Tag: translation

The Supersyllabogram PU in Knossos Tablet KN 424 R q 12. Cloth for whom?

The Supersyllabogram PU in Knossos Tablet KN 424 R q 12. Cloth for whom? Click to ENLARGE:


While a translation for this Linear B tablet may seem relatively straight-forward, unfortunately it is not – as is the case with a great many Linear B tablets which admit of alternative interpretations. In this particular case, I came up with 3 possible interpretations, although I am quite certain other Linear B translators can devise others equally convincing, if not more so. I invite any translator who can do so to post such a translation on his or her blog or to submit it to our blog. In the same spirit of free and open discussion, I also invite other translators of Linear B tablets to criticize my own translation to their hearts’ content.

Richard

“A type of cloth” – the Supersyllabogram PU in Mycenaean Linear B & its Implications for the Eventual Decipherment of Minoan Linear A

“A type of cloth” - the Supersyllabogram PU in Mycenaean Linear B & its Implications for the Eventual Decipherment of Minoan Linear A: Click to ENLARGE

This is probably the last supersyllabogram for cloth, and the last one we will be dealing with before we move onto providing the meanings of all 31 SSYs in context sometime in December 2014. That will be the final step before we publish our official PDF research article sometime in the winter or spring of 2015.

In the meantime, reviewing the principle of the supersyllabogram, it is defined as the first syllabogram, in other words, the first syllable of the Mycenaean Linear B word which it represents, with the caveat that SSYs vary in meaning depending on the context in which they appear. By context we mean the area of the Minoan/ Mycenaean economy or society which the tablet is dealing with. Thus, the SSY PU would have a different meaning in agriculture than it does in the economic sector for textiles. Within each context, however, each supersyllabogram always has one invariable meaning.

In the context of textiles, the SSY PU means “a type of cloth”, and is the first syllable of the Mycenaean word pukatariya. Unfortunately, this word had already disappeared from Greek even in the archaic period, when Homer wrote the Iliad (ca. 900-700 BCE). So we have no way of knowing whether in fact pukatariya was a Greek, Minoan or even an altogether foreign word. My suspicion is that it is Minoan, and that raises the question whether several other Mycenaean words for which there is not even an archaic Greek equivalent might also be Minoan. If any are – even just a few of them – then that might provide a clue to at least a partial decipherment of Minoan Linear A. It would be an easy task if we were able to find either the exact or an approximate equivalent of any of these purported “Minoan words” in John G. Younger’s exhaustive lexicon of Minoan Linear A:

but I suspect that we would have no such luck, as the old saying goes. The confirmation of even a single one of these words in Younger’s lexicon would be a welcome little shot in the arm for the eventual decipherment of Minoan Linear A. Of course, if we cannot find any of the words on extant Linear B tablets for which there is no Greek equivalent, archaic or classical, then we are simply out of luck. I shall eventually get around to doing precisely that, culling all of the Mycenaean words from extant Linear B tablets. for which there is no Greek equivalent, in order to compare them with Younger’s lexicon, unless John G. Younger beats me to the punch. I strongly suspect he already has.

Finally, since the Mycenaean orthography is pukatariya, we cannot be sure if the Mycenaean Greek pronunciation was putakataria, fugataria or possibly even futhataria.

Richard

More Fine Photos by Rita Roberts of Linear B Tablets at the Heraklion Archaeological Museum

More Fine Photos by Rita Roberts of Linear B Tablets at the Heraklion Archaeological Museum: Click to ENLARGE


Click to ENLARGE:


Once again, Rita Roberts has taken some really impressive photos of several Linear B tablets at the Heraklion Archaeological Museum this month, November 2014. She did so under very unfavourable lighting conditions for phtoography. Since flash is patently not allowed in archaeological museums of international stature as as this one, Rita was left with no choice but to take her photos under rather dim natural light. I managed to enhance the contrast and brightness a good deal, and here are the results. We hope you enjoy them as much as we do.

Working as the great team we surely are, Rita and I shall be translating all of these tablets between now and the summer of 2015 at the very latest. And you never know. Some of our Linear B research colleagues may also want to take up the gauntlet and rise to the challenge. I certainly suspect as much. 

Richard

NASA, New MENU added to Reflect our Research into the Application of Linear B & Syllabic Scripts to Interstellar Communication

NASA, New MENU added to Reflect our Research into the Application of Linear B & Syllabic Scripts to Interstellar Communication: Click on this BANNER to see all these posts now.



We have added our innovative, cutting edge NASA MENU (Category), which appears on the third line at the top of the first page of our blog. If you are at all interested in our research into the possible (or even probable) implications of any seriously competent scientific research into the Theoretical and Practical Applications of Linear B & Syllabic Scripts to Interstellar Communication, research such as we see conducted by NASA, ESA, the KEPLER missions, SETI or by any other official international space agencies or university-level research projects and the like, then this is the place you’ll definitely want to be. Ours is the one and only Linear B blog on the entire Internet, dedicated to Mycenaean Linear B, as well as to Minoan Linear A & Arcado-Cypriot Linear C, where such matters are taken seriously, but only at the academic, research level. We do not and shall never associate ourselves with crack-pot blogs and sites all in a kerfuffle about so-called UFOS, alien intelligences (usually deemed hostile) and other such riff-raff on the Net: Click to ENLARGE, at your own risk!


These deserve no valid place whatsoever into the search for communication(s) with extraterrestrial intelligences, if any such exist at all, or if we go on the assumption, fragile as it is, that they might or may exist, that they would even bother to communicate with the likes of us at all. These and several other specific considerations, which can in some real way be scientifically investigated or adduced, will be addressed under the Category MENU NASA, as the need arises.

We shall of course keep you apprized.

Stay posted.

Richard

New Direct Link to Gretchen Leonhardt’s Linear B Blog, Konosos.net, which really deserves much more attention than it is getting!

New Direct Link to Gretchen Leonhardt’s Linear B Blog, Konosos.net, which really deserves much more attention than it is getting! Click to visit her blog:


I have just added a direct link to Gretchen Leonhardt’s Linear B Blog, Konosos.net, which has not been garnering the number of direct hits it is surely entitled to, and should definitely be getting. So for heaven’s sake, please visit her blog, and read her translations of Linear B tablets. Gretchen is a highly accomplished Linear B translator and decipherer of Linear B tablets. This Link always appears at the top of every page our our Blog. You simply click on Konosos.net to be referred directly to her site. 

I should inform you right up front that we rarely see eye to eye on methodology of decipherment and on our approaches to translation, which could not be more unalike if either of us tried. But that is scarcely the point. I for one encourage any and all competent translations of Linear B sources, whether or not I agree, partially agree, or disagree with them, even completely. As I have already made it clear on some of my previous commentaries on Gretchen’s translations of Linear B tablets, which have the virtue of being entirely consistent with her theoretical approach and with her won self-professed highly imaginative mental construct of what the script is all about (the only thing that really matters anyway), I am fundamentally very much at odds with her methodology, as can be seen here in my post on her translation of the famous “Ivory” Tablet, KN 684: Click Previous Post below to read that post:



But this does not in the least imply that she is “wrong” or that I am “right”, or anything on the spectrum between these poles, because to assert that would be paramount to setting myself up as a know-it-all Linear B expert on translation, which I most certainly am not, anymore than any other Linear B translator in the whole wide world is. If anyone claims that he or she is the be-all-and-end-all of Linear B decipherers, then that poor soul should have his or her head examined, at the very least.

With all this in mind, I urge you to please visit Gretchen Leonhardt’s Linear B translation blog. She is also developing a fine Linear B Lexicon right on site, which you will certainly not want to miss out on. I for one am quite certain that I shall, sooner or later, need to ask Gretchen if she will allow Rita Roberts and myself to use at least a small number of her Lexicon entries when we get around to publishing our own Topical English-Mycenaean Linear B Value-Added Lexicon, which is to at least double the presently accepted Mycenaean Linear B vocabulary base from something like 2,500 attested vocabulary items (excluding personal names and toponyms) to at least 5,000 attested (A) and derived (D) Mycenaean Linear B words, if not considerably more than that by the time it is released in .PDF format sometime around 2017 or 2018. Should she agree to allow us to republish at least a few of her entries, she would naturally be fully credited under the provisions of International Copyright Law. 

Thank you

Richard

Rita Roberts’ Translation of Knossos Tablet K 1092, Rams at Ekzonos (Outside the Belt) & Sygrita

Rita Roberts’ Translation of Knossos Tablet K 1092, Rams at Ekzonos (Outside the Belt) & Sygrita: Click to ENLARGE

Rita’s translation of this particular tablet is as polished as are all of her translations. The only real difficulty Rita still has to deal with in deciphering Linear B tablets is that her first encounter with Greek, ancient or modern, was with Mycenaean Greek in Linear B, which is the exact reverse approach pretty much everyone on earth has to take when acquiring a knowledge of Greek... everyone that is to say except Rita. This just so happens to be greatly in her favour, though, because since she is obliged to decipher Linear B tablets straight into Mycenaean Greek, with no intermediary steps into ancient Greek getting in her way, she very often discovers meaning(s) for Linear B words which elude those of us who have a prior solid knowledge of ancient Greek, let alone modern. In other words, her translation do not suffer from bias which is far too often unnecessarily introduced by scholars of ancient Greek, such as myself, who also know Linear B. So Rita has tripped me up on more than one occasion, and she will again... and again... well, at least until she has to learn a little ancient Greek, at least enough to be able to read the ancient Greek equivalent texts of all the Linear B tablets we have posted so far on our blog (and that is scores of them!) and which we will be continuing to post. For the time being, though, Rita can safely rest on her laurels. When the time comes for her to master at least a modicum of ancient Greek, she and I will as always work together as the fine team we are.

I for one have not yet even mastered modern Greek, but it appears I shall have to, because although I can read it (sort of), I must be able to read the several articles which appear only in modern Greek on Linear A, B, C, the Iliad etc. Otherwise, I am going to miss out on some very important research. So as you can see, folks, both Rita and I are going to have to eventually “graduate” to the next level.

Richard

TBP as a Major Research Article in 2015! The Mycenaean Linear B Syllabary, Completely Revised 2014, with 61 Syllabograms & 31 Supersyllabograms

TBP as a Major Research Article in 2015! The Mycenaean Linear B Syllabary, Completely Revised 2014, with 61 Syllabograms & 31 Supersyllabograms: Click to ENLARGE

Here, for the first time in history in the 64 years since Michael Ventris’ astonishing feat of the decipherment of almost the entire Linear B Syllabary in 1952, with subsequent updates and tweaks introduced by his colleague, Prof. John Chadwick, over the decades to come, and with further refinements introduced by Prof. Thomas G. Palaima in the 1990s, is the completely revised Table of Mycenaean Linear B Syllabograms, showing all 61 syllabograms identified to date, and for the first time ever, the 31 Supersyllabograms, which no one has ever seen except on this blog, since it is we, my colleague, Rita Roberts and myself, who discovered them in the first place. The supersyllabograms as we understand them are bound to have a tremendous impact on our understanding of just what the Linear B syllabary is meant to represent. As you shall all discover sometime early on in 2015, the Linear B syllabary is not simply just a syllabary, but much more than that. Linear B is a shorthand syllabary, the first and last of its kind, as well as the first methodically organized system of shorthand in human history until the advent of modern shorthand secretarial systems in the nineteenth century.

Modern Shorthand: Click to ENLARGE

As it stands now, we believe that the 31 Supersyllabograms we have already discovered, isolated and defined, right down to 27 (the other 4 remaining undecipherable), are bound to make big waves in the Linear B research community when we finally publish our in-depth, comprehensive research study on them sometime in 2015, since they can account for a large chunk of the remaining 10 % or so of Linear B recalcitrant to decipherment... until now, that is.

But what exactly is a Supersyllabogram? Well, we have actually already defined it several times over here on our blog, and if you wish to learn all about supersyllabograms, all you really need to do is read all the posts on them under the Category, SUPERSYLLABOGRAMS (top of this page). For the time being at least, this is the only way you will be able to learn anything about sypersyllabograms, since they are neither to be found nor defined anywhere else on any Linear B research sites or documents anywhere on the Internet or in print. We were the first to identify and isolate supersyllabograms for what they truly are, which is:

A supersyllabogram is the first syllabogram, in other words, the first syllable of a Mycenaean Greek word in Linear B. All subsequent syllabograms or syllables are suppressed by the scribe, who uses the supersyllabogram in place of the Linear B word spelled out completely. Thus, as you can readily see, supersyllabograms are in fact a form of shorthand, not shorthand as we understand it nowadays, but shorthand nevertheless. Beyond this, I cannot say more here on this post without getting into the nitty-gritty details, but if you are a Linear B researcher or translator, and are truly serious about the newest developments in the field of Linear B studies, then I strongly urge you to read all the posts on supersyllabograms on our blog, as per our instructions above. Believe me, the reading will make for a real eye-opener.

