A lot of loonies make this claim, but Tom's work is credible enough that it's being reviewed by linguistics experts at Rutgers and Cambridge. Additional validation: his approach produces results. He's translated over 300 words, and that's never been done before, and his solution actually solves some problems in Linear B. Tom is an AI engineer, and Claude Code was key to his work. Disclosures: I know Tom socially, and I wrote the post at the link.
A little bit more. If you ask ChatGPT to "solve linear a" it thinks you mean linear algebra. If you specify that it's the Minoan translation problem, you get a table similar to the one that we get a glimpse of in the without access to the paper, we can't say how much more work the paper has than my gist.
The original prompts aren't provided, nor is the original context; even then, you can't really treat a stochastic system like an LLM as a major component in reproducibility.
> even then, you can't really treat a stochastic system like an LLM as a major component in reproducibility.
If you had the other things, being "stochastic" is not even remotely a show-stopper. Stochastic processes abound and are the reason the mathematics of statistics was developed in the first place, ultimately allowing us to create such things as LLMs.
When all the relevant steps gets published, I absolutely expect a lot of people to (attempt to) reproduce this work even though LLMs are stochastic.
My issue with this is that it's a form of "soft" reproducibility, where it'll work for many (maybe even most!) people, but that depends on the way the original prompt was formulated (read on) and the state of the random noise in the system.
On the prompt formulation; prompts with very similar formulations (in terms of both semantics, hamming distance, or both) can lead to _wildly divergent_ outputs in my experience. It's not rigourous, and when that divergence happens, it's extremely difficult (arguably impossible, by nature of the architecture of transformers) to identify why the divergence happened and where.
Sure it is. We're humans, not robots (well, I think I am, and I presume you are as well, but for all we know, we could be living in a simulation), so if the non-deterministic system decides to generate code that calls the variable foo one day and bar the next, as long as the code still does what's being asked of it, why do I care that the non deterministic system chose to call the variable something different when run on Tuesday? There's the computer science definition of determinism and the engineering result of "does it work", which are at odds. It's like the halting problem. We haven't solved the computer science definition of the halting problem, but give some C code with a loop that won't terminate to Claude, and it'll call that out as not halting.
All things aside, I think this misses the forest for the trees on the halting problem.
It's not about being able to throw claude or codex at a loop and having it evaluate it for halting, it's about being able to do this for arbitrary code. Computer science rigourously defines the halting problem as not computable and undecidable. within the framework of using something akin to static analysis using any deterministic Turing machine.
There's not really a question of "solving" the halting problem like there's some as-yet unknown way of generally figuring out if arbitraty code halts. Turing proposed a proof in 1937 in favour of undecidability of what we now know as the halting problem, building on ideas first articulated by Church a few years prior.
Frankly, if anything, it's reasonable to say that the halting problem's been solved, just in the direction of undecidability rather than decidability.
Anyway, back to LLMs; as code gets more complex, the robot will need a bigger context window, more hardware resources, and more time, all of which will be variable due to the noise inherent in the system. It'll be difficult to put a useful upper and lower bound on how much computing power and time it'll take to figure out if a program ever halts. Which is all a bit moot, frankly, in the context of halting, but useful to keep in mind in the more general context of using these things as analysis tools.
Every day when you lower your butt onto your chair, you trust a stochastic system enough to assume you'll rest on the chair safely and not spontaneously phase through, which would lead to rather gory and painful terminal experience.
Physics at macro scale is stochastic, which is a good reminder that stochastic != uniformly random. Expected distributions matter.
> QM has such small standard deviations as to be irrelevant on the macro for things like bums and chairs
I was going to segue into thermodynamics as a backup example, but you made me think of something better.
> IMO a better example would be the stochastic nature of quality control in manufacturing.
How about, more specifically, food manufacturing? Or maybe, let's talk about cooking?
Cooking is as stochastic as it gets, and we handle it fine. It could be better - the better version is called "chemical process engineering", it's what cooking looks like when you care about quality and consistency of output, and can afford the equipment and process actually necessary for it. Regular people don't (i.e. neither care, nor can afford) - we call this cooking. It's an art, not a science, and people not only do it, but love it, and tie their identities to it, and build businesses around it, and a culture that embraces all the compromises (and calls the more serious approach "unhealthy").
> Cooking is as stochastic as it gets, and we handle it fine. It could be better
My attempts at making bread have been too stochastic, in that it hardly ever produces nice results.
But yes. Eyeballing how much dried herbs to put in my dishes because I like what 2-isopropyl-5-methylphenol does for them. Usually it works, sometimes it's just a bit too Italian.
Might not be the amount, you may have not controlled for humidity or temperature (wink wink), or just that the timer on your oven is off by one minute per every ten minutes, and its bang-bang thermostat never actually reaches the temperature you set on the panel, and...
... in some sense, it's a miracle most people deal with this kind of bullshit without complaining much.
(Probably because they don't realize it's something to complain about. It's just how things are.)
There are too many value judgments in this post. You can "cook" like "regular people" do, and be completely serious, and apply chemical and physical knowledge in doing so, and test the output for quality; generally that's what restaurant chefs do. It doesn't make sense to cook like you're tooling an assembly line, because you aren't cost-optimizing and packaging a product that needs to sit on a store shelf for weeks, months, or years while maintaining its desired qualities.
Speaking generally, food produced though "chemical process engineering" (a.k.a. factories) must compromise on many axes, one of them being nutritional content. We intuitively do not care about several of these dimensions when cooking food with fresh ingredients, at least not at the scale of, say, Kellogg's or General Mills.
Maybe that's evidence of accepting a stochastic process in our daily lives, but you're kind of selling the tradition and science of cooking short when you argue that factory-produced food is a "more serious approach".
Claude code was used to organize the material and to run simulations. The simulations were to determine the likelihood that the text was Semitic vs Tom got lucky. Tom has assigned probabilities to each of the syllables he has proposed sound values for.
I think I caught this guy's reddit posts on the subject. Someone was playing around with statistical analyses of a big Linear A corpus + some other corpora. There was an extremely clear signal that Linear A seemed to be much more similar to one other corpus than to the others. This was the first time I've ever heard of something that might* have been a good hint for decipherment. There's a Dutch professor emeritus (in linguistics) who claims it is Hurrian-Urartian and he's been posting youtube videos about his "decipherment" but he didn't seem too convincing to me.
Claude helped write code to read and parse the corpora and to do some fairly basic statistical analysis along the lines of "which Linear A symbols most often occur together" and "if we use known Linear B sound values, which of the other corpora most often have vowel similarities with the Linear A corpus".
You can write that code yourself or you can ask an LLVM to write it for you. The provenience of the code isn't important.
*) He later deleted some of them, I think. What was still there on reddit a few weeks ago had dead links to a web site of his with statistical tables and I believe also code.
It seems this is still extremely early in the process. There is an apparent finding that was shared. Evidence which would be the basis for a paper is "being reviewed by linguistics experts at Rutgers and Cambridge". So they are trying to do the right thing by talking about what they believe they have done but holding off publication and serious claims until later. The general idea that written forms can be categorized by systems built with Claude could be applied to other as yet undecipherable languages could be used by other interested investigators just with what is discussed here.
> The general idea that written forms can be categorized by systems built with Claude could be applied to other as yet undecipherable languages could be used by other interested investigators just with what is discussed here.
Could you rephrase this or explain it more thoroughly? I don’t follow. What does it mean to categorize a written form by systems built with Claude?
But the Internet nerds wish to blindly judge something they know nothing about so they can feel better with the assumption that they could have done better somehow. How will they be appeased if the document they will say they have read and understood (without having done either) is not available to point at? How, I ask?!
It's entirely reasonable to ask for the underlying research in response to a blog post hyping up an unproven claim in an area notoriously full of amateurs making the same claim that historically fail to stand up to scrutiny.
Particularly when the only source is a friend of the author, posting on a blog named "AI Clambake" about "A weekly, human-powered newsletter for advertising folks who want to stay on top of the AI mayhem" and not a publication with any credibility in linguistics.
