Re: Syllabic vs alphabetic (was: VMs: Entropy, was WAR against EVA)

["Larry Roux" <lroux@xxxxxxx>]

While Evans kept a large portion of the examples of Linear-B to himself (thus reducing the possibility that someone else could deciper it), it was the "expert's" distaste that it could be, in fact, an early form of Greek that really hampered translation efforts.

Even Ventris poo-poo'd the Greek idea until he was forced to accept it.  Shows what happens when you fall into the trap that something "just must be" something else.  You fail to recognize what it really is sometimes.



******************************
Larry Roux
Syracuse University
lroux@xxxxxxx
*******************************
>>> jguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 03/04/03 20:01 PM >>>
3/4/03 9:30:20 PM, "Petr Kazil" <kazil@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>I read some books on deciphering and codes but they don't often mention syllable-based 
encoding
>schemes. Wasn't the problem with hieroglyphics and  linear-b that they encoded syllables 
and *not*
>words or single characters?

The problem was that there was little access to the corpus. In the case of
Linear-B the corpus had been hogged by its discoverer (Evans? or am I
confusing with another archaeologist) who wanted to become famous by
deciphering it. What better way than refusing access to others?

With Egyptian, it was a much harder "code". A mixture of alphabetic signs, 
biliteral signs (signs representing a two-letter string), logograms
(signs representing a word), and taxograms (signs representing 
a category).

With Maya, it was the dog-in-the-manger attitude of Sir Eric Thompson,
who kept peddling the dogma (tix!) that is was a purely ideographic
writing system, without any phonetic component. Other researchers
before him had started on a phonetic decipherment, but Thompson 
killed all those attempts. That's why, I suppose, he was knighted:
for having kept the decipherment of Maya in a deep, dark night. (The
'k' is probably a misprint).




______________________________________________________________________
To unsubscribe, send mail to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxx with a body saying:
unsubscribe vms-list

______________________________________________________________________
To unsubscribe, send mail to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxx with a body saying:
unsubscribe vms-list