In the meantime, this is how Linear B Supersyllabograms actually look on a Linear B tablet: Click to ENLARGE:

As with all new breakthroughs in any field of research, in this instance, ancient linguistics, our Theory of Supersyllabograms is bound to be controversial, but that is precisely what we expect it to be. Some in the field of Linear B research will pretty much agree with us, some will agree in part, others will cast real doubt on our findings and still others will undoubtedly cast our theory straight overboard. But this is what scientific research is all about. Even if we are proven to be “right” or “wrong”, wholly or in part, or whatever may come of our bold venture into the “unknown”, one thing is certain. Things will never be the same after this!

As for myself, I have tried and tested our theory against hundreds of Linear B tablets, and in almost every single case, the “meanings” of the supersyllabograms stand the acid test. They hold up, they are consistent, and they make perfect sense in the specific contexts in which they appear on the Linear B tablets where they are found. If you want to check this all out on your own, go right ahead. Please be our guest! Read all the posts under the Category SUPERSYLLABOGRAMS, and please feel free to get back to us, comment on any and all posts you feel should be commented on or critiqued, and we promise to get back to you.

Thank you

Richard

Categories now Separated into MAJOR (in CAPS) & Regular on Linear B, Knossos & Mycenae, to Facilitate Serious Research into Linear B

Categories now Separated into MAJOR (in CAPS) & Regular on Linear B, Knossos & Mycenae, to Facilitate Serious Research into Linear B: Click to ENLARGE


I have just separated the Categories on our blog, as listed above, into MAJOR Categories (in CAPS or UC), and Regular. To search any Category, just click on its name. A few words of explanation. I have had to make this distinction between Major and Regular Categories because, as of 2015, Rita, my research colleague and I, shall be focusing our attention more and more on the Major Categories, and less and less on the Regular. In particular,

I myself will be translating the entire Catalogue of Ships in Book II of the Iliad, in which we find the most archaic Greek in the entire Iliad. It is therefore of utmost significance in the confirmation of Attested (A) vocabulary, found on any and all Linear B tablets discovered to date, and in the restoration of Derived (D) Mycenaean Greek vocabulary, nowhere Attested (A).

LEXICONS & GLOSSARIES: At the moment, there are only two Linear B lexicons of any note on the Internet, (a) The Mycenaean (Linear B) – ENGLISH Glossary, which although useful is extremely unreliable, riddled as it is with over 25 errors in the Mycenaean Linear B entries alone, and with at least 100 more errors in either ancient Greek or English. Students of Linear B should use this glossary with the utmost of caution, as they are liable to make serious errors in deciphering or translating Linear B tablets, if they rely on it solely. 

You can download the .PDF file of this unreliable Glossary here:


And you definitely should check out all the errors I highlighted in the Linear B entries alone in our previous post here:


On the other hand, Chris Tselentis’ Linear B Lexicon is not only far more comprehensive, it is also extremely accurate and very well researched. The Title Page of Chris Tselentis’ extremely reliable Linear B Lexicon: Click to ENLARGE:


Both are available in .PDF format on the Internet. If you must insist on using the first glossary (a), you should be certain to cross-check every single reference you find in it against the Lexicon (b).

In order to compensate for the unreliable Glossary (a), Rita Roberts, my research associate, and I shall be compiling an all new Topical English – Mycenaean Value-Added Linear B Lexicon throughout 2015 and into 2016, which we hope to release in PDF format sometime in 2016 or at the very latest in 2017. Our Lexicon is meant to complement, and not replace Chris Tselentis’ fine Lexicon. Whereas Tselentis has laid particular emphasis on the inclusion of as many personal names and toponyms (place names) as he could possibly find on extant Linear B tablets, our Lexicon is to focus instead on these particular areas:

(a) the correction of absolutely all errors in the sloppily conceived Mycenaean (Linear B) – ENGLISH Glossary +
(b) the addition of 1,000s of new Mycenaean Linear B Derived (D) words, not Attested (A) on any extant Linear B tablets, vocabulary which nevertheless we believe almost certainly was in regular use in Mycenaean Greek. The criteria for inclusion of any and all such Derived (D) Vocabulary will be clearly defined in the introduction to our new Linear B Lexicon, which is bound to at least double the current Mycenaean Linear B corpus from about 2,500 discreet words (non-inclusive of personal names & toponyms) to at least 5K. +
(c) We shall not, however, duplicate the excellent work Chris Tselentis has done with personal name & toponyms in his fine Linear B Lexicon, because to do so would simply be a waste. On the other hand, we shall include all major Minoan & Mycenaean personal names & toponyms which play a critical rôle in extant Linear B texts.

MICHAEL VENTRIS: It goes without saying that I regard absolutely any information and research, original or new, relevant to my hero, Michael Ventris, as of critical importance. I hope you do so too.

PROGRESSIVE LINEAR B: Progressive Linear B is a brand new Theory of Mycenaean Greek Grammar and Vocabulary in Linear B. This theory enables me to reconstruct large swaths of Mycenaean Greek grammar and vocabulary, by means of the techniques of Regressive Analysis from later Greek textual resources, in the following order of relevance, highest to lowest: Arcado-Cypriot Linear C sources (that dialect being the closest cousin to Mycenaean Greek); The Catalogue of Ships in Book II of the Iliad (See Iliad above); the Iliad itself; and finally, all of the East Greek dialects other than Arcado-Cypriot related to Mycenaean Greek, the older dialects taking precedence over the later, in this approximate order: early Ionic, Aeolic, Ionic & Attic Greek.

Having regressively extrapolated grammatical forms (conjugations, declensions, prepositions & adverbs, numerics etc.) from their latter-day equivalents in the aforementioned dialects, I shall then proceed to reconstruct as much of the corpus of Mycenaean Greek grammar as I safely can, within strict parameters based on equally strict criteria, which I shall of course detail in my Introduction to the grammar, whenever I am finally able to release it in.PDF format on the Internet (2017-2018).

Naturally, the reconstruction of Mycenaean vocabulary in our new Lexicon first (2015-2016) and of the most complete Mycenean grammar ever seen to date (2017-2018) are both immense undertakings, so please do not hold either myself or Rita to account if we take longer to release them than we might have anticipated. This is so simply because we expect from ourselves only the finest quality. And you should expect the same, nothing less.

SUPERSYLLABOGRAMS: Finally comes the biggest surprise of them all, an entirely new Theory of Linear B Supersyllababograms, which we seriously believe will prove to be a major breakthrough in the decipherment of much of the remaining 10 % of Linear B single syllabograms (i.e. where we find only 1 syllabogram all by itself written on a Linear B tablet, heretofore entirely resistant to decipherment). But as it turns out almost all of these single syllabograms, of which – get ready for this! - at least 31 of 61 Linear B syllabograms – are actually supersyllabograms. Trust me on this one, a supersyllabogram, as you shall all soon enough discover, is much more than a simple syllabogram.

Moreover, the implications of the impact of sypersyllabograms on our understanding of just what (kind of syllabary) Linear B is are bound to be profound and wide-reaching. I would even venture to go so far as to claim that Supersyllabograms (SSYs) will represent the first major breakthrough in the decipherment of Linear B in the 64 years since Michael Ventris’ astonishing achievement in cracking Linear B with the decipherment of Linear B Tablet Pylos PY 641-1952 in that year (1952). And just to whet your appetite, I shall be posting the completely revised Linear B Syllabary (2014), which I myself recently posted on our blog and on the Internet, with all the Supersyllabograms highlighted in BOLD, but without letting you know what these Supersyllabograms actually mean... although you can already find out for yourself what they mean simply by reading all the posts under the Major Category, SUPERSYLLABOGRAMS. So go for it. More news on this exciting breakthrough in the next post, which you are going to have to read anyway, if you are a Linear B researcher or translator really, really serious about new, unexpected developments into the Linear B syllabary.

Stay posted!

Richard

Strabo, Geography (8:3.7) “… There is a Pylos before Pylos. And there is even another Pylos (farther down the coast)… ” Part 1: Syntactical and Lexical Analysis

Strabo, Geography (8:3.7) “... There is a Pylos before Pylos. And there is even another Pylos (farther down the coast)... ” Part 1: Syntactical and Lexical Analysis: Click to ENLARGE

And click here to read the article on Pylos in its entirety:

Over the centuries, ever since Homer reputedly composed what we now know as the fabulous Epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey, debate has never ceased to rage over the location of the “Homeric” location of the fortress of Pylos. In fact, Homer himself (if he was indeed the author of these Epics) was himself never able to quite make up his mind where Pylos was located, although he was convinced it was located on the western coast of the Peloponnese. So he naturally hedged his bets, and gave us our choice of three possible sites for Pylos. Fair enough.

However, when the Linear B tablets from Pylos and elsewhere were finally deciphered after 1952 by Michael Ventris and his esteemed colleague, Prof. John Chadwick, et al., it was discovered that Pylos was in fact a Mycenaean fortress city, much like its metropolis (“mother city” or capital, if you like), Mycenae. The site of the excavated Mycenaean fortress of Pylos is shown on the map above as being co-incidental with the location of the modern Greek city of Pylos (furthest south on the map above). So instead of squabbling over the “true” location of ancient Mycenaean Pylos, as so many ancient Greek, Renaissance and even modern authors have done over the millennia, I shall leave that debate for greater lights than I am, and simply accept on faith that the Mycenaean fortress of Pylos is located where most archaeologists today claim it is, at modern Pylos. On the other hand, since I am no archaeologist, and Rita Roberts, my esteemed colleague here on our blog, is one, I expect that she can shed some light on this matter, which is quite beyond my expertise.

What then is the purpose of this post if not to establish “once and for all” the true location of Mycenaean Pylos? Quite clearly, that it is not my intent at all. What I intend to demonstrate here, through lexical and syntactical observations based on actual texts from ancient Greek authors, runs as follows:

[1] That Pylos or as it is called in Mycenaean Linear B, Puro, was an actual Mycenaean settlement, regardless of where anyone believes it was really located, at any of the three assignable sites on the map above, or elsewhere. Since my discussion is not in any way intended to be archeological in nature, I leave the issue of its actual location to the archaeologists, as I have already stated. The problem of the location of Pylos is not our problem here. In fact, it is a not a problem at all, just a red herring. I shall address the question its putative location in the next post, but I warn you not to expect much of the conclusion(s) I reach, being the incurable doubting Thomas I am. To read the Wikipedia article on Pylos, its history, ancient and modern, and the excavations there, click on this photo of the Bay of Pylos:

[2] I will begin with lexical definitions of Mycenaean Linear B Puro, otherwise known as Pylos, presumed site of the Palace of Nestor, in ancient Greek, and all words in Liddell & Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon (1986), to eliminate any ambiguity over the actual meaning of the word Pylos itself & then
[3] proceed with syntactical considerations, both of which will make it abundantly clear just what Pylos is supposed to mean, or more to be point, to be.

[2]Lexical Considerations:

Unfortunately, there are those whose knowledge of Greek, ancient or modern, is so deficient that they believe that Pylos means or somehow must mean, “gate”. But nothing could be further from the truth. The ancient Greek words for “gate” as found in Liddell & Scott, are illustrated here:

However, when anyone who is a serious Greek linguist is asked to provide scholia on the possible interpretations of the name of (the town of) Pylos, he or she is bound to raise several very sound objections to such a simplistic interpretation (of the town’s name), as I myself have done here: Click to ENLARGE

One glance at this table of 5 possible definitions for the word Pylos, and we can see right away that we are up against several possible interpretations. Literalists will of course insist that Pylos must mean “gate” and absolutely nothing else, since it appears as such twice in this chart. However, to do so is to cut too thin a razor line, for in ancient Greek, most words (vocabulary) are, if anything, open to multiple interpretations, at any of the concrete, semi-concrete and abstract levels, or all of them. All definitions for Pylos are either concrete or semi-concrete, given that a town or district name falls more readily into the second category. What makes matters worse is that the name Pylos itself is either masculine OR feminine, but – and here is the crunch – masculine only in Mycenaean Greek, which obviates against its meaning merely a “gate”. Matters are further complicated by the fact that the other entry in the masculine [5] = gateway, is more abstract than [1] or [3]. Whenever ancient Greek flounders around between different genders (here, masculine and feminine), and different endings for one gender, in this case, for [3] & [5], we can be sure that the word itself is equally open to multiple interpretations. Pylos is a prime candidate for this scenario.

[3] Syntactical Considerations:

Sadly, for the literalist, things become far messier when we turn to consider the implications for the “meaning” of Pylos (and Pylos alone, not the other variants on the word) taken strictly in syntactical or, if you will, grammatical context. Resorting to the good old technique of reductio ad adsurdum, if we insist on defining Pylos as “gate”, here is what we end up with, taking a few examples onlhy from my discussion above:

[1] There is a gate before a gate. And there is even another gate.

What is wrong with this? Plenty. Had Strabo meant to say that, he would have written this: esti pylos pro pyloio pro pyloio. But he did not. He states that there is a Pylos before Pylos. And then, in an entirely new sentence, which emphatically and dramatically cuts it clearly off his first two allusions to Pylos, he mentions the third. That second sentence sports no fewer than three (3!) emphatic Greek particles, ge, men & kai, to make it completely transparent to anyone with a sound knowledge of ancient Greek that he means to put as great a distance as he possibly can between the first two allusions to Pylos and the third. And here I am referring to distance defined spatially in geographical terms. Strabo was neither an architect nor a builder. He was a geographer.