None of that means it can't be true, but some basic skepticism is warranted here. Otherwise we end up in a situation like the LK99 room temperature superconductor where a lot of HN commenters were also upset at the cynical "downers" who just couldn't root for a good thing/progress.
After reading too many post in HN I got two conclusions:
1) Many preprints are bad, incredible bad. I read a lot of posts about ivermectine during 2020 and the errors were obvious. Like no control groups, the control group is a bunch of unrelated guys in another city, and a weird articles that split the 20+20 cases in 10 bins with 2+2 cases in each. They had a lot of error that were easy to spot without being a medical doctor. (Ctrl+F exclusions, you may get a surprise.) (And don't get me started with Chlorine Dioxide.)
2) Perpetual mobile and mass less drive reappear every few years. I definetively can read most of them. The most interesting part is the totally broken explanation of why this new version does not break the laws of physics.
3) HN has a lot of users specialized in niche topic. A few weeks ago I wrote a comment with a joke: "the list of text transformation to allow a Spanish speaker to read German enters in a napkin" (for example v->f and w->v and a few more). Someone was surprised because s/he knows that German has more phonemes than English that has more phonemes than Spanish. There is someone wandering here that really knows about phonetics.
So, I want to see a preprint. Perhaps I can read it, perhaps someone else can read it, perhaps we have to wait a few days until someone writes a nice blog post and debunks it, perhaps it's correct.
Amazing work and refreshing to see a well written and cogent post to summarise it. Would love to hear more about how he used Claude to help solve the puzzle.
You're absolutely right! We've opened a ticket with the Linear A folks, hopefully they'll get back to us soon with an update as to whether we've got it correct or not. Hang tight!
I mean it's not like anyone could objectively go back in time and query ancient civilizations for what they meant, but presumably it means the verification heuristics, they have currently, pragmatic success, and expert solidarity means that it is "verified"
They verified Linear B against a new tablet that turned up in a dig after the Kober/Ventris* solution had been published. It had pictures of jars with no or one or two handles, and the claimed Linear B for "two handled jar" and such next to the correct picture.
* Ventris' publication, but given Kober's contribution to the work they should really share equal credit. I like to think Kober would have got there on her own if she had access to the larger corpus that Ventris had (the Pylos tablets) and a comparable amount of free time and money available.
You can evaluate the logic for the decipherment step by step and make sure all the claims are justified. But the best test is to try the proposed decipherment against some new text and see if it makes sense. In the case of Linear A and the other remaining undeciphered scripts, there's not a lot of held-out text to test against, so it's tricky.
>> reviewed by linguistics experts at Rutgers and Cambridge.
Here in Argentina, near 2005, we had like 5 guys that claimed to have 5 independent solutions of the Goldbach Conjeture. Each one got a PhD student that volunteer to read it, discussed the obvious problems with the author, tried to help to solve them and after a few months of back and forth they concluded that none of the solutions were correct or has an interesting insight. Nobody was surprised about the that, but some wanted to give them a try.
Until there is a official report by Rutgers or Cambridge, it doesn't mean too much.
Skepticism is appropriate until the experts bless the work. I will point out however that all of the words Tom has translated provide strong support for his proposed phonetic values. And that's why I published the information prior to confirmation, along with the appropriate caveats.
he has apparently translated one word according to the only documentation we have. "my untrained amateur friend with no experience in the field has solved a hundreds of years old puzzle. no, trust me!" gets old real quick.
The thunder is as per the headline. Assuming it passes review.
One of the things I find weird with AI is how the dismissals of work that involve AI splits into two camps: like yours, saying the AI did the work while the human played no role and deserves no credit; and those saying the AI rips off its training data while the human using it played no role and deserves no credit.
I exist in both camps. Claude can’t launder human achievement into a different person. Claude stole it, but it’s still in Claude’s possession and is not transferable in any durable sense.
> Claude stole it, but it’s still in Claude’s possession and is not transferable in any durable sense.
No human, individually or as a team, has been able to solve this to date.
To the extent this was Claude solving it itself and thus denying Di Mino any thunder, there was nobody to have stolen anything from. To the extent he has thunder to be stolen, it wasn't ever in Claude's possession.
"Flattening of achievement" is true for the overwhelming majority of people named and revered for their genius. Shakespeare didn't invent many of his plot lines, Einstein used Lorentz' transform (amongst other things) etc.
As reported (I have no skin in this), Di Mino appears to have used Claude to write tool to perform statistical analysis to test an idea he had, and in such cases as this it seems to me fairer to praise the human using the machine than to praise a director for the films acted, filmed, written, and edited by others.
Claude helped, it did not do the work. It would have taken Tom more time to crack on his own, and it would have been harder, but the key insights were Tom's not Claude's.
I think it is an open question: can an unknown language be cracked -- without any dictionary or grammar or understanding of the language? Just lots and lots of texts, maybe some of it bilingual.
It's a common misconception that is what happened with Ancient Egyptian with the Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta Stone was just one of the big pieces of the puzzle. The decoding came when people realized that Coptic (a language written alphabetically and still in use in the Coptic Church today) is actually descended from Ancient Egyptian; as Spanish is to Latin, Coptic is to Ancient Egyptian.
Similarly the attempts to decode classical Maya were all dead ends. Until Yuri Knorozov realized that it encoded the ancestor of the Maya languages which are still spoken to this day. (Knorozov's Wikipedia article is worth checking out just for his photo with his cat. [0] IMHO.)
I have written before about the La Mojarra 1 stele in Mexico [1]. It looks a lot like Maya. [2] But it isn't Maya. Maybe the difference like between Russian and Latin writing?
No one can read it. It's undecipherable. There are some attempts to identify it with a proposed ancient language that would have been related to the modern Mixe-Zoque languages: some of the glyphs that are shared with Maya, when read phonetically, start sounding like a Mixe-Zoque language. But no one has proposed a confident decipherment. There probably isn't enough text. La Mojarra 1 is the only long example of the Isthmian script.
Deciphering Akkadian was very difficult, at first. The process started with Persian; old Persian was written in a simplified adapted form of the Mesopotamian cuneiform (wedges on clay). It was a kind of alphabet. And Old Persian was already understood. And there was a bilingual text on a monument carved by Darius I. But even then -- decoding relies so heavily on the fact that Akkadian is a Semitic language distantly related to Hebrew, more distantly, also Ancient Egyptian. So again, we sort of knew what we were looking for.
That is all to say: even if the Voynich manuscript (for example) contains real text in an otherwise completely lost language, I'm not sure it is possible even theoretically to translate it.
Sorry but I don’t recognize this as being an achievement by an amateur. This dude had no chance in hell until we trained a model to use his time to suss it out.
Assuming this pans out, every other professional linguist in the world has had the option to use Claude or other LLMs, but has not solved this problem, despite the incentives for doing so. It stands to reason the human is adding crucial value.
I drilled down on this with Tom. He thinks that it might not have happened without Claude Code, but Claude was used to organize all of the symbols, and to run I think it was 100,000 simulations to assess whether or not he had an actual insight, or if he just randomly got lucky. Claude did NOT crack the code. Significant supporting role though.
So Claude Code was used to generate software that ran simulations? I don't think LLMs in and of themselves can execute simulations, esp. a specific, non-single digit count like 100k.
I feel like that is extremely relevant information. An LLM running "simulations" is nonsense, using an agent (apparently Claude Code) to write simulation software is more realistic. I'm sure you could clarify this since you have a relationship with the person.
Curious to see where this goes. Hopefully an update is posted here when it's all said and done :)
As observed by archaeologist John Younger, the entire Linear A corpus takes up only 1.84 pages of letter paper when typeset in 12 point font and 1-inch margins.
An in addition to that, a vast majority of documents are lists which consist of a "header" (1 to 3 words) and word-number pairs afterwards. An another common class are small clay seals with 1, 2 characters carved into them. It's likely that in both cases, we may be dealing with abbreviations.
