This is a REBLOG of the SAME post I just added to this blog on the URGENT NEED for support for JE SUIS CHARLIE! Richard
Category: haiku
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Je suis Charlie – in French, English & Greek + 11 modern languages & 3 ancient Greek dialects!
Je suis Charlie - in French, English & Greek + 11 modern languages & 3 ancient Greek dialects!
I beg you, please be sure to RETWEET this, folks! As a polyglot Canadian, fluent in English and French, conversant with both modern languages and ancient, especially ancient Greek, with some 20 dialects under my belt, including Mycenaean Linear B & Arcado-Cypriot Linear C, I hope to reach not only everyone alive now, but as many of our ancestors as possible. I do this out of love for all the millions upon millions of people who have been slaughtered by warmongers, manaics, religious fanatics & terrorists, past, present and... God forbid... future!
Je vous prie de tout mon coeur de faire des RETWEETs de ce message des plus urgents! Tout en étant canadien parfaitement bilingue, je suis également polyglotte, connaisseur de plusieurs langues modernes et anciennes, dont une vingtaine de dialèctes grecs tels que le mycénien en linéaire B et le chypro-arcadien en linéaire C. Dans ce but, j’espère communiquer ce message de solidarité bienveillante à tous ceux qui sont encore vivants autant qu’à tous nos ancêtres, dont d’innombrables millions qui ont perdu la vie, tous massacrés par des bellicistes, des maniaques, des fanatiques religieuses et des terroristes d’antan, de nos jours et... à Dieu ne plaise ... incontournablement à l’avenir.
Richard Vallance Janke,
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
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Debate still rages over date of Thera eruption
Indeed, the approx. date of Thera eruption is of ENORMOUS significance in determining the approx. time line for the fall of Knossos, Phaistos and other cities in ancient Crete. Reblogging this. Richard
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World’s oldest undeciphered writing
I hope they achieve the breakthrough they promised. I shall check on this this years (2015). Thanks, Rita! Wil reblog now.
Richard
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Rita Roberts’ Fine Translation of Knossos Tablet KN 824 B r 01, Slave Girls & Boys
Rita Roberts’ Fine Translation of Knossos Tablet KN 824 B r 01, Slave Girls & Boys: Click to ENLARGE:
All of my comments are right on the facsimile of the tablet above, so there really isn’t much more to say. The only question of any note is the interpretation of the so-called “missing” verb, which can be translated any number of ways, all of them just as valid as any other. One could say that Apiqoita “has” x number of slaves, or “owns” them, or even “is the mistress of” them. But what does that matter in the larger scheme of things? As far as I am concerned, it matters no more than a hill of beans.
The other important thing to note is that Linear B is characteristically a shorthand script. The scribes composed almost all of the tablets in a kind of shorthand of Mycenaean Greek. Why, you ask? It is simple. If you ever saw any of these tablets at the Heraklion Museum just 5 kilometres from Knossos, you would instantly understand why... the tablets are minuscule, the vast majority of them measuring no more than 20 centimetres wide and much shorter in depth. The longest tablets might measure 30 X 40 centimetres, rarely more. The scribes had to squeeze as much Linear B text as they possibly could onto these tiny tablets, which is precisely why they used so many shortcuts.
Among these we may count (a) the omission of verbs, adverbs, adjectives, prepositions etc., except where any of these were absolutely necessary to their own understanding of the contents of any tablet in Linear B... and I emphasize their own understanding, and certainly not ours, because that was all that counted to them. If any word really added nothing to the “meaning” of the tablets, it was simply omitted, because all of the scribes knew what the meaning was, and shared the same interpretation of it. So the difficulty in translation lies not with them, but with us in the twenty-first century, since we cannot possibly always know what they “meant”. (b) The scribes also frequently replaced entire words in Linear b with either logograms or any combination of over 100 ideograms, since these saved a great deal of space on the minuscule tablets & finally (c), they also replaced entire Linear B words with their first syllable only. This practice is what Rita and I refer to as the use of supersyllabograms. Of the 61 syllabograms now known in Linear B, fully 31 are supersyllabograms! As for the definition of supersyllabograms, stay posted. I shall be writing a multi-part essay on their definitions (plural, because there are at least 4), their key rôle in Linear B tablets, and the translations which they represented. It was I myself who “discovered” all of the supersyllabograms throughout 2014. This discovery constitutes the first major leap forward in the last stages of decipherment of parts of the Linear B syllabary which have remained recalcitrant to translation in the 63 years since the brilliant Michael Ventris first deciphered at least 90 % of Linear B in the summer of 1952. I remain quite confident that our “theory” or hypothesis of the phenomenon of supersyllabograms will stand the text of peer reviews by at least two major Linear B experts this year, prior to our publishing our research paper in PDF format later in 2015.
While there are ideograms on this tablet, there are no supersyllabograms. You will see plenty of examples of the latter soon enough.
Richard
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Linear B, Knossos & Mycenae: 2014 in review Quite a Nice Record!
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 31,000 times in 2014. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 11 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
Click here to see the complete report.
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Happy New Year in Greek, Linear B, Linear C, English, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian & German
Happy New Year in Greek, Linear B, Linear C, English, Latin, French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian & German! Click to ENLARGE:
Richard and Rita
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