The difference between the actual meaning in ancient Greek of his two sentences and the literal sentence, esti pylos pro pyloio pro pyloio = There is a gate in front of a gate in front of a gate is as plain as the light of day. No ancient Greek author of any true merit would ever make the unconscionable mistake of justapositioning the simply concrete, in this case, the position of two gates, one immediately in front of the other, with the abstract, where, in this instance, Strabo is unequivocally referring to geographic, topological distances, and great distances, at that. In fact, I would venture to say that no Greek author in his right mind, ancient or modern, would ever employ a phrase as clumsy as esti Pylos pro Pyloio pro Pyloio, since Greek is a language which instinctively eschews awkward syntactical constructions, lending even greater preference to the periodic style than even Latin.

But there is even more here than first meets the eye. Strabo, who is after all writing around the time of Christ, some 800 years after Homer and over 1,200 years after the fall of Mycenae, does somethingextremely peculiar. He uses the archaic Mycenaean + Homeric genitive for Pylos no less than 3 times in a row, and he does so not only consciously but without compunction. In his own day and age, no Greek writer in his right mind would ever even dream of using the archaic genitive. But Strabo does, and he hammers it home. The reason is obvious: he is specifically and unequivocally referring to the Mycenaean settlement of Pylos, even though he like all latter-day ancients had no idea whatsoever of where Mycenae had once been located. Though he really made a valiant effort to at least pinpoint the potential location(s) of Pylos and failed, he did try. And that alone speaks volumes to his professionalism as an ancient historian and geographer. The fact that he knew Pylos definitely existed implies that he also knew Mycenae did too. Mycenae was not merely a legend to the ancient Greeks. Homer mentions both Mycenae and Pylos several times in both the Iliad and the Odyssey. No ancient Greek author of real merit after Homer was going to question the judgement of the great bard on such matters, since they all knew perfectly well he was much much closer in time to the Trojan War than they could ever possibly hope to be. And so they trusted him implicitly. Before the twentieth century, most historians believed that the Trojan War was a myth. Heinrich Schliemann shattered that myth in one fell swoop in the 1870s. So if the Trojan War is not a myth - and we now know it definitely is not - then by the same token neither are the Mycenaeans themselves mythical figures, nor are Mycenae and Pylos mythical cities. Both were as real as Sparta, Corinth and Athens were much later on. Both have been completely excavated. Strabo, by using the archaic genitive three times in a row, rams this point home point blank.

One final point we cannot overlook: the masculine definition above for Pylos as a gate never allowed for the use of the archaic genitive, for the simple reason that this word was never an archaic Greek word. So once again, the evidence mitigates heavily against interpreting the archaic genitive Pyloio as a gate.

[3] OK, so here, if we take Pylos as meaning “gate”, then Strabo would appear to be saying: drove their swift horses from Bouprasion to the gate. Why on earth would anyone have to make use of horses, let alone, swift horses, to drive from Bouprasion to (presumably) its own gate? Ok, ok, some other gate. But which other gate? A professional geographer the likes of Strabo would never tell us someone drove swift horses from one place (settlement) to another (settlement), without mentioning the name of the second one. At any rate, coupling a toponym with a concrete noun like “gate” once again violates every precept of elegance in Greek prose, which the ancients prized above all else. The interpretation is thus absurd, not necessarily to our minds today, but most definitely to the mind of an ancient Greek author of the stature of Strabo.

[4] “... and those who inhabited the gate...” Must be termites, I guess.

[5] “... the last city of the sandy gate...” This is so uproariously funny as to require no further comment, unless of course, you like to build your fortifications and their gates out of sand.

[7] & the most side-splitting of them all, “... ambitious rivalry toward a gate in their country...”, which the dative of interest demands. Need I say more? If anyone wishes to challenge me to do so, I can and I will. The textual evidence against Pylos as meaning “gate” in the context of the Iliad or Strabo or any other ancient Greek mentioning Pylos as a toponym is overwhelming. It is in fact decisive. Case closed.

Richard

An Archaeologist’s Perspectives on Offerings to the Goddess Potnia, by Rita Roberts, on Pylos Tablet PY cc 665: Click to ENLARGE

Linear B tablets reveal to archaeologists information about offerings made during religious ceremonies, such as we find with this tablet Pylos PY cc 665, found at Pylos Crete, listing offerings of rams and pigs to the Goddess Potnia. It seems from archaeological evidence that the main animals including pigs were transported as a whole carcass into the main Cultic Room, and the not so meaty parts were selected for burning, whereas their meaty parts were first consumed by humans and then thrown into the fire.

This is borne out by evidence of burnt animal sacrifices from the sanctuary of Agios Konstantinos, North East Peloponnese.

Rita Roberts, Archeologist, Herakleion, Crete

NOTE by Richard Vallance Janke: I learn something new everyday. I may be a linguist, but I am no archaeologist. So Rita, our resident archaeologist, now retired, who has lived in Herakleion, Greece, for years, and has worked right at the site of Knossos, serves as the perfect complement to myself, our resident linguist. I scarcely know how either of us could do without the other. We make the perfect team. I am sure you all can understand how very grateful I am that I met Rita less than two years ago, and how my teaching her Linear B, and her teaching me at least the basics of archaeology, have benefited us to the utmost. I know that I speak for Rita too when I say this. Click to ENLARGE:

Pylos Tablet PY cc 665: The Shepherd, Fresh Penis, Offers to Goddess Potnia… Click to ENLARGE (the Tablet, I mean, not the Shepherd’s Tool)

Pylos Tablet PY cc 665: The Shepherd, Fresh Penis, Offers to Goddess Potnia... Click to ENLARGE (the Tablet, I mean, not the Shepherd’s Tool)

When my esteemed colleague, Rita Roberts, sent me her latest translation of an extant Linear B tablet from Pylos, PY cc 665, little did she suspect, indeed, even less did I suspect what we were in for. Rita’s translation is the most commonsensical one a translator could come up with. The word NEWOPEO is almost certainly the name of the suppliant making an offering of 100 sheep and 190 pigs to the goddess, Potnia, one of the major Mycenaean deities, almost all of whom were feminine anyway. Potnia, otherwise called, “Potnia Theron” or Mistress of the Wild Beasts, has often been associated with Artemis, the ancient Greek goddess of the hunt, but she may also be linked with Demeter Ceres, goddess of the grain harvest, as appears to be the case with the Mycenaean fresco in this collage: click to ENLARGE

Certainly the Minoans and Mycenaeans both relied heavily on their grain harvest, as did all Greek societies and city states, Crete, Cyprus, Athens, all the Athenian colonial cities, Corinth, Macedonian Pella, Syracuse etc., right on down through the Classical and Hellenic Eras, as indeed did Egypt and all other major ancient civilizations, including Rome, of course.

Apparently, the Minoan hierarchy of goddess and gods was matriarchal rather than patriarchal, although whether this was the case for the Mycenaean pantheon of gods we cannot say for sure. However, that being said, we can see right away that Rita Robert’s translation does great justice to the apparent significance of this important tablet as a religious votary, by translating NEWOPEO as the suppliant’s name. So far, so good.

But when I happened to take a closer look at the fellow’s name, I noticed at once that the first two syllables were the Linear B word for “new”, a very common word in Mycenaean Greek. So then, of course, the question is, what do the last two syllables mean? I was already suspicious of what the result would be even before I looked up a Greek word that would fill the bill, and sure enough my suspicions were confirmed, to a T. It meant what I thought it meant. Not only that, it cannot mean anything else in Classical Greek, if spelled the way it is in this fellow’s name in Linear B. The Mycenaean Greek word and its Classical Greek equivalent are one and the same. No doubt about it. “Penis”.

But is this so very surprising, given the Greeks’ obsession with the beauty of the male anatomy in all its parts, apparently, it seems, right on down from the Mycenaeans to the Hellenic Age and beyond? There is one splendid Minoan fresco of a fisherboy from Akrotiri (Late Cycladic 1, Late Minoan 1A) which does show a fellow nude. Sadly, however, his lovely penis has been effaced by the ravages of time. Here is this exquisite fresco: Click to ENLARGE

As for the ancient Greeks themselves (by whom I mean those from ca. 700 BCE to 100 BCE and beyond), they were utterly obsessed with the all-too prominent aspects of the male physique, given that to them, i.e. the Greeks, the male physiognomy of the gods and of their heroes held a supremely religious value, even beyond the equally enticing virtues of the female physique, divine (athanatos) or mortal (thanatos).

Onomastics & Personal Names:

Yet what about nomenclature? Would the ancient Greeks have been so daring as to give their men names like this? Certainly. Why not? Their pagan religion was saturated with imagery and images alike of fertility and sensuality, with a marked emphasis on the former, as were the religions of practically every ancient civilization right up to the Roman. No big surprise there to anyone.

Still, I will have to buttress this claim of mine with actual examples of racy Greek names, if I expect our readers to actually believe me. We needn’t look very far. Among the Greek deities, some of the most prominent bear names with distinctly sensual overtones: Pan, Greek name derived from the word pa-on, meaning "herdsman". In mythology, this is the name of a god of shepherds and flocks, who had the horns, hindquarters and legs of a goat; Herpes, god of prostitutes & cunning; Himeros, god of sexual desire (Himeros can be translated as “love or lust attack”); Eros, god of love and sexual desire; Pothos, god of sexual desire and longing; Ganymede, Priapus etc. And among mortals, Arsenios (Virile), Beelzeboul (Lord of Dung), Dioskouroi (Zeus’ boys!), Pythias (rotting!), Seilinos (moving back and forth in a wine trough), Zoroastres (he whose camels are angry) etc.

As for the plays of Aristophanes, they are riddled with obscene names, most of which of course are meant as parodies, but nevertheless...

Compare Rita Robert’s translation of this tablet (Pylos PY cc 665) to my own: Click to ENLARGE:

My version, which requires considerable knowledge of ancient Greek grammar in numerous dialects, relies on translating NEWOPEO in an entirely different manner, and in two different versions, (a) the first rendering this word as the present participle active of the Greek verb “to bring” & (b) the second referencing bringing tribute to Potnia by ship. The problem with my interpretations is that they overlooked the obvious, which Rita did not. Which of these three versions carries the most weight I leave entirely in your hands. Or perhaps all three of them have something going for them. One thing is certain: it is extremely unwise to fall into the trap of believing that there can only be one “right” translation for so many Linear B tablets, given that adequate context to clinch the matter is sorely lacking in the vast majority of them. I have mentioned this often on our blog, and shall continue to raise the point for the simple reason that a great many Linear B tablets admit of more than one interpretation, and often of more than two. In such instances, each translation has its own merits and weaknesses, which are subject to rigorous critical analysis by Linear B scholars worldwide... as indeed they should be, without exception.

Richard

When SETI showed us this amazing photo from space, I could not resist defining it in ancient Greek & Linear B + this fractal, also in French!

When SETI showed us this amazing photo from space, I could not resist defining it in ancient Greek & Linear B + this fractal, also in French!

Image shown to us by SETI on Twitter:



What it means in ancient Greek and in Mycenaean Linear B:


What can you see (or not) in the image they posted?

Oh and what about this? What is it a fractal of?


If you can read Greek, Mycenaean Linear B or French, you will know; otherwise you will have to guess.

Let me know what you think it means & I will tell you if you are right. 

Richard

My Twitter account completely updated, new header new photo, and new, wider perspectives: Click to ENLARGE

My Twitter account completely updated, new header new photo, and new, wider perspectives: Click to Visit:

I have just updated and completely revised not only the appearance but the contents of my Twitter account, to reflect my widely expanding interests as related, either directly or indirectly, to Mycenaean Linear B, Minoan Linear A, Arcado-Cypriot Linear C, ancient Greek etc. etc. I have posted a new header, which you see above, incorporating the Linear B word for Knossos, and part of the stunning dolphins fresco in the Queen’s Megaron at Knossos, which you can see here: Click to ENLARGE

As it now stands, in its short lifetime of less than two years, our Linear B (A & C) blog has become one of the primary Linear B resources on the entire Internet, with visits already running into the tens of thousands (an astounding figure for something as bizarre and esoteric as Linear B!). Soon approaching 40K, we expect at least 60K hits by our second anniversary, if not more. The reasons for this are obvious to anyone with even a passing interest in Linear B (A &C). Nothing is off-limits on our blog. Neither Rita Roberts, my research colleague, nor I, take anything for granted. We are both “doubting Thomases” to the core, casting doubt not only on translations of Linear B tablets by other Linear B researchers, but on one anothers as well, given that neither of us is in the least impervious to committing errors, sometimes egregious. Such errors must be drawn to our attention, come what may. If you are an expert in Linear B decipherment, and you do not like any translation either of us has made, feel free to give us a shout.