Some of the lists end with "ku-ro" and a number that's the sum of all the previous numbers, oddly frequently off by one.
Surprisingly this comes up more then you'd think, for instance in Ancient Rome, tomorrow is two days away so all the dates are off by one from what you'd think it was. They mainly count down and it goes, 5, 4, 3, day before, day.
“Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration.” — Stan Kelly-Bootle (first person to obtain a postgraduate degree in computer science)
My French teacher told me a story of a Norwegian man who married a French woman. A few months after she'd moved to Norway, my French teacher had come to visit thrm.
When she was leaving, the woman said "pose, pose". My French teacher was puzzled, and asked why she'd said that, and the woman asked if it didn't mean "au revoir" in Norwegian?
Because it was what the cashier at the grocery store said to her every time.
That's one of the reasons. Another, and more important one, is that we don't know the language that the script transcribes. The claim above is that it's Hebrew.
I have no idea why Minoans would speak Hebrew, there's no indication as far as I'm aware of extensive cultural exchange between the Minoan civ and Hebrew-speaking people, but there's a very clear hierarchy of difficulty to translate dead scripts. From easier to harder:
a) We know what language the script transcribes and how the script transcribes it (e.g. what symbol means what word or sound).
b1) We don't what language the script transcribes but we know how the script transcribes it (e.g. it's a syllabary or an abjad etc).
b2) We know what language the script transcribes but we don't know how the script transcribes it (e.g. Egyptian hieroglyphics).
c) We don't know what language the script transcribes nor do we know how it transcribes it.
b1) and b2) are more or less of similar difficulty.
Linear A goes to category c) above. We know next to nothing about the script or the language, other than the fact the former was reused in linear B to transcribe Mycenean Greek.
Semitic, not Hebrew. Hebrew is one language in the semitic group, alongside Arabic, Amharic and many more. They were much more spread out in the west before the iron age, with most people in Asia Minor belonging to the group. Some of the earliest states used the languages, and they spread alongside the idea of states.
You're right of course but the article above is unclear about whether the claim is that Linear A transcribes Hebrew or a different Semitic language.
First it says that the language of Linear A is a semitic language that is a precursor to biblical Hebrew:
>> Di Mino believes that Linear A belongs to an extinct Semitic language that was a precursor to biblical Hebrew, the way that Latin is a precursor to Italian.
But then it compares the Linear A language directly to Hebrew. For example:
>> Once deciphered, Di Mino saw that the prayer was similar to subsequent Hebrew prayers but was addressed to a Goddess.
So maybe I'm confused. The claim that the Minoans spoke a semitic language sounds less odd than claiming they spoke straight-up biblical Hebrew.
Don't know about the situation for this particular example, but keep in mind this type of analysis will necessarily involve extremely archaic dialects of all the involved languages
You're incorrect. The letter ו (vav) is pronounced /v/ in modern Hebrew but /w/ in Biblical Hebrew and other ancient Semitic languages, which is why the letter is referred to as Waw and transliterated as 'W'.
As an amateur who's been fascinated by this puzzle himself, I will add some context that might be relevant in assessing the plausibility of this claim:
- The "Libation Formula", which the author used as the base for his translations, is the most studied piece of writing in Linear A, because it's the only recurring phrase (with grammatical variation) that we have. The corpus is extremely fragmentary, with just a handful of instances of longer text (and even then, the texts are the length of an average sentence in English). The majority of documents available to us are lists (of inventory, personnel, offerings or something of this sort). The longer texts make use of punctuation marks, likely put in between words. This gives us a non-trivial vocabulary, which still does not match that of any known language.
- With such fragmentary remaining material, we cannot be sure that a) all the texts we call "Linear A" are written in the same language, and b) the recognizable words are not abbreviations, for example.
- The author made an assumption that Linear A symbols which have counterparts in Linear B should have the same phonetic values. This gives us an already known glyph that represented "NA". "Duplicate" glyphs are only found in the P-series, and are assumed to represent syllables which were distinguished by the Linear A language, but not by Greek - such as aspirated/unaspirated P. There is a glyph that stands for "NWA" in Linear B, but instances of it have been found in Linear A as well.
- There are countless words with no known etymology in Ancient Greek, assumed to originate from a substrate language or languages spoken in the area at the time Greeks migrated to their present-day homeland. The language of Linear A would be a likely candidate for such substrate. If Linear A were a Semitic language, then we should already be able to establish Semitic etymologies for those words as they were in Greek. Of course it could also be the case that these words came from an another language which did not adopt writing or its writing did not survive to our times.
Thanks for the context; how do you think this impacts plausibility? Presumably the fact that he made progress in a well studied passage is cause for skepticism? What's your take?
Well, the reasoning in the article is that if you take A-TA-I-*301-WA-JA, keep only W-J and assume *301 starts with N, then you get a claimed Semitic root N-W-Y related to dwelling, except I wonder whether that shouldn't be N-W-H instead https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D7%A0%D7%95%D7%95%D7%94 (Semitic isn't my area) so at best one fifth of one word matches two thirds of another therefore iT mUsT bE sEmItIc. A serious attempt at decipherment should at least try to explain the A-TA-I, or any of the other words in the sentence, for that matter.
I'm not saying that this is implausible, but this is one guess in a sea of many. We were shown a single word substitution with a claim that 300 others match, but no documentation of this person's research. We don't know this person's methodology beyond this single sentence. A naive approach would be to collect a thesaurus of Semitic roots and use automation such as an LLM to match those against instances of words. Sounds plausible in the beginning, but words do not exist independently.
To illustrate how things can go wrong, let's try to prove that English is a Semitic language. Suppose that the source material we have is this sentence:
- "Baker" matches "bVkVr-", "first-born son". We have our anchor now. (V means any vowel).
- "Brought" looks plausibly close to "burāṯ-", "juniper" on our list. So far so good.
- "Bushel" is a good match with "b-š-l", "to be cooked"!
- "Wheat" does not have an exact match. It could be a loanword, for example.
- "Mill" looks like "m-r-r", "bitterness" if we assume lack of written L/R distinction. Again, juniper + cook + bitter is plausible, because juniper can be bitter.
- The meaning of particles will be inferred from the sentence structure.
Okay, let's take a look at our translation! We have "first-born son", "juniper", "cook", (wheat), "bitter". Pretty clear that (wheat) must be the name of a dish here. Therefore, the sentence can be translated as "A bitter juniper dish is being cooked for a first-born son". This even matches the context: the sentence was found in a granary, and it refers to food.
My point here is that with such a small sample size, we can extrapolate the data to mean absolutely anything. With no reference material, we cannot assess the correctness of any translation.
Ciao. I'm Tom di Mino, and I'm on vacation in Bellingham, Washington right now. I'll get back to you later with a formal response.
I've also reached out to Dr. Ester Salgarella, so I'm familiar with attempts to apply computational analysis to the corpus, and where previous efforts erred.
Always glad to exchange! I'm a software engineer and a hobby linguist only myself, so don't expect wonders from me. But this is a fun topic to research for sure.
I'm not an expert on linguistics, but I will say that Crete at that time was polylingual. No one is saying that everyone on the island spoke this Minoan semitic language; only the semitic people on the island, and it was a diverse population.
The name of Cyprus being of semitic origin is probably easy to hand-wave away as the result of trade.
I'd like to offer some evidence that the people of Crete were of Greek origin and therefore Indo-European rather than semitic, unfortunately all the scholarship I can find on the subject is from Greek scholars and since it confirms that the Minoans are genetically related to modern Greeks, the more I hear of that evidence the less I am convinced by it. Because it's exactly consistent with confirmation bias. So I would not be surprised if the Minoans turned out to be one of the lost tribes of Israel.
Except of course we know those turned up in the Americas so they can't be the Minoans.
