[Cryptography] Linear B

[Mark Steward]

On Mon, Jun 4, 2018 at 4:18 PM, John Ioannidis <jayeye at gmail.com> wrote:
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> On Thu, May 31, 2018 at 7:57 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
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>> Not quite crypto, but...
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>> On this day back in 1952, Michael Ventris began decoding the Linear B tablet, thereby showing that the Cretan language was based upon ancient Greek.
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> Wrong on almost all counts. Linear B was the writing system of what we call the Mycenean civilization, so Mycenae and all the various cities in the Peloponnese. Chadwick and Ventris's insight was to assume that LB was (mostly) a syllabary and that the language was actually Greek. Since what we call "Ancient Greek" these days is the register of the language of the 5th and 4th century writings, it makes no sense to say that 12th Century BC Greek was based on ancient Greek. It is simply an even more ancient form of Greek.
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> None of this has anything to do with Crete; the Cretan language remains unknown, its writing (Linear A) still undeciphered. There is no reason to believe that it was actually Greek.
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> Linear B seems to be derived from Linear A, and is not very well suited to writing Greek either. Unfortunately, all we have is accounting records; nobody thought of committing to clay tablets any poetry or literature.


Not only that, but Ventris had been working earnestly on the tablets
since 1951: June 4th was just when he circulated his 20th Work Note,
where he laid out tentative evidence of correspondences with Greek.
The groundwork for decoding the script was done almost 5 years
earlier, when Alice Kober (who isn't famed outside her field) showed
possible evidence of inflection.

Also, none of this has anything to do with cryptography. Can't these
birthday posts go in an iCal feed or something?


Mark