The other principal concerns and issues our blog frequently focuses on are:
1. keeping the Linear B syllabary right up to date. The syllabary chart most commonly used on the Internet is way out-of-date, and must be replaced by this one: Click to ENLARGE

2. the introduction of the completely new theory of Supersyllabograms in Mycenaean Linear B, of which there are at least 30 from the store of 61 syllabograms. We have plenty of posts on our theory on our blog. Rita Roberts and I shall be publishing a major research article on supersyllabograms sometime in 2015 or 2016. If tenable, it should prove to be a revolutionary step forward in the decipherment of the remaining 10% or so of the Linear B syllabary, its homophones, logograms and ideograms as yet undeciphered over the past 62 years since Michael Ventris successfully and amazingly deciphered the other 90%. Our research will be widely available in PDF format on the Internet, and although copyrighted, will be free for use by any Linear B aficionados. Here is an example of just a few supersyllabograms, all dealing with sheep, rams & ewes, the primary concern of Linear B scribes by a long shot: Click to ENLARGE

3. Progressive Linear B Vocabulary and Grammar, another all-new approach to the study of Linear B, whereby I intend to re-construct as much of the lost grammar of Mycenaean Greek as I possibly can. I have already completely mapped the active voice of both Thematic and Athematic verbs in Mycenaean Greek. Nouns, adjectives, adverbs and prepositions with cases are to follow in 2015. To view all posts on this topic, visit our PINTEREST Board, Mycenaean Linear B Grammar and Vocabulary:

4. Rita Roberts and I shall be constructing an all new English-Linear B Lexicon sometimes between 2016 & 2018, which will be vastly superior to the currently available Mycenaean (Linear B) – ENGLISH Glossary on the Internet, of which the less said the better, as it is riddled with at least 100 errors! I strongly dis-advise anyone using it. If you must use a Mycenaean dictionary, be sure to avail yourselves of Chris Tselentsis’ far superior Linear B Lexicon.

5. the all new field of the feasibility of the possible application of the Linear syllabaries, especially B & C but also, to a lesser extent, Linear A, to the emerging field of extraterrestrial communication, by which I mean serious research as undertaken by NASA: Click to read the entire PDF

and other space administration, research facilities and professional online sites, and not crackpot nonsense such as UFOs, alien abductions and the like. Here are a few comic strips just to make it clear exactly what I think of extraterrestrial crackpots: Click to ENLARGE

followed by this famous quotation by Werner Karl Heisenburg: Click to read the Wikipedia article on him:

These are just the 5 major ventures we are undertaking on our blog, but we do not shy away from anything whatsoever which advances our knowledge of Linear B in general and in particular.

My Twitter account has expanded its scope to include not only my primary pursuits, research into Linear A, B & C and ancient Greek, especially the archaic Greek of the Catalogue of Ships in book II of Homer’s Iliad, which I am in the process of translating in its entirety, as you can see here: Click to ENLARGE

but also the following areas of great interest to me:

1. posting of major research articles, not only in English, but in French and Italian as well, the latter two of which I shall translate into English whenever I deem it necessary for our blog readers;
2. ancient Greek vocabulary, but exclusively in the East Greek dialects, Mycenaean Greek, Arcado-Cypriot, Aeolian, Ionic and Attic;
3. Decipherment of ancient languages in general, insofar as these related, either directly or indirectly, to Linear syllabaries;
4. Cryptology, such as the Bletchley Circle project in World War Two, and the key rôle the brilliant genius, Alan Turing, the equal of Michael Ventris in intellect, played in the decipherment of the Enigma Code, especially as this astounding achievement relates to...
5. thorough investigation and in-depth analysis of the possible suitability of of syllabic scripts such as Linear A, B & C into extraterrestrial communication (NOT UFO’s, which are crackpot nonsense suitable only to... I will not fill in the blanks!);
6. astronomy, Mars, exoplanets etc. (not reflected on this blog, of course, except insofar as it may possibly relate to Linear syllabaries), linguistics in general, including translation from one language to another, especially between English & French, in which as a Canadian I am fluent, Latin & Greek and Italian, which I read very well & Spanish, fairly well. I have forgotten my Russian, which I learned 50 years ago, but I can still read the Cyrillic alphabet with no difficulty. Linguistics and translation posts on this blog must in some way be related to Linear syllabaries, but not on my Twitter account, where anything important about linguistics in general is just fine with me.

Richard

NASA: Linear B and Extraterrestrial Communication: article in French by Prof. Richard Saint-Gelais of Laval University, Quebec

NASA: Linear B and Extraterrestrial Communication: article in French by Prof. Richard Saint-Gelais of Laval University, Quebec

Linear B and Extraterrestrial Communication: E-mail in English I sent to Prof. Richard Saint-Gelais (Laval University) informing him that I will eventually translate his article into English: Archéologie, anthropologie et communication interstellaire 2 : Au-delà de Linéaire B - Le défi de la communication métasémiotique avec une intelligence Extraterrestre

Richard Saint-Gelais, I congratulate you on your extraordinary perspective in French on the possibility of the application, however provisional, of the Mycenaean Linear B syllabary to extraterrestrial communication.

Click on this banner to read the full research article in French by Prof. Richard Saint-Gelais:

 

When I came upon the English translation of your translation of your article, somewhat abridged, in PDF format, I read it with great interest (See below).

As far as I can tell, your perspective is clearly unique and, in my opinion, quite the mind-boggling revelation on the prospects for the practical application of human scripts by nature essentially geometric to extraterrestrial communication. In fact, your research study, which takes an approach heretofore unheard of to this topic, fascinates me to no end, especially in light of my own in-depth research into any and all aspects of these syllabaries: Minoan Linear A, Mycenaean Linear B and Arcado-Cypriot Linear C. If you care to visit my blog, Linear B, Knossos & Mycenae, one of the key sites Linear B on the Internet, you can see for yourself that, taken in their own proper context, our theories, hypotheses and the practical applications of them play a key role in our numerous scrupulous translations of Linear B tablets, each and every one of which in turn significantly contributes to the timely dissemination of the most up-to-date academic research of the highest order into Linear B above all else, but also into the other two scripts referenced above. In addition, I just now sent you an e-mail of paramount importance, whereby I have let you in on my own primary concerns dealing with this very subject, revolutionary as it is likely to prove. It is my sincere hope that you will quite soon be open to further, more in-depth, discussion with me, with our mutual research interests in mind. Meanwhile, I must truly congratulate you. Yours, Richard Vallance Janke, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

Or if you are allophone English, you can read the shorter, less detailed and less informative version of the original French article from NASA in PDF format here:

ORIGINAL E-MAIL in French / premier courriel en français :

Je vous félicite, Richard Saint-Gelais, pour votre excellente perspective sur les possibilités d’application provisoire du syllabaire Linéaire B du Grec mycénéain à la communication exraterrestre, dont j’ai lu le texte intégral raccourci en anglais en format PDF ici:

Cette perspective est évidemment unique et, à mon avis, tout à fait époustouflante quant à la mise en pratique potentielle des écritures humaines de nature géometrique à la communication extraterrestre. En effet, votre étude de recherche sur une telle approche jusqu’ici inouïe me fascine énormément, surtout à la lumière de mes propres recherches approfondies sur tous les aspects des syllabaires, le Linéaire A minoen, le Linéaire B mycénéain et le Linéaire C arcade-chypriote. Si vous consultez mon blog, Linear B, Knossos and Mycenae, l’un des sites les plus importants en ligne sur le Linéaire B, vous verrez que le contexte de nos théories, de nos hypothèses, de la mise en oeuvre pratique de celles-là, ainsi que nos traductions considérables servent toutes et chacune à la dissémination la plus actualisée de la recherche dans le domaine des études académiques de première ordre sur le Linéaire B avant tout, mais également sur les deux autres écritures mentionnées ci-dessus. De plus, je viens de vous envoyer un courriel important qui vous communique mes propre préoccupations les plus significatives portant sur ce sujet révolutionnaire, tout en espérant que vous et moi, nous serons prêts à communiquer réciproquement à base plus profonde dans le prochain avenir. Entretemps, je vous salue sincèrement. Bien à vous. Richard Vallance Janke, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.

NOTES:
1. Since this original article in French is significantly more comprehensive than the English article authored by Richard Saint-Gelais at NASA (see above), I shall eventually be translating the full text of this seminal article on the feasibility of syllabaries such as Linear B for extraterrestrial communication. This translation is bound to prove difficult, even for someone such as myself who, as a Canadian, is fluently bilingual English-French. So do not expect my translation online anytime soon. It is most likely to appear sometime in the winter of 2015.
2. For our francophone and bilingual English-French readers. You can read the full text of Richard Saint-Gelais’ original research article in French, which preceded his PDF study at NASA (link above) here:

Archéologie, Anthropologie et Communication Interstellaire 2 :

Voici quelques illustrations tirées de son article (A Few Illustrations from his article): Cliquer pour élargir : Click to ENLARGE

Excerpts in French from his article: Au-delà de Linéaire B - Le défi de la communication métasémiotique avec une intelligence Extraterrestre Par Richard Saint-Gelais - Chapitre 5 Perspectives sémiotiques sur SETI

La Communication, comme nous le savons tous, est une entreprise délicate entre les êtres humains. Donc, il y a des raisons de douter que ce serait une chose facile à travers l'univers. Dans cet essai, je vais essayer de décrire un ensemble de problèmes théoriques qui pourraient affecter la communication avec des intelligences extraterrestres... passim ... Je dois dire d'emblée que ma position est similaire au scepticisme épistémique que je viens de mentionner. Mais mon point de vue sera légèrement différent de ça, mais pas incompatible avec la perspective épistémique. Je vais appliquer les théories et les méthodes d'analyses sémiotiques au problème de la communication interstellaire, en mettant l'accent sur les signes, le langage, le sens et l'interprétation... passim...

Les conséquences que ces considérations ont pour la communication interstellaire sont tout à fait évidentes. Cette communication, si elle est couronnée de succès, doit surmonter les difficultés inhérentes à un échange où l'expéditeur et le destinataire ne partagent pas un langage commun; ce dernier ne peut se prévaloir d'une compétence linguistique déjà établies avec laquelle travailler sur le sens du message, mais doit plutôt commencer avec le message lui-même et essayer d'en déduire, par conjecture, les règles lexicales et syntaxiques qui lui confèrent une signification. Du point de vue de l'expéditeur, le défi est de concevoir un message qui comprendra, en quelque sorte, le contexte d'interprétation nécessaires pour lui donner un sens. En d'autres termes, l'expéditeur doit, apparemment, produire ce paradoxe sémiotique: un message d'auto-interprétation... passim ...

Décrypter d'Ancient Scripts La question, bien sûr, est : dans quelle mesure est-ce possible ? Une comparaison avec l'inverse, une situation de non coopération - le déchiffrement de messages codés ou d'inscriptions écrites en langues éteintes - peuvent apporter un regard neuf sur les problèmes invoqués.
.. passim ...

Sur le plan sémiotique, la similitude entre les trois types de situations est évidente. Décrypter des inscriptions dans des langues inconnues ou des messages en codes secrets implique à faire face à des chaînes de signes, sans avoir aucune connaissance préalable des règles de codage, de sorte que la reconnaissance de ces règles devient l'une des finalités (à la place des moyens, comme c'est généralement le cas) du processus de l'interprétation. Le déchiffreur des langues inconnues tente d'établir la valeur phonétique et / ou sémantique des symboles. Le décrypteur de messages secrets cherche à identifier le principe régissant le remplacement et / ou la permutation de lettres. Donc, les deux activités peuvent être comparées à la réception d'un message interstellaire et pour tenter d'interpréter sans avoir une idée préalable des règles de codage, le cas échéant, concernant la production des signaux... passim ...

Prenons, par exemple, les types de systèmes d'écriture que les cultures humaines ont développé. Il est possible de déterminer, à partir du nombre de caractères différents que possède une langue, le type de système d'écriture qu'il soutient. S'il n'y a que entre 20 et 40 caractères, c'est un système alphabétique; si il y a environ 100 caractères, nous avons un système syllabique dans lequel chaque symbole traduit une syllabe (par exemple, ta, te, ti, à). l'appareil phonologique des êtres extraterrestres peut être tout à fait différent du nôtre; leurs langues peuvent avoir des unités plus ou moins phonétiques par rapport aux nôtres ou peuvent reposer sur une base physiologique sans rapport avec son articulation... passim ...

Le plus célèbre d'entre eux est le cas du linéaire B, un système d'écriture trouvé sur des tablettes d'argile sur l'île de Crète, déchiffré par Michael Ventris dans les années 1950, sur la base d'un important travail visionnaire que Alice Kober avait fait avant lui. Ventris a utilisé une méthode purement formelle, regroupant ensemble les mots ayant le même début et puis d'en déduire, ou plutôt enlever, à quelles variations grammaticales les différentes terminaisons correspondaient (par exemple, le sexe, le chiffre, etc.). Finalement, il a produit une grille sur laquelle la valeur phonétique de chaque signe a été enregistré. Cette grille a conduit à la découverte inattendue de Ventris, que les symboles linéaire B traduisaient une forme très ancienne de Grec. Cette conclusion de l'histoire sape un promettant abord sur une comparaison entre les écritures anciennes et une communication extraterrestre. Ventris ne savait pas à l'avance quelle langue était «derrière» le linéaire B, mais bien sûr, il ne pouvait le reconnaître, car il était différent du grec classique, quand il le "perçu", il l'a dit lorsque suffisamment de preuves ont été accumulées pour révéler le lien. Nous ne pouvons pas, bien sûr, s'attendre à une telle reconnaissance à travers des distances inter-stellaires... passim ...