The serious bit is that as soon as you make claims about who is from where and connected to what ancient people, you lose. It's impossible to disentangle peoples' nationalism and identity politics from whatever facts. I'm speaking in this as a Greek myself. Did you know that the Greek language is not, actually, an Indo-European language, but predates it by severeral hundreds of thousands of years, and has influenced every language you can find on every continent, including but not limited to the languages of the pre-Columbian civilisations? True story. Evidence: plenty! Consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xochicalco Obviously that is the temple of the Goddess Kali in the country side ("Ο ναός της Θεάς Κάλι στην Εξοχή". Εξοχή-Κάλι-κο, Ξοχικάλκο!). I have actually read that in a book someone handed to me when I was a teenager. I had to put the book down after that.
tl;dr people get really crazy when it comes to their ancient history and lose the ability to think straight and derive sound conclusions from facts.
"...syllables which were distinguished by the Linear A language, but not by Greek - such as aspirated/unaspirated P." Given that aspirated and unaspirated voiceless stops were almost certainly distinguished in spoken Greek of the time (as they were in proto-IndoEuropean and in later classical Greek), why would the Greeks not have carried over such a distinction if it existed in the Linear A language? It seems much more likely that the distinction did not exist in the Linear A language or script, and that's why it didn't show up in Linear B.
True, I did not think of the pi/phi distinction when writing this. There are other quirks exclusive to Linear B that don't occur in Linear A though, such as three different ways to write the phoneme "A" with no clear pattern on when is which one used.
With regard to the origin of the script, Linear A documents have been dated to earlier times than Linear B. And then, there is also an even earlier hieroglyphic script, but its relation to Linear A has not been established.
Alot of the comments in this thread are disappointing. Rather that celebrating an achievement (whether or it is validated yet), many of you seem to want to put him down, or make it seem like claude did all the work.
Claiming that claude did all the work is patently ridiculous. Claude is a tool, like any other. The corpus of linear A is ~7500 characters across ~1500 inscriptions and claude, no matter how smart, doesn't just solve that on its own.
this isn't an achievement, it's yet another amateur crank claiming he solved a famous puzzle, without a paper and without any critical review. many people have claimed to decode Linear A before. just because this guy used an LLM doesn't make it more credible
He has a working draft of a manuscript that may form the basis of a scholarly article, it has been shared with experts, and there is an excerpt of the paper in my blog post. I have also seen and read the paper with my own 2 eyes, I can't publish it though, Tom wants to keep that under wraps while it's reviewed by linguistics experts.
But the entire corpus for Linear A is tiny, you could backfill a "translation" that has no actual similarity with the real language when properly tested against novel examples. How was this tested?
who at Rutgers and Cambridge? did he just email some random linguistics profs? why not classics? and did they respond out of genuine interest or just trying to let an enthusiastic amateur down gently?
i am sorry but "crank" is the correct term for the many amateurs who routinely email mathematicians, physicists, and apparently linguists with their special theories without having any academic experience in the field. for every anecdote where it panned out there are thousands of cases where it did not.
This is very exciting. Congrats to Tom on the accomplishment.
To be clear, this is an attempt at a decipherment. This is not proven, and we shouldn't consider Linear A to be "solved" until experts in the field have reviewed the work. In fact, it probably shouldn't be considered "proof" unless some more Linear A writings are uncovered and these are congruent with the method proposed. All that can be said for certain at this point is that this is an interesting conjecture.
But this is a story worth following. This could be the real deal. More research and validation should follow and we should have a better idea in the next few weeks or months whether Linear A has really been solved. At the very least, this is an interesting attempt, and optimistically, it could yield real insight into Minoan culture. Kudos.
If confirmed this is really cool and impressive work.
Honestly curious how many years before it can be one shotted in a coding harness with Fable.next by someone who’s not a linguistics expert.
Develop, test, and rank hypotheses about the phonetic values, morphology, grammar, and possible language family of Linear A using the full available corpus. Do not assume any decipherment is correct. Treat all candidate readings as hypotheses to be scored…”
Humans capable of the first part regularly make the mistake of assuming that their decipherment is correct even if it's not internally consistent and fails to adequately explain most of the data.
I haven't talked to him extensively about how he learned his engineering skills, but he is I believe 100% self taught. His background is in copywriting.
Isn't a big problem with Linear A that there are so few symbols you can "solve" it relatively straightforwardly with no way to tell if you it's correct or not?
You know you have cracked it because using the proposed system you are able to translate the uncracked language. Also helpful if your proposed system for Linear A makes sense relative to related languages that are not Linear A. Tom's proposed phonetic values work for more than one language.
Not questioning the particular finding, just wondering in general. E.g when linear B or hieroglyphs were cracked, you could check angainst other untranslated texts and see if the translation still made sense.
> Di Mino used Claude Code to build a suite of Python scripts that query, cross-reference, and organize the digitized Linear A corpus (drawn from the GORILA and SigLA databases), enabling systematic hypothesis testing at a scale that would have been impractical to do manually.
That's exactly the kind of thing I'd hope Claude would be used for in these kinds of projects - building tools, not black-box "solving" the problem.
If it turns out to be true, it would open the door a bit for connecting Indo-European languages with Semitic languages. In the beginning of the last century it was believed that these were related. Later this came out of vogue. How could they have been so wrong initially? Because both languages families were entangled, as now there is genetic evidence that both languages spread from very close to the Caucasus. It's probably old news for most but in the last 15 years it became clear that Europe was completely resettled, once by Anatolians and then partly by Indo-Europeans. The language of the Anatolians is still unknown.
"How could they have been so wrong initially?" For the same reason that many other proposed reconstructions were (and some still are) so wrong. Chance matches, sometimes actual loanwords, and bias on the part of some people.
i had the fonts for the phaistos disk but not linear a. i have no idea why i had that one even installed, but now i have both :-) only that last character () is still missing. which font is that?
From what I know, the main issue is that the Linear A script corpus is rather small. Another commenter here said it's only 7500 symbols in total, spread around 1500 inscriptions (so on average 5 symbols per inscription).
The other thing I find odd, however, is that it's found to be a Semitic language. If it's a Semitic language, I would have expected it to already have been deciphered. And certainly linguists would have already looked at Semitic languages, and looked hard.
Also if it were a Semitic language, why wasn't it consonantal but had vowels? Usually Semitic languages (and Egyptian maybe) write only the consonants because their stems are made three consonants and vowels are interweaved to make words.
Example semitic root K-T-B and how vowels are added in-between to form words:
kataba – He wrote
yaktubu – He writes / is writing
kitāb – A book
kutub – Books
kātib – A writer / scribe / clerk
maktūb – Written / fate
maktab – An office / desk
maktabah – A library / bookstore
And another such root - D-R-S which means "studying" or "learning."
darasa – He studied
yadrusu – He studies / is studying
dirāsah – A study / school course
dāris – A student / learner
madrūs – Studied / carefully planned
madrasah – A school
This system of triliteral roots is the reason why usually Semitic languages don't use vowels. Why would Linear A have consonant+vowel syllabary if it were semitic?
Your post shows exactly why it would be useful to write vowels in Semitic languages: to distinguish among the different tenses, passive/active, nominalizations etc.---in other words, to distinguish the various words that happen to be based on a single root.
>Di Mino believes that Linear A belongs to an extinct Semitic language that was a precursor to biblical Hebrew, the way that Latin is a precursor to Italian.
Indus valley script is about 1500 years earlier than Linear A and I hope we can also decipher Indus script using AI or not [1]. It's well overdue although from statistical profiling it's has been proven to be a valid linguistic script believed to be being used for writing system the ancient Harappan language, the likely precursor of modern Dravidian languages for examples Telegus and Tamil.
The main reason it's very difficult to decipher is that there's no equivalent Rosetta Stone for Indus script. My hypothesis is that the AI LLM model can be trained or tuned as the logical or virtual version of the venerable Rosetta stone hence can be used to decipher ancient writing system.
The author and their friend are in the thread so I'll try to not be mean.
Caveat: I'm Greek so a kind of natural amateur historian. That is to say I grew up reading about the prehistory and ancient history of Greece, as one does when one is born Greek and a geek. I've seen the Phaistos disk and linear A inscriptions with mine own eyes in Greek museums and I have dreamed of the day they would be translated. I am not at all unsympathetic to the hopes of a Linear A decipherement.
