ventirs did would have been impossible without Kober's methods: extending her work is what worked and gave Ventris his main idea.
Ventris briefly worked with Kober. It didn't go well. But over time Ventris came to know the key players and to be accepted in the inner circle. One of these players, Emmett Bennett, gave him what Kober did not have: the Pylos tablets. By the time they were published she had died.
Ventris extended Kober's work to the Pylos tablets. Her work focused on systematically analyzing groups of characters. When he looked at the results, he made his first critical observation: some groups were unique to the Knossos tablets and others were unique to the Pylos tablets. What if these are place names?
There aren't that many places to be had on Knossos and he knew the Greek names. So he looked for possible combinations and used them to guide the decoding. He used Kober's work and the place names, along with help from at least Bennett, to build a rough mapping from some signs to sound. And then he made his second critical observation: what if Linear B is Greek? Since the Greek names for places seemed to appear.
Then he could try to decode word after word. And along the way he made his third critical observation: many Myceanean scribes were incredibly sloppy spellers. We can even tell now that some were much better than others, but everything is very messy because even the basic rules of spelling weren't agreed on yet. Not only were characters missing, but a single character could be one of 30+ different syllables at times. Bare statistical methods alone often resulted in a mess because of this.
Only small parts of the text could potentially be decoded at this point. None of the classicists that Ventris normally talked to were convinced.
That's when John Chadwick, a linguist, heard about Ventris and tried his idea out. Chadwick was an expert in very old Greek, 1000 years older than Plato. Chadwick was quickly convinced by Ventris because while the decodings were very poor for someone who knew classical Greek, they made a lot more sense to him. They worked together for several years to fix up the decoding.
An architect did contribute the main idea for the decoding, but an architect that was a connected insider, with a background in Greek and Latin, who had published in the area before, knowledgeable in all of the latest methods, with access to privileged information, in conversation with the experts.
The way you put it, it sounds like some random architect somewhere looked at Linear B, worked hard on their own, and came up with the answer. That's not even remotely true.
> The Ventris system thus set forth has been widely accepted by Greek scholars, including many of the highest eminence, in many countries. It has also been widely rejected by scholars of eminence, in varying degrees.
> These Ventrisian rules enable bits of a curious sort of Greek to be got out of Lin[ear] B texts; but experiments have shown that bits of English or Latin or other tongues, when spelt out in syllables according to the Ventrisian system, are capable often of yielding bits of Greek just as plausible as anything in the Ventris-Chadwick Documents volume. One eminent Oxonian, dining at a high table, amused himself by taking the names of the Fellows of the College present and turning them into Ventrisian syllables, from which he made a new translation of them into Greek, in which they all turned out to be Greek gods.
> gentle reader, pray perpend the syllable-groups (reference number Dy 401), that run: a-ma wi-ru-qe ka-no to-ro-ja qi-pi-ri-mu a-po-ri. Here we have two specimens of the labio-velars, the syllables with q-, discovered by Ventris, to the astonishment of philologists who had not expected to find them in Bronze Age Greek. qe is, of course, equivalent to Latin -que, Greek te, while qi doubtless here shows the development to a voiced dental noted by Ventris and Chadwick in their "Mycenaean Vocabulary,"
> The Greek evaluation of the sentence would be, according to Ventris's spelling rules, halmai wiluite kainōs Tholoiai Diphilimus apolis: "With brine and slime in novel fashion at Tholoia (the place of tholoi, beehive tombs) Diphilimus (is) cityless." No doubt this is a record of a Bronze Age tidal wave.
> It is by coincidence that the acumen of Mr. Michael C. Stokes, the Edinburgh authority on ancient philosophy, has extracted the Virgilian hexameter, Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris....
> Note that in this sentence one need assume only two of the six words to be names of persons or places, whereas, in the Lin B material as a whole, 75 per cent of the sign-groups have to be, on Ventris's system, evaluated as names
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 may be remedied at some point.
But, even so, there is no guarantee that even with all surving artefacts uncovered we would be able to reconstruct the language.
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.
There are probably many of them in storage in various museums and antiquities departments.
The vast majority of ancient inscriptions ever found are uncatalogued, and some have never even been looked at. This includes inscriptions in languages we already know how to read. I remember reading long ago somewhere that well over 90% of all known Egyptian hieroglyphics texts haven't been translated yet.
Therefore, my guess is that once AI is good enough to do classification and translation automatically, there will be rapid progress, without requiring any new discoveries.
Good episode here that covers a bit about the language and translation efforts. The translation of Linear B is a very cool story too.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mi%EA%9E%8Ckmaw_hieroglyphic_w...
This had the convenient side effect of neatly classifying all the American writing systems as protowriting in the early 20th century, as well as some more controversial examples like Chinese. Some of those have since been walked back (e.g. Mayan), but most remain in that limbo. We have a somewhat better understanding today that there was a huge variety of visual communication systems across the Americas prior to European contact, but properly redefining the term "writing" to include them is a slow, ongoing process.
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.
Would it work?
Your idea can not work unless the data that you feed the language model with correlated items. It can't. Imagine I feed a predictor with a long list of images on the one hand and, on the other hand, a long list of randomly ordered image descriptions that may or may not match the images. Do you think you could learn a foreign language that way? You absolutely need the image of a donkey be associated with the name for that animal in the foreign language, and the algorithm is no different.
It's something I've often thought about in the way that the Voyager record was built and Sagan's Cosmos novel assumes it and many others. Even recently, the novel Project Hail Mary borrowed that assumption that math is enough shared language to bootstrap understanding. I think the movie Arrival did some of the best work of showing why that wouldn't necessarily work, but also had the language in question designed by a mathematician and still fell into some parts of the assumption/trope. I'm not saying any of these examples are bad for doing this, I certainly love them all. It's still a small something worth criticizing.
It's certainly not a bad thing to want to communicate math, and to hope that things like Pi are "constant enough" to provide bootstraps to other communications, but it's also such a fascinating thing how much science fiction thinking (and real world scientific thinking such as the Voyage Record) think that you can just sort of "yada yada yada" your way from "so we established communications of basic mathematical constants and concepts" directly as a straight line of some sort to "now we can communicate all sorts of other things".
> here we've already reached the end of what a text per se can tell you about its meaning if the signs are not clearly pictorial
Note that language models today seem to be quite good at understanding English, even though they are only trained on symbolic text, not on any images.