Cette discussion sur les symboles, les icônes et les indices ne conduit pas inévitablement à la conclusion que les messages interstellaires doivent inclure uniquement des types de signes plus faciles à interpréter. Nous devons nous rappeler que le message ne se compose pas d'un signe isolé, mais de (parfois complexes) combinaisons de signes, qui peuvent contribuer à leur élucidation réciproque... passim... Ce qui peut aider de façon décisive ce destinataire final est l'interprétation mutuelle que des parties du message proviennent d'un autre (mais une interprétation qui doit encore être sous-entendue, c'est-à-dire interprétée comme telle) et le jeu systématique de la répétition et de la variation entre les images, qui donnera aux destinataires la possibilité de faire des conjectures et enlèvements, que les images suivantes peuvent confirmer ou infirmer, dans ce dernier cas en appuyant pour que les bénéficiaires lecteurs révisent leurs hypothèses précédentes... passim ...

Linéaire B et autres Dans son livre sur les langues éteintes, Johannes Friedrich souligne que la direction dans laquelle un script doit être lu peut parfois être déduite de l'espace vide à la fin de la dernière ligne d'une inscription. Ici nous avons un indice, un signe causé par son objet : la direction de la rédaction est concrètement responsable de quel côté la dernière ligne est vide. Mais ce n'est pas un signe très remarquable qu'il ne nécessite pas un raisonnement abductif (d'enlèvement). Aussi étrange que cela puisse paraître, je vois dans ce petit exemple des raisons d'espérer en ce qui concerne la communication interstellaire. Nous avons tendance à conceptualiser la communication avec des intelligences extraterrestres en termes de transmission réussie dans le sens voulu. Mais la production et la réception de signes ne peuvent pas être limités à un plan intentionnel. Une caractéristique importante de la plupart des indices est leur nature involontaire. Cela s'applique non seulement en des signes naturels, tels que la fumée, mais aussi dans les productions conscientes des signes, qui comprennent toujours un aspect indiciel provenant d'ailleurs de ce que l'expéditeur a voulu dire. Le touriste est confronté à une anomalie, comme nous l'avons vu, qui peut le mener à conclure à tort que c'est une erreur; mais cette hypothèse devient de moins en moins plausible lorsqu'il ou elle rencontre plus d'anomalies.

Pour moi, la répétition devient un indice de la nature régulière de ce signe, même si cette indication n'a jamais traversé l'esprit des auteurs des textes. Cet exemple montre une fois de plus le rôle central de l'interprétation. L'insistance de Peirce sur le rôle de l'interprétant implique qu'un signe, dès qu'il est reconnu comme tel (ce qui est déjà le résultat d'une interprétation), est soumis à un processus d'interprétations sans fin et souvent inattendues. Ce sera certainement le cas si, par hasard, nos signaux sont reçus par des êtres intelligents, quelles que soient leur physiologie ou leur culture. Nous pouvons compter, jusqu'à un certain point, sur l'ingéniosité des bénéficiaires. Bien qu'ils ne peuvent pas comprendre les choses particulières que nous voulons communiquer, ils peuvent au moins reconnaître et interpréter, peut-être même de manière fructueuse, certains indices laissés tout à fait involontairement. Le scribe sumérien qui a laissé une partie de la ligne vide ne pouvait pas imaginer qu'il quittait un signe qui serait lu et utilisé plusieurs siècles plus tard par un archéologue. La situation de SETI n'est pas vraiment très différente. De l'expérience des décrypteurs de langues éteintes, il semble que l'envoi du plus grand nombre et de différents messages que possible est la meilleure stratégie, celle qui offre le plus de chance au destinataire. Le contenu de nos messages peut être beaucoup moins important que le nombre et la variété des messages que nous envoyons, mais seulement parce qu'ils donneront aux bénéficiaires plus de possibilités de comparer et tester leurs enlèvements sur les messages passés contre de nouveaux exemples. En l'absence de commentaires, c'est peut-être le meilleur plan d'action pour une élaboration de nos "messages dans une bouteille interstellaire."

par Richard Saint-Gelais,Université Laval, Québec, Québec

The Implications of the Linear B Geometric Syllabary for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence: Part 1 — The Biggest Bang you will ever have seen from this blog!… so far… stay tuned!

The Implications of the Linear B Geometric Syllabary for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence: Part 1 — The Biggest Bang you will ever have seen from this blog!... so far... stay tuned!

Before I go any further, allow me to state categorically that this message the Voyager Space Capsules launched in 1977 with one of their missions being to search out suppositional extraterrestrials, is primitive at best, and ludicrous at its worst. Click to ENLARGE:

As far as I can figure it out (which isn’t very much at all - not that it matters), the message on this disc is difficult even for most humans to interpret, unless they happen to be astrophysicists, mathematicians or some sort of scientific geek. Unless the reader is human, it is probably impossible to make to make head or tails of it. And I for one, even though I am human and hopefully intelligent, cannot even begin to imagine how any target extraterrestrial civilization could even begin to out how to play the damn thing, unless they had a record player (ahem, as if!), a device already obsolete even to us! One of the fundamentally flawed assumptions of this analog device is that you have to play it on a device the human race alone has invented. The very concept of playing an analog recorded medium could very well be completely impenetrable to even the most advanced extraterrestrial civilizations, who might find the whole thing so laughable they would toss it out “the window”, assuming they even had windows, which is a helluva stretch in and of itself.

In the Wikipedia article on this mission, we read this:

Voyager 1 and 2 both carry with them a golden record that contains pictures and sounds of Earth, along with symbolic directions for playing the record and data detailing the location of Earth.

This patently assumes that whoever or whatever intelligence eventually (!) receives this message will look a great deal like us (i.e. be anthropomorphic) and will think almost exactly as we do, and so will understand human music, and will be able to interpret the capsule’s human historical, photographic archives & over a thousand human languages... probably so much gibberish to our poor benighted recipients some countless millennia hence, assuming it arrives in one piece, if at all. So as far as I am concerned, this mission is paramount to a futile exercise in pipe-dreaming. Even in 1977, when I was only 32 years old, I considered the whole thing a complete waste of time, money and human resources. If anything is a near-perfect example of “thinking inside the box, with the lid closed and sealed”, that project had to be it. This will all become all too painfully obvious as we proceed through our discussion of the truly formidable, quite possibly even insurmountable challenges of interstellar communication. Of course, since then, in the past 37 years, humankind has apparently begun to grow up from mid- to late-adolescence, to burst the chains of the outer limits of human consciousness as it then manifested itself, and quite literally gone cosmic. We appear to be on the cusp of our next leap in human consciousness, and if it is indeed transpiring at this very moment in our history, we are in for one helluva roller-coaster ride, the likes of which humankind has never come close to imagining in the past, right up to and including the twentieth century.

Richard Saint-Gelais’ Survey of the Potential Implications of the Application of the Linear B Syllabary as a Cipher for Extraterrestrial Communication:

In the first of our two previous posts we introduced the proposals that Richard Saint-Gelais of NASA set forth in the potentially theoretical, if not quite yet practical, application of the Mycenaean Greek Linear B Geometric Syllabary to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. In the second of these posts, I myself posited some of the assumptions, principles and hypotheses underpinning a search of such tremendous magnitude that it stretches the powers of human reasoning practically beyond its outer limits.

Still, history has repeatedly demonstrated that our intellect and powers of reasoning can be, and at certain junctures in the timeline of human evolution, are stretched another notch up the ladder beyond the presumptive limits of our previously adduced levels of abstractive powers, finally allowing us today, for the first time in human history, to think more and more, and more and more swiftly “outside the box” than ever before prior to the twenty-first century.

The Ancient Greeks Take the First Great Leap of the Human Intellect onto the Higher Plane of Abstract Reasoning:

The first great leap onto the purely abstract plane of reasoning was taken by the ancient Greeks, in two discreet stages:

(A) the complete overhaul of the Minoan Linear A syllabary into the Mycenaean Greek Linear B syllabary, which swiftly and unceremoniously tossed overboard the most complicated and abstruse Linear B syllabograms, homophones & ideograms (some 1/4 of some 300), in less than 50 years, an incredibly rapid turnover in terms of socio-linguistic change, which otherwise nearly always occurred at a snail’s pace in the ancient world.

But there is even more to this picture than we can possibly have imagined before the 1990s at the very earliest. Despite the proliferation of puissant supercomputers and the quasi-instantaneous communication afforded by the World Wide Web, a much better semiotic signifier for what it actually is than the word, “Internet”, which is significantly lamer, I say again, in spite of all these extremely recent massive technological advances at our disposal, the Minoan Linear A syllabary, which for a human language was already a quasi-geometric script complete with the base set of 5 vowels for the first time in history, has utterly defied any and all attempts whatsoever at decipherment since Sir Arthur Evans first excavated the ruins of Knossos in the spring of 1900. It just won’t budge a single centimetre. Now, if we are utterly incapable of deciphering a human language, Minoan in Linear A, even with all of our technological gadgets and goodies at our instant command, including The University of California Berkeley Campus’ newly conceived automated “time machine” to reconstruct ancient languages, Click to visit the site:

imagine how much more alarmingly daunting must be the gargantuan task of beginning to scratch even the surface of communicating anything sensible to any extraterrestrial civilization whatsoever. But is the task really all that hopeless?

Although the Linear B syllabary was used by the scribes at Knossos, Pylos, Mycenae, Phaistos, Thebes (in Greece) and in several other Mycenaean locales, almost solely for accounting and inventories, which function primarily on a concrete and semi-abstract level, the script itself, being fundamentally and almost exclusively geometric in nature, was by far the most abstract script ever developed in the ancient world until that time (ca. 1450 BCE). Geometric abstraction is also one of the outstanding characteristics of Minoan & Mycenaean architecture, as illustrated in these two examples:

Knossos: Click to ENLARGE

Here we can instantly isolate the perfectly Circular Frieze Motif shown here on one of the two buildings at Knossos, a motif which appears over and over on several Minoan and Mycenaean structures. Notice also that the other edifice is perfectly straight in every plane, including the then revolutionary liberal use of skylights for interior illumination. You can readily see that the building reminds us of the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959), the first true pioneer in the advent of modern architecture. This is no accident. Lloyd Wright took much of his inspiration for the foundation of his architectural constructs from Japanese and, yes, Minoan architecture. Once again, this should not come as any surprise to anyone familiar with the amazing achievements of one of the most brilliant architects in the history of humankind, an architect whose applied principles fundamentally relied on the application of geometry to his buildings and structures.

Mycenae:

Even more astounding are the near perfect geometric proportions of the Mycenaean Tesoro Atreoyo (Treasury of Atreus), which the Mycenaeans constructed with astonishing mathematical accuracy hundreds of years before the great Greek mathematicians finally came round to working out the complex geometric and algebraic theorems underlying the elegant geometric proportions of this magnificent structure: Click to ENLARGE

SOURCE: Metron Ariston (Greek for “The Ideal Mean” (from: Liddell & Scott, 1986, pg. 442)

What can I say? The Mycenaeans were Greeks down to their very marrow.

As anyone with even a passing acquaintance with the Linear B syllabary can attest, its geometric elegance and economy is second-to-none.

Are Ancient Scripts Primitive?

When modern writers and the occasional deluded linguist refer to ancient scripts as “primitive”, as compared with so-called “modern” alphabets, which for Occidental languages (Greek & Latin) are ancient anyway, they do a great disservice to the former, propagating totally false misconceptions on that account alone. In point of fact, there is no such thing as a “primitive” script, which leads me almost inexorably to my next observation: if there are no primitive scripts, there are no modern, all scripts (ideographies, syllabaries & alphabets) ancient or modern being as sound as any other. It follows logically then that any and all future scripts as yet uninvented will also serve as well as, but no better than, the thousands of scripts humankind has dabbled in over the past 10 millennia at least, including any which we may devise for extraterrestrial communication. The implications of this factor alone are profound. They inform us that any language whatsoever we use for communication, terrestrial or otherwise is, and can only be, human, whoever tautological this may sound... or so it may appear.

Now, the implications of this scenario for the potential transmission of some sort of set of signals susceptible to possible decipherment by extraterrestrial intelligences are profound. My point is simply this: if the historical timeline in the (apparent) “evolution” of human scripts is not sufficiently impressive even for us to make a big deal out of it, and if the transmission of any one or more of humankind’s most mathematically elegant scripts, past or present – and eventually future – are deemed by some to be just the right recipe, then why not try them? What have we got to lose? Nothing... to gain? - cosmic communication = cosmic consciousness. Now there’s something to put in your pipe & smoke.