However. The claimed decipherment has all the hallmarks of imaginative and fanciful attempts to draw parallels between historical events and entities, that were not really connected, many of them notably inspired by the Hebrew bible. For example, remember when the lost tribes of Israel turned out in the New World [1]? Or how Biblical Sodom was actually destroyed by a comet [2]? Or the time that Venus was ejected from Jupiter and caused the Biblical Cataclysm [3]? Or, for less biblical but no less foundational texts of the Western literary canon, remember when Heinrich Schliemann discovered the Jewels of Helen of Troy [4] and the Death Mask of King Agamemnon [5]?
Or of course we could recall any of the claims to decipher the Phaistos Disk [6] or the Dropa Disks from Bayan Kara-Ula [7], and so on I'm sure.
All of the above is not to say that a decipherement is impossible. What it is to say is that it currently isn't possible; because we have no idea what the language that Linear A transcribes even is. It's not like the Minoan language is still spoken today in some far-evolved form, as was the case for e.g. Egyptian or Mayan or indeed ancient Greek [8]. So we have an unknown script, writing an unknown language, and to make matters worse there are no parallel texts with another ancient language that might help us bridge the gap. What there is, is some rudimentary understanding of the more obvious contents of Linear A texts (mostly, lists of goods) and the fact that some Linear A symbols have been reused in Linear B.
But, how were they reused? And what good is that knowledge without knowing anything about the language transcribed by Linear A? I can read German, a language that I don't speak, because I can read Latin script, but the meaning of the script might as well be Greek to me [9].
I'm a computer scientists, I guess, these days [10]. The problem of deciphering Linear A, or the Phaistos Disk, or any other script (that may not even be a script) that transliterates a language that we don't know is a problem of reconstructing information that we don't have, from other information that we don't have. I'm not saying it's completely impossible. I mean, who knows? Maybe we're just missing the right maths. But, what we're really trying to do here is de-noise a message garbled by the passage of time without even a guess as to the language the message is written in. Claude Shannon would tell you that it's a fantasy that is not worth pursuing. You don't have to ask him, you can just read his magnum opus [11] and check out Section 3 titled "The Series of Approximations to English" for an idea of what the mechanics of deciphering a script when the language is known look like with the only technology we have that can do the job reliably.
When Turing and the other Brits at Bletchley Park cracked the Enigma code, they at least knew it was, ultimately, a coded form of German. We may have a lot more compute now, and much more advanced tech overall, but there are some barriers that you cannot physically cross, no matter what resources you have. For example, you can't go faster than light and you can't escape the event horizon of a black hole. In the same way you can't translate text written in an unknown script, encoding an unknown language, without any parallel texts with a known language. There is just not enough information to do the job. Worse, if you try, you can endlessly come up with plausible "translations" and convince yourself that you have the right one, but you have no way to know you do.
I'm sorry but this claim is just a wild guess trying to link Hebrew to Linear A, without any serious evidence that the two are linked and without any evidence that the link is real, other than "look, I can guess what all the texts say!".
[8] I can read ancient Greek. The further back in time it goes, the harder it gets to understand what it means but I can still read the script. It has changed in 5000 years but not enough that I can't read it. Nothing like that ability survived for Linear A. I blame Thera.
[9] Except of course then I would understand it. But it's just German to me.
[10] I can assure you that took me by surprised, first of all.
[OP] Kosturdistan | a day ago
yorwba | a day ago
GavinMcG | a day ago
kelseyfrog | a day ago
justin_dash | a day ago
kelseyfrog | a day ago
atrus | a day ago
smsm42 | a day ago
fragmede | a day ago
https://gist.github.com/fragmede/bbf277d36a2398065f109484f34...
[OP] Kosturdistan | a day ago
_verandaguy | a day ago
The original prompts aren't provided, nor is the original context; even then, you can't really treat a stochastic system like an LLM as a major component in reproducibility.
ben_w | a day ago
If you had the other things, being "stochastic" is not even remotely a show-stopper. Stochastic processes abound and are the reason the mathematics of statistics was developed in the first place, ultimately allowing us to create such things as LLMs.
When all the relevant steps gets published, I absolutely expect a lot of people to (attempt to) reproduce this work even though LLMs are stochastic.
_verandaguy | a day ago
On the prompt formulation; prompts with very similar formulations (in terms of both semantics, hamming distance, or both) can lead to _wildly divergent_ outputs in my experience. It's not rigourous, and when that divergence happens, it's extremely difficult (arguably impossible, by nature of the architecture of transformers) to identify why the divergence happened and where.
fragmede | a day ago
_verandaguy | a day ago
It's not about being able to throw claude or codex at a loop and having it evaluate it for halting, it's about being able to do this for arbitrary code. Computer science rigourously defines the halting problem as not computable and undecidable. within the framework of using something akin to static analysis using any deterministic Turing machine.
There's not really a question of "solving" the halting problem like there's some as-yet unknown way of generally figuring out if arbitraty code halts. Turing proposed a proof in 1937 in favour of undecidability of what we now know as the halting problem, building on ideas first articulated by Church a few years prior.
Frankly, if anything, it's reasonable to say that the halting problem's been solved, just in the direction of undecidability rather than decidability.
Anyway, back to LLMs; as code gets more complex, the robot will need a bigger context window, more hardware resources, and more time, all of which will be variable due to the noise inherent in the system. It'll be difficult to put a useful upper and lower bound on how much computing power and time it'll take to figure out if a program ever halts. Which is all a bit moot, frankly, in the context of halting, but useful to keep in mind in the more general context of using these things as analysis tools.
iwontberude | a day ago
[OP] Kosturdistan | a day ago
TeMPOraL | a day ago
Every day when you lower your butt onto your chair, you trust a stochastic system enough to assume you'll rest on the chair safely and not spontaneously phase through, which would lead to rather gory and painful terminal experience.
Physics at macro scale is stochastic, which is a good reminder that stochastic != uniformly random. Expected distributions matter.
ben_w | 23 hours ago
IMO a better example would be the stochastic nature of quality control in manufacturing.
TeMPOraL | 22 hours ago
I was going to segue into thermodynamics as a backup example, but you made me think of something better.
> IMO a better example would be the stochastic nature of quality control in manufacturing.
How about, more specifically, food manufacturing? Or maybe, let's talk about cooking?
Cooking is as stochastic as it gets, and we handle it fine. It could be better - the better version is called "chemical process engineering", it's what cooking looks like when you care about quality and consistency of output, and can afford the equipment and process actually necessary for it. Regular people don't (i.e. neither care, nor can afford) - we call this cooking. It's an art, not a science, and people not only do it, but love it, and tie their identities to it, and build businesses around it, and a culture that embraces all the compromises (and calls the more serious approach "unhealthy").
ben_w | 22 hours ago
My attempts at making bread have been too stochastic, in that it hardly ever produces nice results.
But yes. Eyeballing how much dried herbs to put in my dishes because I like what 2-isopropyl-5-methylphenol does for them. Usually it works, sometimes it's just a bit too Italian.
TeMPOraL | 22 hours ago
... in some sense, it's a miracle most people deal with this kind of bullshit without complaining much.
(Probably because they don't realize it's something to complain about. It's just how things are.)
tadfisher | 21 hours ago
Speaking generally, food produced though "chemical process engineering" (a.k.a. factories) must compromise on many axes, one of them being nutritional content. We intuitively do not care about several of these dimensions when cooking food with fresh ingredients, at least not at the scale of, say, Kellogg's or General Mills.
Maybe that's evidence of accepting a stochastic process in our daily lives, but you're kind of selling the tradition and science of cooking short when you argue that factory-produced food is a "more serious approach".
[OP] Kosturdistan | a day ago
peterfirefly | 21 hours ago
Claude helped write code to read and parse the corpora and to do some fairly basic statistical analysis along the lines of "which Linear A symbols most often occur together" and "if we use known Linear B sound values, which of the other corpora most often have vowel similarities with the Linear A corpus".
