Linguistics

773 readers

25 users here now

Welcome to the community about the science of human Language!

Everyone is welcome here: from laypeople to professionals, Historical linguists to discourse analysts, structuralists to generativists.

Rules:

Instance rules apply.
Be reasonable, constructive, and conductive to discussion.
Stay on-topic, specially for more divisive subjects. And avoid unnecessary mentioning topics and individuals prone to derail the discussion.
Post sources when reasonable to do so. And when sharing links to paywalled content, provide either a short summary of the content or a freely accessible archive link.
Avoid crack theories and pseudoscientific claims.
Have fun!

Related communities:

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Cracking the Code of Linear B (antigonejournal.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

3 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What an interesting read. Tbh I never paid much thought about how ancient scripts might have been deciphered and it is even more awesome than I would have anticipated.

One thing that is not clear to me, however: The text says

Because Linear B is a syllabary, and not an alphabet

The text does not go into detail about how this could have been known to the researchers. Anybody got a hint for me here?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

By the number of different glyphs that you find. Alphabets and abjads typically have 20~30 glyphs, syllabaries around 80~200, and logographic systems have at least a few hundreds.

That's also how we know that the Voynich manuscript is written in an alphabet, even if nobody deciphered it yet.