(B) Then the very same people, the Greeks, went plunging ahead, completely abandoning the Mycenaean Linear B syllabary for the even more elegant Greek alphabet, but significantly not casting aside the Arcado-Cypriot Linear C syllabary (even more geometrically economic than Linear B), which held its own right down to 400 BCE! No use re-inventing the wheel, or so the Arcadians and Cypriots believed. But, and here is the wringer. Now get this! The Linear C syllabary was no longer used merely for record keeping and inventory purposes, in fact, far from it. Its primary use was for publication of much more abstract legal and constitutional documents. Abstract geometric syllabary, abstract thought. That’s the next big leap forward. And the next: abstract geometric syllabary --> abstract communication --> abstract extraterrestrial communication.

What about the Greek Alphabet, and its Widespread Use for Algebraic Notation?

Now, of course, the Greek alphabet itself is not characteristically geometric, so we can pretty much eliminate it, and for that matter any other Occidental alphabet (Latin or Cyrillic) as suitable for interstellar communication. This includes our Arabic numerals, which you can be pretty much sure no extraterrestrial civilization would be able to distinguish from letters in an alpha-numeric system, since all characters in such a system would look the same to them, and almost certainly far too complex for them to take seriously.

We can also be pretty well assured that no extraterrestrial civilization, even if they too used alphabets, would have the faintest idea what human alphabets were supposed to be signifiers of. But does that really matter? My short answer is simply, not at all. If we were to transmit from the source (ourselves) for instance just these rectilinear & circular 10 Linear B symbols &/or 10 Linear C symbols – for a potential total of 20 — as simple signals and nothing more (10 supposedly being a universally recognizable number), all kinds of wacky scenarios are likely to transpire at the target (them, whoever or whatever they are).

Now, of course, since our target extraterrestrial civilization will not have the faintest idea what these symbols mean to us, as humans – if they see them as symbols as such at all – or whether or not they simply see them as geometric signals, the latter will do the trick just fine, thank you very much. So in this case, it does not matter a hill of beans which syllabograms from which syllabary we as the source civilization transmit to them, the target civilization, since they are going to interpret these 20 signals – if we decide to send that many – whatever damn well way suits them just fine, regardless of who we are, since they could care less anyway. All that would matter to them is that someone or some entity or entities from somewhere in our (meaning, their) galactic neighbourhood sent them a signal that meant something significant to themselves (the targets), though God only knows what. And why should we care any more than they do anyway? Come to think of it, they do not even have to live on a planet such as we construe it. If they do not, they might just as easily assume that whoever or whatever sent the signal would not live on a “planet” either. Any scenario is possible. So for this reason alone, if it were up to me to send the signal, I would simply mix-and-match Linear B & Linear C geometric signifiers any old way I felt like, and be damned the consequences... well, that might be a bit of an overstatement in case they turn out to be hostiles, we piss them rightly off and they invade us! But the chances of that ever happening are so extremely remote as to approach quantum zero.

Still, we have to admit that the Linear B & Linear C syllabaries have a helluva lot going for them. If anything, both are eminently suited for extraterrestrial communication, for the following reasons (as I see it):

1. What is the “Message” in the Extraterrestrial Communication Medium? What does it signify? Does it matter to “them”? Should it matter to us? Whose “Message” is it anyway? Woah!

As Richard Saint-Gelais correctly points out, any attempt on our part to communicate with extraterrestrial intelligences cannot, and must not, be based on what we as humans understand as being signifier(s) and signified, but rather on (hopefully) recognizable patterned sequences, by which I mean either digital (0 1), decimal or geometric, but not algebraic (see above). In fact, I posit that it does not matter a hill of beans whether signals of these three mathematical orders mean anything at all like what they clearly signify to us, but not clearly at all to our extraterrestrial compeers, other than what they signify to them, and in that light, applying reverse logic, almost certainly not to us. All that matters is that they, our extraterrestrial buddies, understand that the constructs mean whatever the hell they mean to them. If they do meaning anything, anything at all, then we will have established communication.

Funny Things Happened on the Way to the Extraterrestrial Conference:

Let us imagine a few ludicrous sounding examples. Say, for instance, we transmit a circle in the source signal, and our extraterrestrial friends at the target “read it”. Well, what if the circle we send is not abstract at all to them, but concrete only? What if they cannot even think on the abstract, connotative plane? Don’t laugh. Maybe to them the circle is just one of a thousand polka dots on one of their pet five-legged orgathonics with two heads and four arms, but no legs, just flippers instead. Again, take the straight line. Same scenario. If the language of that particular extraterrestrial civilization is concrete and denotative only, it would not matter how many straight lines we transmitted to them. They simply would not recognize them as such. But they would recognize them as something concrete, such as, for instance, a pole sticking in the ground.

2. The exact reverse scenario may just as easily obtain, namely that a particular extraterrestrial intelligence we sloppily target and by sheer accident hit (there is after all no other way we would hit them, if we ever could... imagine trying to hit the Earth with a pin-pong ball from 1,000 light years away!) uses a language or languages which are absolutely abstract and connotative, and not concrete and denotative at all. I hear someone shouting, “Eureka! We’re in luck!” Not so fast. To such a civilization a circle may be far more than just a circle or a straight line as we envision them. To them, a circle might automatically mean a sphere, if even their language is entirely three-dimensional on the abstract plane. Woops! As for a straight line, God forbid! It would at the very least probably be that naughty old straight line drawn out to infinity, and looping back in a circle to the point where it started to bite them in the conjectural ass. Then they would really get confused!

To them, a circle and a straight line might even be paramount to one & the same phenomenon, so I can hear them asking themselves, “Why would anyone or any entity such as ourselves bother sending the same exact symbol as two discrete symbols – unless of course they were stupid?” If that were the case, I suspect that they would not even bother communicating with us, targeting us with their far more intelligent signals, because they would (rightly) see us as utterly incapable of interpreting them, not having even the minimal intellectual resources to tackle their “message”, or rather I should say, the signals in their “medium”, whatever that happens to be. Your guess is as good as mine.

So we end up with at least two scenarios, and plenty more besides, I strongly suspect. Either our abstract geometric symbols are interpreted as signals of concrete objects alone or they are considered to be far too primitive for our hyper-intelligence recipients, who would probably just laugh them off as some sort of hopelessly dumb joke from the equivalent of what we would generously refer to as apes!

The Enigma Code:

3. There is yet another highly fruitful source for food for thought in the massively daunting challenge facing us in the apparently Quixotic search for potential solutions to the problem of extraterrestrial communication. This is, leaving aside the absolutely monumental achievement of the decipherment of Linear B by Michael Ventris, the astonishing work of another genius of decipherment in the mid-twentieth century. I speak of course of Alan Turing (1912-1954), who not only was the first person in history to actually correctly conceptualize the theoretical base of the digital computer, based on the 0-1 binary construct, but who successfully cracked both versions of the German Enigma Code in World War II (the earlier easier & later more difficult one). Click on his photo for his biography:

Now there is a term I can latch onto, Enigma Code. In fact, I fairly burst to leap on it, because I can think of no other term that more aptly exemplifies the fundamental precepts and hypotheses underlying the search for some way, any way, to communicate with any kind of extraterrestrial intelligence. It is no longer a question of us, or to put it bluntly, of the nature of our own human intelligence.

Speaking frankly, I for one do not believe it matters one jot what kind of intelligence is at the source and the target of extraterrestrial communication, provided that there is at least some common universal signal substrate which may (or may not) be susceptible to an interpretation, any interpretation of the source message by the target recipient, even if their understanding of what the “message” actually says (to them) differs drastically from what it means to us.

The only thing that matters at all is that the extraterrestrial target recipients of the signals we transmit are able to recognize a clearly repetitive pattern of sufficient variations on a “theme” to the point that it is intelligible to them (not us), in the fundamental framework of their own intelligence (not ours), however much it differs from our own human paradigm(s) for what we ourselves call “intelligence”. That is what I mean by a potentially universal signal, an Enigma Code which, although it remains an Enigma Code to our target recipients, is at least an enigma with a clearly recognizable pattern.

They certainly do not need to decipher it as we understand the principle of “decipherment” in human terms, any more than we need to actually decipher the Minoan language in Linear A to recognize highly repetitive morphemic and semiotic patterns and even oblique declensions, which we in fact do recognize as essential markers of human languages. But even a partial decipherment can serve well enough to convince us that we are on the right track. We know this because signifiers-signified are universal in human languages. Moreover, the entire Linear A numeric system has been successfully deciphered, and a great many toponyms we know in Linear B have (nearly) exact counterparts in Linear A.

Yet even if the fundamental construct of the intelligence of our extraterrestrial buddies contains neither the signifier “language” nor “decipherment”, their intelligence, if at least as advanced as ours (and that is not very advanced) will be able to derive some sort of “sense” from our “signal”, because for them, just as for us, the medium would be the message. The clue would be McLuhanesque, even if they could never have a clue what a McLuhan is. So the situation is far from hopeless.

The Enigma Machine:

At the crux of the problem, however, there is this: what is universal to human language constructs is almost certainly bound to be far from being universal even for any single target extraterrestrial “language”, let alone any number of them, whatever their intrinsic nature, it being almost certainly equally enigmatic to us. Ah the old double-blind scenario.

The Germans knew what their Enigma Codes meant, because they could decipher them by reverse extrapolation at the source. But until Bletchley Park and its brightest star, Alan Turing, could get a grip on it – and it took years of the most backbreaking analysis – it remained just what it was to the Allies, an Enigma Code. Still, they knew perfectly well that the code itself, however massively complex it was (and it was!) overlay relatively simple original military messages in perfectly intelligible German. They new it was an artificial human means of communication. And that was all they needed to know. Let us never forget that those clever bastards at Bletchley Park cracked the Enigma Code without the benefit of computers, which says far more for them than it does for us today!

A Universal Enigma Code for Extraterrestrial Communication?

“Are you completely bonkers?” I hear you protest. Not so fast. Yes, the irksome question still remains, and refuses to just go away in a puff of smoke: would any extraterrestrial communication system or “language”, if we must insist on calling it that, even be able to begin to crack a human Extraterrestrial Enigma Code we so blithely sent buzzing off into interstellar space at the speed of light, unless their communication system were in fact a “language” something along the lines of what we understand a language to be? Conceivably they might, but their “language” would have to be a language fairly approximating the universal construct of what we call human language for them to be able to do so. Otherwise... fill in the blanks. Rather, do not fill in the blanks. Firing off blanks does not kill anyone. Firing off blank “blank” messages does not “mean” anything to any higher intelligence which has no need of language as we understand it. In fact, they might even toss our medium, forget the “message” into the “garbage”, considering it as nothing more significant than “dog poop” or whatever they call “it”.

One thing is pretty obvious to me at least: sending a code which would be interpreted as an Enigma Code by some extraterrestrial civilization would probably be more like child’s play to them than vainly struggling trying to decipher what the silly messages on the Voyager spacecraft mean, simply because the latter are plainly and solely human, nothing more or less & next nothing else at all. But as I have said over and over, the “message” or more properly the signals we transmit cannot & must not be simply human in nature, they must at least make a stab at being cosmically universal, at least to one extraterrestrial civilization whose communication system bears attributes roughly equivalent to what we deem to call language – excuse me, human language. Oh and by the way, good luck finding it, because the odds are almost certainly stacked trillions to one against us.

4. The problem gets far more complex, if we just pause for even a moment and allow the scary realization to sink in that any signals we send at the source, particularly geometric, even if they are entirely abstract to us, may run the full gamut from concrete to semi-abstract to abstract and, yes, even beyond abstract and consequently beyond our ken. Just stop and consider for a second what would happen if we sent our silly geometric symbols to a four-dimensional extraterrestrial civilization? I cringe to think of it. And let’s not forget what I just said above: what if another three-dimensional extraterrestrial civilization interpreted absolutely all of our signals, even the two-dimensional, as three-dimensional only? Then there are nuances within nuances within nuances of every shade between these extremes. Beyond these scenarios I have just outlined, my mind simply explodes.

So I will end it there before it does.

However, stay tuned. There’s more, a lot more. I have scarcely begun. Stay tuned for more on extraterrestrial communication. And stay tuned for a possible breakthrough on an entirely new approach to the first baby steps in deciphering Linear A. We’re taking the ball where it wants to take us.

Richard

Astounding Discovery! NASA: Interstellar Communication & Linear B Part 2: The Geometric Economy of Linear B. This is a Mind-Blower!