You can write that code yourself or you can ask an LLVM to write it for you. The provenience of the code isn't important.
*) He later deleted some of them, I think. What was still there on reddit a few weeks ago had dead links to a web site of his with statistical tables and I believe also code.
petjuh | 6 hours ago
cake-rusk | 15 minutes ago
m0llusk | a day ago
sillysaurusx | a day ago
Could you rephrase this or explain it more thoroughly? I don’t follow. What does it mean to categorize a written form by systems built with Claude?
tyingq | a day ago
[OP] Kosturdistan | a day ago
Sniffnoy | 23 hours ago
[OP] Kosturdistan | 23 hours ago
ahknight | 22 hours ago
qustio | 19 hours ago
Particularly when the only source is a friend of the author, posting on a blog named "AI Clambake" about "A weekly, human-powered newsletter for advertising folks who want to stay on top of the AI mayhem" and not a publication with any credibility in linguistics.
None of that means it can't be true, but some basic skepticism is warranted here. Otherwise we end up in a situation like the LK99 room temperature superconductor where a lot of HN commenters were also upset at the cynical "downers" who just couldn't root for a good thing/progress.
evilfred | 15 hours ago
gus_massa | 17 hours ago
1) Many preprints are bad, incredible bad. I read a lot of posts about ivermectine during 2020 and the errors were obvious. Like no control groups, the control group is a bunch of unrelated guys in another city, and a weird articles that split the 20+20 cases in 10 bins with 2+2 cases in each. They had a lot of error that were easy to spot without being a medical doctor. (Ctrl+F exclusions, you may get a surprise.) (And don't get me started with Chlorine Dioxide.)
2) Perpetual mobile and mass less drive reappear every few years. I definetively can read most of them. The most interesting part is the totally broken explanation of why this new version does not break the laws of physics.
3) HN has a lot of users specialized in niche topic. A few weeks ago I wrote a comment with a joke: "the list of text transformation to allow a Spanish speaker to read German enters in a napkin" (for example v->f and w->v and a few more). Someone was surprised because s/he knows that German has more phonemes than English that has more phonemes than Spanish. There is someone wandering here that really knows about phonetics.
So, I want to see a preprint. Perhaps I can read it, perhaps someone else can read it, perhaps we have to wait a few days until someone writes a nice blog post and debunks it, perhaps it's correct.
grey-area | a day ago
kubb | a day ago
mikestorrent | a day ago
saagarjha | a day ago
kridsdale1 | a day ago
mikestorrent | a day ago
TeMPOraL | a day ago
bawolff | a day ago
sigbottle | a day ago
[OP] Kosturdistan | 23 hours ago
red_admiral | 23 hours ago
* Ventris' publication, but given Kober's contribution to the work they should really share equal credit. I like to think Kober would have got there on her own if she had access to the larger corpus that Ventris had (the Pylos tablets) and a comparable amount of free time and money available.
pfdietz | 22 hours ago
arrowsmith | 22 hours ago
pfdietz | 21 hours ago
(Also: the passive voice was used.)
canjobear | 20 hours ago
gus_massa | 23 hours ago
>> reviewed by linguistics experts at Rutgers and Cambridge.
Here in Argentina, near 2005, we had like 5 guys that claimed to have 5 independent solutions of the Goldbach Conjeture. Each one got a PhD student that volunteer to read it, discussed the obvious problems with the author, tried to help to solve them and after a few months of back and forth they concluded that none of the solutions were correct or has an interesting insight. Nobody was surprised about the that, but some wanted to give them a try.
Until there is a official report by Rutgers or Cambridge, it doesn't mean too much.
>> He's translated over 300 words
Where is the table of translations?
[OP] Kosturdistan | 22 hours ago
evilfred | 15 hours ago
baq | 20 hours ago
dwroberts | a day ago
Cynical read would be you’re stealing his thunder a bit by prematurely announcing this before it’s fully confirmed
Conscat | a day ago
dwroberts | a day ago
iwontberude | a day ago
ben_w | a day ago
One of the things I find weird with AI is how the dismissals of work that involve AI splits into two camps: like yours, saying the AI did the work while the human played no role and deserves no credit; and those saying the AI rips off its training data while the human using it played no role and deserves no credit.
iwontberude | a day ago
ben_w | a day ago
No human, individually or as a team, has been able to solve this to date.
To the extent this was Claude solving it itself and thus denying Di Mino any thunder, there was nobody to have stolen anything from. To the extent he has thunder to be stolen, it wasn't ever in Claude's possession.
iwontberude | 7 hours ago
ben_w | an hour ago
As reported (I have no skin in this), Di Mino appears to have used Claude to write tool to perform statistical analysis to test an idea he had, and in such cases as this it seems to me fairer to praise the human using the machine than to praise a director for the films acted, filmed, written, and edited by others.
timschmidt | 23 hours ago
Either all information is stolen, or none is. Can't have it both ways.
blackqueeriroh | 20 hours ago
If not, how did “Claude” steal anything?
[OP] Kosturdistan | a day ago
jstanley | a day ago
[OP] Kosturdistan | a day ago
canjobear | 20 hours ago
What does this mean? Like he e-mailed it to some people at Rutgers and Cambridge? Or it's under some kind of non-anonymous peer review?
OutOfHere | a day ago
SoftTalker | a day ago
retrac | a day ago
It's a common misconception that is what happened with Ancient Egyptian with the Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta Stone was just one of the big pieces of the puzzle. The decoding came when people realized that Coptic (a language written alphabetically and still in use in the Coptic Church today) is actually descended from Ancient Egyptian; as Spanish is to Latin, Coptic is to Ancient Egyptian.
Similarly the attempts to decode classical Maya were all dead ends. Until Yuri Knorozov realized that it encoded the ancestor of the Maya languages which are still spoken to this day. (Knorozov's Wikipedia article is worth checking out just for his photo with his cat. [0] IMHO.)
I have written before about the La Mojarra 1 stele in Mexico [1]. It looks a lot like Maya. [2] But it isn't Maya. Maybe the difference like between Russian and Latin writing?
No one can read it. It's undecipherable. There are some attempts to identify it with a proposed ancient language that would have been related to the modern Mixe-Zoque languages: some of the glyphs that are shared with Maya, when read phonetically, start sounding like a Mixe-Zoque language. But no one has proposed a confident decipherment. There probably isn't enough text. La Mojarra 1 is the only long example of the Isthmian script.
Deciphering Akkadian was very difficult, at first. The process started with Persian; old Persian was written in a simplified adapted form of the Mesopotamian cuneiform (wedges on clay). It was a kind of alphabet. And Old Persian was already understood. And there was a bilingual text on a monument carved by Darius I. But even then -- decoding relies so heavily on the fact that Akkadian is a Semitic language distantly related to Hebrew, more distantly, also Ancient Egyptian. So again, we sort of knew what we were looking for.
That is all to say: even if the Voynich manuscript (for example) contains real text in an otherwise completely lost language, I'm not sure it is possible even theoretically to translate it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Knorozov
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Mojarra_Stela_1
[2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:La_Mojarra_Stela_1_S...
a_e_k | 21 hours ago
[OP] Kosturdistan | a day ago
sejje | 21 hours ago
mNovak | a day ago
Blahah | a day ago
fittingopposite | 10 hours ago
indiv0 | a day ago
NooneAtAll3 | a day ago
gorjusborg | 22 hours ago
iwontberude | a day ago
jonahx | a day ago
[OP] Kosturdistan | a day ago
BretonForearm | 23 hours ago
[OP] Kosturdistan | 22 hours ago
slopinthebag | 18 hours ago
Curious to see where this goes. Hopefully an update is posted here when it's all said and done :)
Tuna-Fish | a day ago
If you have a 4k screen, you can fit all remaining Linear A text on your screen at once, in 14pt high font.