For the original article by Richard Saint-Gelais, click here:

Before I even begin to address the possibilities of interstellar communication based on the fundamental properties of the Linear B script, I would like to refer you to a sequential series of very early posts on our Blog, in which I formulated the basic thesis that, in fact, the Linear B script for Mycenaean Greek is based on the fundamental principle of Geometric Economy, a highly unusual, if not outright exceptional characteristic of the Linear B central construct of a syllabary+logography+ideography:

And moving onto Numerics:

Extended Set: Linear & Circular:

Application of the Extended Set to Linear B Syllabograms and Supersyllabograms: Click to ENLARGE

Note that, even though Michael Ventris and Prof. John Chadwick, his intimate colleague & mentor, successfully deciphered some 90% of the Mycenaean Linear B syllabary, neither was aware of the existence of Supersyllabograms, of which there at least 30, all of them a subset of the basic set of Linear B syllabograms. Moreover, even though I myself hit upon the hypothesis and the principle that Supersyllabograms do indeed exist, some of them still defy decipherment, even at a human level, let alone extraterrestrial, which only adds further fuel to the raging fire that awaits us when we take even our first baby steps into the putatively impossible task of interstellar communications reliant on syllabaries similar to Minoan Linear A, Mycenaean Linear B & Arcado-Cypriot Linear C. For my initial post announcing the existence of Supersyllabograms in Linear B and their profound ramifications in the further simplification of the syllabary, click here:

At the time I first posted these Paradigmatic Tables of the Geometric Economy of Linear B, I already suspected I was onto something really big, and even that the very hypothesis of the Geometric Economy of Linear B might and indeed could have potentially colossal ramifications for any operative semiotic base for devising altogether new scripts, scripts that have never been used either historically or in the present, but which could be successfully applied to dynamically artificial intelligence communications systems. However inchoate my musings were at that time that Linear B, being as geometrically economic as it obviously was, at least to my mind, might and could also apply to extra-human communication systems, i.e. communication with extraterrestrials, the thought did pass through my mind, in spite of its apparent absurdity. That is how my mind works. I have repeatedly asserted in this blog that I am forever “the doubting Thomas”, extremely prone not to believe anything that passes before the videographic panorama of my highly associative intellect. Put another way, I recall a fellow researcher of mine, Peter Fletcher, informing me that I had a “lateral mindset”. I had never considered it from that angle before, but even with this truly insightful observation, Peter had not quite hit the mark. Not only does my reasoning process tend to be highly associative and lateral, but also circular, with all of the tautological implications that carries with it.

I devised this paradigm chart of (approximately) rectangular syllabograms and supersyllabograms in Linear B to illustrate how such symbols could conceivably be transmitted to interstellar civilizations in the implausible hope that we might, just might, be able to transmit something vaguely intellgible, however miniscule, to such imagined aliens. But as you might easily imagine, even from a chart of only a small subset of the 61 syllabograms alone in Linear B (another herculean task not yet completed), the dilemma is fraught with almost insurmountable difficulties, even at the theoretical, conjectural level.

In fact, I am a firm believer in the precept that all human rational thought-process are in fact just that, tautological, which is the fundamental reason why it is so utterly perplexing for us as mere humans to even begin to imagine anything at all otherwise, i.e. to think outside the box. But we can if we must. Otherwise, any attempt to communicate on a semiotic basis with extraterrestrial intelligence(s) is simply doomed to failure. The reason is obvious: the semiotic ground and its spinoff framework of signifiers and signified of every single extraterrestrial intelligence (if indeed any such beast exists... see doubting Thomas above) is almost certainly and (inevitably) bound to be completely unlike, or to put it even more accurately, completely alien to any other. And this is precisely where we are on extremely slippery grounds. We may be skating on the surface of the ice, but the ice is thin and is bound almost certainly to crack, before any given extraterrestrial intelligence can even begin to decipher the semiotic framework of our own unique structure of signals, as Richard Saint-Gelais nicely points out in Chapter 5 of his study of the principles underlying the possible communication, however remote, with any single given extraterrestrial intelligence. I cannot stress this enough. The snares and traps we can so easily slip into far outweigh any practical framework even remotely potentially applicable to the (far-fetched) possibility of extraterrestrial communication. But this does not necessarily imply that such communication is impossible. Extremely improbable, yes, but impossible, no. See Infinite Improbability Drive in the Spaceship, Heart of Gold, Wikipedia:

If you have not yet read The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, I urge you to do so, at least if you have a sense of humour as nutty as mine. I swear to God it will leave you laughing out loud.

But I have not yet done with the possibility, however, remote, of extraterrestrial communication. There is another ancient syllabary, the younger cousin of Mycenaean Linear B, namely, Arcado-Cypriot Linear C, of which the Geometric Economy is even more streamlined and considerably less complex than that of Linear B. I have neither the energy nor the time to even begin approaching that huge undertaking, but you can be sure that I shall eventually take a firm aim at the possibilities for extraterrestrial communication inherent in Arcado-Cypriot Linear C, probably sometime in the winter of 2015. Meanwhile, I would like you all to seriously entertain this notion, which has fascinated me to no end for years and years, namely, that the Greeks, brilliant as they were, were far beyond their contemporaries, including the Romans, by inventing the Linear B & Linear C syllabaries, and consequently the ancient Greek alphabet, all of which sported at the very least the five basic vowels. The whole point is that no other Occidental or Centum ancient writing system prior to ancient Greek, had even dreamt of the concept of vowels – although of course, Oriental Sanskrit, the Satem Indo-European cousin of Greek, had done precisely the same thing! No huge surprise there either, given that the Sanskrit scribes and philosophers were as intellectually refined as the Greeks.

For my previous discussion of The Present and Imperfect Tenses of Reduplicating – MI – Verbs in Linear B & the Centum (Greek) – Satem (Sanskrit) branches of ancient Indo-European languages, click on this banner:

Now let’s take my assumption one step further. What I am saying, to put it as plainly as the nose on my face, is that the invention of the ancient Greek & Sanskrit writing systems was as enormous a leap in the intellectual progress of humankind as were the equally astounding invention of printing by the Germans & Italians in the early Renaissance, and of computers & the spectacular explosion of the space race in the latter part of the twentieth century, to say nothing of the swift global propagation of the World Wide Web from ca. 1990 to the present. Each of these intellectual leaps have been absolutely pivotal in the advancement of human thinking from concrete to abstract to, we might as well say it out loud, to cosmic, which we are already the cusp of. Three greatest historical revolutions in the expansion of human consciousness, without which we would never have even been capable to rising to the cosmic consciousness which is dawning on humanity at this very moment in our historical timeline.

But, here lies the real crux: without the first great leap the Greeks took in their astonishing invention of Linear B, Linear C & the Greek alphabet, neither of the next two revolutions in human thought could possibly have manifested themselves. But of course, all three did, because all three were inevitable, given the not-so-manifest, but intrinsic destiny humankind has always had access to to, however little we may have been conscious of it “at the time”. But what is time in the whirlpool of infinity? Apparently, not nothing. Far from it. Time is a construct of infinity itself. Einstein is the password. Given this scenario, cosmic consciousness is bound to toss us unceremoniously even out of the box. What a mind-boggling prospect! But someday, possibly even in the not too distance future, we will probably be up to it. We can only hope and pray that we will. It is after all the only way out of the ridiculously paradoxical conundrums which presently face us in the herculean task of communicating at all with alien intelligences.

Richard Vallance Janke, November 2014

Astounding Discovery! Look What I Found from NASA on Linear B! You’ll be amazed! PART 1

Click this banner to read the entire Chapter:

Once you open the NASA PDF file, just scroll down the Table of Contents to Chapter 5: Beyond Linear B. You will then need to continue scrolling until you reach page 79. You can then scroll page by page through the whole of Chapter 5. I am willing to bet this is going to be as mind-blowing a read for you as it was for me. Here are just a few tantalizing excerpts from Chapter 5:

Excerpts from Chapter 5, by Richard Saint-Gelais

pg. 81:
... the deciphering of coded messages or inscriptions written in extinct languages — may provide a fresh look at the problems involved.

pg. 82:
At first glance, the difficulties involved in the decipherment of coded messages or ancient scripts suggest a rather pessimistic view of the interstellar communication challenge, for if it took specialists many years to solve the enigma of writing systems devised by human beings... passim ... it seems unrealistic to imagine that our messages could be easily understood by beings whose culture, history, and even biology will differ vastly from ours. How can we be sure that some well-meaning interpreter will not misread our intended message?

On a semiotic level, the similarity between the three kinds of situations is readily apparent. Deciphering inscriptions in unknown languages or messages in secret codes implies coping with strings of signs without having any prior knowledge of the encoding rules, so recognizing these rules become one of the ends (instead of the means, as is usually the case) of the interpretive process. The decipherer of unknown languages tries to establish the phonetic and/or semantic value of symbols... passim ...

I use the word signal instead of sign because at the early stage of interpretation, decipherers must still identify the relevant semiotic units. They are confronted with signals — i.e., material manifestations of some kind (strokes on clay tablets, microwaves of a certain frequency) — that may be signs. A sign is more abstract in nature: it is a semiotic configuration that is relatively independent of the concrete signals that embody it because it is defined by a limited number of relevant features,...

pg. 89:
The second way is to think up self-contextualizing messages — or, in other words, self-interpreting signs. A self-interpreting sign is easier conceptualized than created. Let’s consider, for instance, the pictograms imagined by H. W. Nieman and C. Wells Nieman, which would be sent as sequences of pulses that correspond to the dots into which an image has been decomposed. In order to reconstruct the correct image, the recipients would need first to convert the linear signal into a bi-dimensional structure and then to interpret that structure to determine what it might signify or represent... passim ... Frank Drake imagined an easy and ingenious way to point to this, by making the total number of dots equal the product of two prime numbers, say 17 and 23, so that the transmitted message can be construed only as a 17-by-23-cell grid. Such a signal is as close as we may come to a message embodying an interpretive instruction. It assumes only a basic knowledge of prime numbers, which is not asking too much. So this instruction looks promising, but only insofar as the recipient deduces that the signal corresponds to a rectangular grid (See next post for more).

pg. 91:
We must remember that a message is composed not of one isolated sign but of (sometimes complex) combinations of signs, which may contribute to their mutual elucidation. This is precisely the idea behind Vakoch’s proposal of a sequence of frames, each of which would contain six distinct areas: one for the picture; four for different parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs); and one for the interrelationship between two successive frames (a meta-sign, then). Here we have a combination of icons (the shape of a human body, or of parts of it) and symbols: nouns for what is shown in the picture, adjectives for properties of that object (e.g., high, low, etc.), verbs for actions performed by the character between two successive frames, and adverbs for characteristics of that action (fast, slow). At first it may seem dubious that a recipient could establish a correlation between a given symbol and what it is intended to designate, or even that this recipient could identify it as a symbol and not as part of the picture. What may decisively help this eventual recipient is the mutual interpretation that parts of the message provide for one another ... passim... and the systematic interplay of repetition and variation between frames, which will give recipients the opportunity to make conjectures — abductions — that the subsequent frames may either confirm or inform... passim...

What we know of interpretation shows that this inability to control reception is always the case anyway, and that it is not necessarily a bad thing. A widespread conception of communication rests on the premise that successful reception of a message is one that recovers the meaning its sender meant to convey through it. But the history of the decipherment of unknown languages shows that things are never so simple, and that oblique ways of reading sometimes lead to unexpected breakthroughs. In his book on extinct languages, Johannes Friedrich points out that the direction in which a script should be read can sometimes be deduced from the pp. 92-93 (ff.) empty space at the end of an inscription’s last line. Here we have an index, a sign caused by its object: the direction of writing is concretely responsible for which side of the last line is left blank. But this is not so conspicuous a sign that it does not require a piece of abductive reasoning. Strange as it may seem, I see in this small example some grounds for hope regarding interstellar communication. We tend to conceptualize communication with extraterrestrial intelligences in terms of the successful transmission of intended meanings. But the production and reception of signs cannot be restricted to an intentional plane. An important feature of most indices is their unintentional nature.

Richard Saint-Gelais

Simplifying the Most Common Ideograms & Logograms for Students of Linear B

Simplifying the Most Common Ideograms & Logograms for Students of Linear B: Click to ENLARGE

One of my Linear B students pointed to me, just today, that it is difficult to remember all of the Linear B Ideograms, which hardly comes as a surprise, given that there are so many of them (well over 100). Ideograms often occasion confusion. With that in mind, I devised the chart which you see above, as a guide to the simplification of learning Linear B ideograms in general.

The situation is further bedeviled by the fact that there are also a few logograms in Linear B, which also have to be learned if the student is to be able to advance to the highest level of proficiency in deciphering and translating Linear B tablets. There is also at least one homophone, RAI, illustrated in the chart above, which very often means “saffron” in Linear B. Students of Linear B have to keep their eye out for the double function of the homophone RAI, which is either simply pronounced as such or is not a homophone at all, but the ideogram for “saffron”. It can be one or the other, but never both. The chart above includes all of the most common ideograms and logograms in Linear B, so if the student masters all of these, that in and of itself should prove to be a more than sufficient foundation for the decipherment of the vast majority of ideograms in Linear B. I should note in passing that the ideograms for “sheep”, “rams” & “ewes” account for more than 20% of a cross-section of 3,000 Linear B tablets with ideograms from Knossos which I have closely studied over the past year. But this does not alter the fact that ideograms for other animals and livestock also often appear on Linear B tablets. So the student of Linear B must stay alert, and not confuse the ideograms for one species for those of another.

I wish all of you who are students of Linear B the best of luck (although luck has nothing to do with it!) in learning this requisite set common ideograms and logograms.

I note in passing that this is our 500th. post, coming a mere two months after our 400th. Posts on our blog are literally taking off!