WithinReason | a day ago
dehrmann | a day ago
AaronAPU | a day ago
Obviously one symbol can mean literally anything, but you could also have very long strings of symbols with many different meanings.
red_admiral | 23 hours ago
stringfood | a day ago
stratocumulus0 | a day ago
Some of the lists end with "ku-ro" and a number that's the sum of all the previous numbers, oddly frequently off by one.
_kst_ | a day ago
cwmma | a day ago
codebaobab | 23 hours ago
mcswell | 20 hours ago
kps | 23 hours ago
humodz | a day ago
neonstatic | 21 hours ago
red_admiral | 23 hours ago
vidarh | 22 hours ago
When she was leaving, the woman said "pose, pose". My French teacher was puzzled, and asked why she'd said that, and the woman asked if it didn't mean "au revoir" in Norwegian?
Because it was what the cashier at the grocery store said to her every time.
It means (carrier) bag.
elbasti | 23 hours ago
tclancy | 23 hours ago
YeGoblynQueenne | 19 hours ago
I have no idea why Minoans would speak Hebrew, there's no indication as far as I'm aware of extensive cultural exchange between the Minoan civ and Hebrew-speaking people, but there's a very clear hierarchy of difficulty to translate dead scripts. From easier to harder:
a) We know what language the script transcribes and how the script transcribes it (e.g. what symbol means what word or sound).
b1) We don't what language the script transcribes but we know how the script transcribes it (e.g. it's a syllabary or an abjad etc).
b2) We know what language the script transcribes but we don't know how the script transcribes it (e.g. Egyptian hieroglyphics).
c) We don't know what language the script transcribes nor do we know how it transcribes it.
b1) and b2) are more or less of similar difficulty.
Linear A goes to category c) above. We know next to nothing about the script or the language, other than the fact the former was reused in linear B to transcribe Mycenean Greek.
Tuna-Fish | 18 hours ago
YeGoblynQueenne | 9 hours ago
First it says that the language of Linear A is a semitic language that is a precursor to biblical Hebrew:
>> Di Mino believes that Linear A belongs to an extinct Semitic language that was a precursor to biblical Hebrew, the way that Latin is a precursor to Italian.
But then it compares the Linear A language directly to Hebrew. For example:
>> Once deciphered, Di Mino saw that the prayer was similar to subsequent Hebrew prayers but was addressed to a Goddess.
So maybe I'm confused. The claim that the Minoans spoke a semitic language sounds less odd than claiming they spoke straight-up biblical Hebrew.
doubleorseven | a day ago
however, nawaya or what ever examples around it are not part of the Hebrew language.
drcode | 23 hours ago
atdt | 22 hours ago
https://www.biblexika.com/bible-lexicon/navah-h5115
https://hebrew-academy.org.il/%D7%93%D7%A3-%D7%9E%D7%99%D7%9...
https://biblehub.com/hebrew/5116.htm
stratocumulus0 | a day ago
- The "Libation Formula", which the author used as the base for his translations, is the most studied piece of writing in Linear A, because it's the only recurring phrase (with grammatical variation) that we have. The corpus is extremely fragmentary, with just a handful of instances of longer text (and even then, the texts are the length of an average sentence in English). The majority of documents available to us are lists (of inventory, personnel, offerings or something of this sort). The longer texts make use of punctuation marks, likely put in between words. This gives us a non-trivial vocabulary, which still does not match that of any known language.
- With such fragmentary remaining material, we cannot be sure that a) all the texts we call "Linear A" are written in the same language, and b) the recognizable words are not abbreviations, for example.
- The author made an assumption that Linear A symbols which have counterparts in Linear B should have the same phonetic values. This gives us an already known glyph that represented "NA". "Duplicate" glyphs are only found in the P-series, and are assumed to represent syllables which were distinguished by the Linear A language, but not by Greek - such as aspirated/unaspirated P. There is a glyph that stands for "NWA" in Linear B, but instances of it have been found in Linear A as well.
- There are countless words with no known etymology in Ancient Greek, assumed to originate from a substrate language or languages spoken in the area at the time Greeks migrated to their present-day homeland. The language of Linear A would be a likely candidate for such substrate. If Linear A were a Semitic language, then we should already be able to establish Semitic etymologies for those words as they were in Greek. Of course it could also be the case that these words came from an another language which did not adopt writing or its writing did not survive to our times.
_alternator_ | 23 hours ago
yorwba | 23 hours ago
stratocumulus0 | 8 hours ago
To illustrate how things can go wrong, let's try to prove that English is a Semitic language. Suppose that the source material we have is this sentence:
"A baker brought a bushel of wheat to the mill."
Now let's match it to Semitic roots as found on this list: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Proto-Semitic_stems. Let's look for plausible substitutions now:
- "Baker" matches "bVkVr-", "first-born son". We have our anchor now. (V means any vowel).
- "Brought" looks plausibly close to "burāṯ-", "juniper" on our list. So far so good.
- "Bushel" is a good match with "b-š-l", "to be cooked"!
- "Wheat" does not have an exact match. It could be a loanword, for example.
- "Mill" looks like "m-r-r", "bitterness" if we assume lack of written L/R distinction. Again, juniper + cook + bitter is plausible, because juniper can be bitter.
- The meaning of particles will be inferred from the sentence structure.
Okay, let's take a look at our translation! We have "first-born son", "juniper", "cook", (wheat), "bitter". Pretty clear that (wheat) must be the name of a dish here. Therefore, the sentence can be translated as "A bitter juniper dish is being cooked for a first-born son". This even matches the context: the sentence was found in a granary, and it refers to food.
My point here is that with such a small sample size, we can extrapolate the data to mean absolutely anything. With no reference material, we cannot assess the correctness of any translation.
tamarru | 23 hours ago
I've also reached out to Dr. Ester Salgarella, so I'm familiar with attempts to apply computational analysis to the corpus, and where previous efforts erred.
stratocumulus0 | 23 hours ago
[OP] Kosturdistan | 22 hours ago
yorwba | 22 hours ago
Speaking of Greek, Linear B and Semitic, the related Cypriot syllabary was deciphered thanks to a bilingual inscription in Phoenician and Greek: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idalion_bilingual And just as in Crete, there is an undeciphered pre-Greek language written in the same script: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eteocypriot_language
[OP] Kosturdistan | 22 hours ago
YeGoblynQueenne | 18 hours ago
I'd like to offer some evidence that the people of Crete were of Greek origin and therefore Indo-European rather than semitic, unfortunately all the scholarship I can find on the subject is from Greek scholars and since it confirms that the Minoans are genetically related to modern Greeks, the more I hear of that evidence the less I am convinced by it. Because it's exactly consistent with confirmation bias. So I would not be surprised if the Minoans turned out to be one of the lost tribes of Israel.
Except of course we know those turned up in the Americas so they can't be the Minoans.
Yeah it's a joke. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Indian_theory
The serious bit is that as soon as you make claims about who is from where and connected to what ancient people, you lose. It's impossible to disentangle peoples' nationalism and identity politics from whatever facts. I'm speaking in this as a Greek myself. Did you know that the Greek language is not, actually, an Indo-European language, but predates it by severeral hundreds of thousands of years, and has influenced every language you can find on every continent, including but not limited to the languages of the pre-Columbian civilisations? True story. Evidence: plenty! Consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xochicalco Obviously that is the temple of the Goddess Kali in the country side ("Ο ναός της Θεάς Κάλι στην Εξοχή". Εξοχή-Κάλι-κο, Ξοχικάλκο!). I have actually read that in a book someone handed to me when I was a teenager. I had to put the book down after that.
tl;dr people get really crazy when it comes to their ancient history and lose the ability to think straight and derive sound conclusions from facts.
tempaccountabcd | 21 hours ago
mcswell | 20 hours ago
stratocumulus0 | 12 hours ago
With regard to the origin of the script, Linear A documents have been dated to earlier times than Linear B. And then, there is also an even earlier hieroglyphic script, but its relation to Linear A has not been established.
fooster | a day ago
Claiming that claude did all the work is patently ridiculous. Claude is a tool, like any other. The corpus of linear A is ~7500 characters across ~1500 inscriptions and claude, no matter how smart, doesn't just solve that on its own.