Richard

Rita Robert’s Translation of KN 409 X k 25: Delivery of Tribute to Kutaistos

Rita Robert’s Translation of KN 409 X k 25: Delivery of Tribute to Kutaistos: Click to ENLARGE

Here we have Rita’s first translation of a tablet considerably more challenging than any she has previously been saddled with. This is because both the words APUDOSI and OPERO are open to debate, for the same old same old reason Linear B researchers and translators always cite, namely, that Linear B vocabulary, more often than not, is ambiguous, especially where context is minimal, as is the case for this tablet. Some translators have, in the past, assigned the meaning, “attribution” to APUDOSI, which literally means, “giving unto”, but such a translation is unquestionably unsound, because it (pardon the pun, which I cannot resist) attributes an abstract meaning to APUDOSI. Not only is the abstract rare in the earliest stages of any language, in this instance, Greek, but the attribution (ahem!) of the abstract “attribution” renders the sense of this tablet absurd. Translators who persist in frequently assigning abstract meanings to attributed (A) Linear B words should beware of this practice, as it is bound to lead them into irresolvable impasses.

Now I am going to contradict myself flat out. OPERO, in this context, means either “debt” or “liability”. “What!” I hear you protest. “You have just made a fool of yourself.” Not at all. I this context, which is typical of the primary concern of Linear B scribes, namely, accounting and record keeping, this is indeed the very translation we would expect to see. Accounting and inventory records frequently have recourse to terms such as – account, debt, deficit, liability & total – and in keeping with this, Linear B tablets do make use of the abstract in this context, because they must. But this probably the only exception to the “rule”. There are no “rules” as such, anyway, and exceptions always pop up whenever anyone is foolhardy enough to make them. Of course, it is possible, and in fact even likely that other abstract words in other areas of the Minoan economy are liable to appear, and if and when they do, provided that their connotations are sound in the given context, I am the last person on earth to contest such translations. The area in which more such abstract words are likely to appear is that of sheep husbandry and rearing, accounting for some 20 % of all Linear B tablets.

There still remains one more possibility for the translation of OPERO = “tribute”, which is even more abstract than those cited above. But it fits the context, provided that we assume (as I am doing here, at least tentatively) that Kutaistos, Phaistos, Exonos and other Minoan settlements were as worthy of tribute as Knossos itself most certainly was. But it was more likely the other way around. Just as tribute came pouring into the Treasury of Delphi of Athens from the subject cities of her Empire in the 5th. century BCE, so must have the same occurred with Knossos. So there is even another translation which could be assigned to this tablet, which is after all a fragment:

Delivery of tribute from Kutaistos... (to Knossos) - missing because this is a fragment.

Recall that the genitive can be assigned the value “of” or “from”, let alone plenty of other values, context dependent. I deliberately omitted this translation from Rita’s work, because it is probably the most contestable of the lot. Other Linear B translators and research experts are sure to have plenty to say about this.

Richard

Translation of a Tiny Linear B Fragment Thebes TH Of 37, Spelt Granary & Bales of Wool

Introduction: Discoveries of the Cache of Linear B Tablets at Thebes:

First, some background on the Linear B Thebes tablets. This relatively small cache was unearthed at archaeological excavations in Thebes, Greece, according to the following timeline: the first 21 fragments were excavated in 1963–64; 19 more tablets & fragments were found in 1970 and 1972; but by far the largest find came from 1993 to 1995, when the archaeologist Vassilis L. Aravantinos discovered some 250 tablets, amounting roughly to 300 or 5% of the entire corpus of about 6,000 Linear B tablets and fragments. Of these, the first and by far the most substantial store, amounting to no fewer than 4,000 tablets and fragments, was unearthed by Sir Arthur Evans from 1900 to 1903 and again after the First World War, and followed by major digs from all other Mycenaean sites, Pylos being the next largest after Knossos, with over 1,000 tablets and fragments there alone.

The Theban tablets and fragments date to the Late Helladic IIIB period (ca. 1300-1200 BCE), contemporary with the finds at Pylos. Apparently, the Theban tablets date from roughly 1225 BCE, when the Kadmeion, the Mycenaean palace complex at Thebes, came to ruin.

Prof. John Chadwick, Michael Ventris’ closest colleague and confidant in the initial decipherment of Linear B, who outlived Ventris by scores of decades, himself identified three recognizable Greek divinities, Hera, Hermes and Potnia "the mistress", among the recipients of wool, and made a case for ko-ma-we-te-ja, the name of a goddess, elsewhere attested at Pylos.

The Significance of Linear B Tablet TH Of 37, as well as of the other Linear B finds at Thebes:

Though relatively few in number (about 300), the tablets and fragments from Thebes are significant for a number of reasons, not the least of which are: (a) by ancient standards for travel time, Thebes was located at a great distance from both Knossos and Mycenae. (b) In spite of this vast distance, the syntactical structure, orthographic conventions and the standard use of the entire Linear B syllabary varied very little, if at all, from Linear B from all the other administrative sites scattered all over Greece and Crete, as well as the outlying Cycladic islands and settlements. (c) The real clincher in this scenario is that Mycenaean Greek, unlike later Greek dialects during the historical period (ca. 800–400 BCE), which varied widely, was remarkably consistent and standardized regardless of where it was used. As “proof” positive of the cross-the-board structural linguistic uniformity of Linear B, regardless of where it was in use (Knossos, Mycenae, Pylos, Phaistos, etc. etc.) all we need to do is simply glance at Theban fragment TH Of 37 (let alone read it), to realize that in fact the consistency is overwhelming, right down to the precise disposition of syllabograms, logograms and ideograms on the tablets, which were also by and large of the same shape as well! And here it is (Click to ENLARGE):

May I stress emphatically that I do not lend any more credence to my own half-baked translations (pardon the obvious pun!), even when I come up with more than one alternative translation, and often as many as three, than to anyone else’s equally scholarly – and valiant, if not fanciful – attempts at translation. I am a doubting Thomas down to my core. I sincerely do not believe in any single over-riding theory of the “best of all possible worlds” when it comes to deciphering any Linear B tablet, except perhaps the most voluminous in which ample context tends to lay to rest all sorts of doubts about almost every word in the integral text. I say, “tends to...”, because even with the longest Linear B tablets, nagging doubts remain about not a few phonemes. All we have to do is compare the decipherments of even as few as three Mycenaean Greek linguists specializing in Linear B to witness these variations, however minor or (sometimes) significant.

And where context is minimal, as in this tablet, the decipherment becomes all the more problematic. Allow me to flag some of the more recalcitrant textual ambiguities on this particular tablet alone.

1. In a real, almost scary sense, all translations of Linear B, for all its inherent ambiguities, are tautological by nature, or plagued with circular reason. There is simply no way out of this impasse. But this is precisely the reason why any and all truly competent decipherments of Linear B tablets vie with one another for attention, and why the whole process of translating Linear B is such an exciting undertaking for us all in the first place. So much the better for all ongoing research ventures in the translation of Linear B, since the more versions of the same tablet (any tablet or fragment) we have, the more likely are we to eventually hone in at least a relatively stable translation with minor, if real, variations.

In fact, I think I would probably have to check myself into a lunatic asylum if I were to make the absurd claim that my translation, however competent or even brilliant, of any Linear B tablet or fragment, were better than another highly qualified translator’s, for the obvious reason that there is no way to check which version is “right” — whatever the blazes that is supposed to mean—unless the doctor is right at hand and on call. And here the doctor is the scribe who actually wrote the tablet in question, and only he can tell us what it really means. But he isn’t available for comment, being sadly dead for some 32 centuries. So we just have to put up with our bandage solutions, even when they do “heal” the text we have in front of us well enough. For this very reason, I never contest the translations my co-researcher, Rita Roberts, posts on our blog, because I was not the author of them, and so I do not and cannot know why she, in her sound judgement, opted for the choices she made. All I can do is come up with an alternative translation, if one is called for. More often than not, it is not. But if it is, that way we both stay clear of our respective asylums. What is good for the goose (Rita) is good for the gander (me), or for that matter any goose or gander.

2. When there is no evidence for an existing (attested A) word to be found anywhere on any extant Linear B medium, I am more than willing to search elsewhere, by which I mean in alphabetical Greek texts, the earlier the better, the best being The Catalogue of Ships in Book II of the Iliad, which is written in the most archaic so-called Epic Greek, sharing as it does a number of grammatical features and even some vocabulary in common with Mycenaean Greek. One of the most outstanding is the archaic genitive in “oio” in the Iliad, which is, for all intents and purposes, the exact equivalent of the Linear B genitive in “ojo” or “oyo”, if you like. And I like “oyo” a lot better for the simple reason that I sincerely believe that the harsher j pronunciation such as we have in English was swiftly on its way out, already morphing into something like the much softer French j as in “je” (I). It is not far from from the soft “je” to outright “i”.

A similar phenomenon was manifested in Middle and Renaissance English, when the rough pronunciation of “r”, which still persists in practically every other Occidental Indo-European language, simply vanished in the Great Vowel Shift between 1350 and 1700 in England, when not only the English vowels ended up greatly softened, but also the labials “l” & “r” underwent the very same process, becoming semi-consonants or more accurately semi-vowels.

This is the same process which shifted the Mycenaean pronunciation towards something like French j as in “je”, not the much stronger English “j” at all! And this is precisely why I, like a few other Linear B scholars, much prefer “ya ye yo” over the more commonly accepted “je je jo”, for the simple but obvious reason that scholars speaking in English will almost certainly get the pronunciation wrong. Since English is after all by far the most common language used for research articles, both in print and online, regardless of scientific, linguistic, historical or literary discipline, we are far more likely to fall into this trap, even if we are not English speaking, as that is the way “j” is pronounced in English. You just cannot get around it, try as you might... unless of course you are French, and cannot pronounce “j” as the English do, but pronounce it as the French do... which just so happens to agree much more closely with the latter pronunciation, at least in my opinion. Otherwise, how can we explain the relatively swift transition from “ojo” to “oyo” to “oio” in Homeric Greek? I leave it entirely to you to decide for yourselves.

3. When early alphabetical texts are not available, the next best resource is the Liddell & Scott Greek-English Lexicon (1986), which after all includes many dialectical variants on the same word(s), quite a few of them (quasi)-archaic. And even in those instances where only latter-day Ionic and Attic orthography is to be found, we can still make a brave attempt (as I always do), to retrospectively re-construct much earlier versions of the word in question.

This is exactly what I have done on this tablet, where:

3.1 I had to rummage through Liddell & Scott to come up with a suitable translation for the first word in the first line of this tablet, QARIYA, which did not make any sense whatsoever, at least for the first half-hour of digging about. However, the most likely candidate finally popped up right in front of my nose. I decided that the translation I hit upon was a pretty good match with AREIZEWEI (dative singular), which I happened to translate first (3.2). The match is the Ionic form of the word for “granary”, which fits the bill very nicely.

Caveat: however, once again, I must warn you, this translation of mine is neither any better or any worse than anyone else who really puts the axe to the grindstone. This tablet is open to at least a few interpretations, for the simple reason that, in this case as in so many others, the Linear B text is more or less ambiguous – and here, unfortunately, more. Other experienced and expert Linear B translators will surely take exception to my translation. That is the healthy approach. I invite translators who disagree with my own version of this text to make their views known in the Comments section for this post. In fact, I welcome any criticisms, however tough, of any of my translations of Linear B tablets.

3.2 I merge two Ionic-Attic words into one so-called “Mycenaean” word, areizewei (areirawewei). Whether this word ever existed is open to hefty debate, but it might have, which is good enough for me. I have done this on several Linear B tablets, including the very last one in the post immediately before this one, in which I translated the famous Linear B tablet, Mycenae MY Oe 106. It is no mere accident that the clay figure of a boy appears in tandem with this tablet... because that is precisely what the Linear B scribe intended. We need to pay a lot more attention to everything that appears on any and all Linear B tablets and fragments, including attendant pieces such as this, because they must be there for a very good reason. If you read my previous post, all of this will come into sharp focus. On that tablet, I came up with a derivative [D] word (not attested [A]) for “a young boy”, transliterated here into Latin script = koroton, which in turn just happens to be an exact match with the Linear B KOROTO on this tablet. This phenomenon is identical to the Classical Attic paidion (a youngster). Since the word KOROTO is right in front of our noses on this tablet, then it does exist, and it does mean “a young boy”. What the blazes else can it mean, especially when that huge sketch of a boy is staring us right in the face? In fact, what the scribe who wrote tablet truly seems to be saying is that the boy is the primary subject of the entire tablet, which is precisely what I take it to mean.

PS in case you are wondering (which you probably are not), it took me 12 hours (!) to construct the illustration and to compile the text of this post, the longest time ever I have had to devote to any post. But for most significant explanatory posts I still spend between 4 and 8 hours. So I sincerely hope folks who read my posts really do appreciate all the bloody hard work I pour into them, and even, dare I suggest, flag all such posts with “Like”. And why not comment on them too? It won’t kill you, and certainly won’t kill me. Healthy debate, as I have intimated above, is the very sustenance of true research.

Richard

Tag: translation

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