What a shame.
evilfred | 23 hours ago
[OP] Kosturdistan | 23 hours ago
evilfred | 22 hours ago
BigTTYGothGF | 22 hours ago
So did many of the previous attempted solvers.
[OP] Kosturdistan | 22 hours ago
evilfred | 21 hours ago
qustio | 20 hours ago
fooster | 20 hours ago
I don't know why you want to stoop to name calling which violates the guidelines and the spirit of this site.
"without any critical review" is also seemingly untrue: the post says Rutgers and Cambridge are reviewing it
YeGoblynQueenne | 19 hours ago
My following searches turn out no announcements by either Rutgers or Cambridge:
"rutgers linguists evaluate deciphering of linear a by tom di mino"
https://www.google.com/search?q=rutgers+linguists+evaluate+d...
https://www.google.com/search?q=cambridge+linguists+evaluate...
evilfred | 15 hours ago
i am sorry but "crank" is the correct term for the many amateurs who routinely email mathematicians, physicists, and apparently linguists with their special theories without having any academic experience in the field. for every anecdote where it panned out there are thousands of cases where it did not.
loudmax | a day ago
To be clear, this is an attempt at a decipherment. This is not proven, and we shouldn't consider Linear A to be "solved" until experts in the field have reviewed the work. In fact, it probably shouldn't be considered "proof" unless some more Linear A writings are uncovered and these are congruent with the method proposed. All that can be said for certain at this point is that this is an interesting conjecture.
But this is a story worth following. This could be the real deal. More research and validation should follow and we should have a better idea in the next few weeks or months whether Linear A has really been solved. At the very least, this is an interesting attempt, and optimistically, it could yield real insight into Minoan culture. Kudos.
[OP] Kosturdistan | a day ago
WhitneyLand | a day ago
Honestly curious how many years before it can be one shotted in a coding harness with Fable.next by someone who’s not a linguistics expert.
Develop, test, and rank hypotheses about the phonetic values, morphology, grammar, and possible language family of Linear A using the full available corpus. Do not assume any decipherment is correct. Treat all candidate readings as hypotheses to be scored…”
danishanish | 23 hours ago
yorwba | 22 hours ago
rw_panic0_0 | a day ago
[OP] Kosturdistan | a day ago
vb-8448 | a day ago
I know I'm simplifying a lot, but all this deciphering isn't it just some kind of pattern matching?
cwmma | a day ago
[OP] Kosturdistan | 23 hours ago
bazoom42 | a day ago
[OP] Kosturdistan | 23 hours ago
bazoom42 | 22 hours ago
evilfred | 23 hours ago
evilfred | 22 hours ago
rich_sasha | 23 hours ago
simonw | 23 hours ago
That's exactly the kind of thing I'd hope Claude would be used for in these kinds of projects - building tools, not black-box "solving" the problem.
xeonmc | 21 hours ago
neonstatic | 21 hours ago
topaz0 | 21 hours ago
pfdietz | 22 hours ago
singularity2001 | 22 hours ago
mcswell | 20 hours ago
singularity2001 | 22 hours ago
𐇑 𐇘 𐇪 𐇐 | 𐇬 𐇳 𐇖 𐇗𐇽 | 𐇬 𐇗 𐇜 | 𐇬 𐇼 𐇖𐇽 | 𐇥 𐇬 𐇳 𐇖 𐇗𐇽 | 𐇪 𐇱 𐇦 𐇨 | 𐇖 𐇡 𐇲 | 𐇖 𐇼 𐇖𐇽 | 𐇖 𐇡 𐇲 | 𐇥 𐇬 𐇳 𐇖 𐇗𐇽 i-𐇘-wi-jeʳ | ʰau-ni-ti-noʳ au-no-pa au-ndi-tiʳ 𐇥-au-ni-ti-noʳ wa-pi-naᵐwa ti-ru-te ti-nd-tri ti-na-ru-he ʰau-ni-ti-noʳ i-301-wa-ja/e | ʰau-... jaᵘ-di-ki-to i-pi-na-ma si-ru-te ta-na-ra te-ti-u ta-na-te i-da 𐘚 ᴴI 𐘮 WA 𐘱 JA 𐘱 JA 𐘆 DI 𐘸 KI 𐘹 TU 𐘚 ᴴI 𐘢 PI 𐘅 NA 𐙁 MA ()
I believe the phonetic values for Phaistos here were based on similarity.
em-bee | 15 hours ago
akerl_ | 21 hours ago
WalterBright | 21 hours ago
"Thag is a smarty-pants"
tlogan | 21 hours ago
Laurel1234 | 21 hours ago
petjuh | 21 hours ago
The other thing I find odd, however, is that it's found to be a Semitic language. If it's a Semitic language, I would have expected it to already have been deciphered. And certainly linguists would have already looked at Semitic languages, and looked hard.
Also if it were a Semitic language, why wasn't it consonantal but had vowels? Usually Semitic languages (and Egyptian maybe) write only the consonants because their stems are made three consonants and vowels are interweaved to make words.
Example semitic root K-T-B and how vowels are added in-between to form words:
kataba – He wrote yaktubu – He writes / is writing kitāb – A book kutub – Books kātib – A writer / scribe / clerk maktūb – Written / fate maktab – An office / desk maktabah – A library / bookstore
And another such root - D-R-S which means "studying" or "learning."
darasa – He studied yadrusu – He studies / is studying dirāsah – A study / school course dāris – A student / learner madrūs – Studied / carefully planned madrasah – A school
This system of triliteral roots is the reason why usually Semitic languages don't use vowels. Why would Linear A have consonant+vowel syllabary if it were semitic?
mcswell | 20 hours ago
teleforce | 19 hours ago
Indus valley script is about 1500 years earlier than Linear A and I hope we can also decipher Indus script using AI or not [1]. It's well overdue although from statistical profiling it's has been proven to be a valid linguistic script believed to be being used for writing system the ancient Harappan language, the likely precursor of modern Dravidian languages for examples Telegus and Tamil.
The main reason it's very difficult to decipher is that there's no equivalent Rosetta Stone for Indus script. My hypothesis is that the AI LLM model can be trained or tuned as the logical or virtual version of the venerable Rosetta stone hence can be used to decipher ancient writing system.
[1] Indus script:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_script
YeGoblynQueenne | 18 hours ago
Caveat: I'm Greek so a kind of natural amateur historian. That is to say I grew up reading about the prehistory and ancient history of Greece, as one does when one is born Greek and a geek. I've seen the Phaistos disk and linear A inscriptions with mine own eyes in Greek museums and I have dreamed of the day they would be translated. I am not at all unsympathetic to the hopes of a Linear A decipherement.
However. The claimed decipherment has all the hallmarks of imaginative and fanciful attempts to draw parallels between historical events and entities, that were not really connected, many of them notably inspired by the Hebrew bible. For example, remember when the lost tribes of Israel turned out in the New World [1]? Or how Biblical Sodom was actually destroyed by a comet [2]? Or the time that Venus was ejected from Jupiter and caused the Biblical Cataclysm [3]? Or, for less biblical but no less foundational texts of the Western literary canon, remember when Heinrich Schliemann discovered the Jewels of Helen of Troy [4] and the Death Mask of King Agamemnon [5]?
Or of course we could recall any of the claims to decipher the Phaistos Disk [6] or the Dropa Disks from Bayan Kara-Ula [7], and so on I'm sure.
All of the above is not to say that a decipherement is impossible. What it is to say is that it currently isn't possible; because we have no idea what the language that Linear A transcribes even is. It's not like the Minoan language is still spoken today in some far-evolved form, as was the case for e.g. Egyptian or Mayan or indeed ancient Greek [8]. So we have an unknown script, writing an unknown language, and to make matters worse there are no parallel texts with another ancient language that might help us bridge the gap. What there is, is some rudimentary understanding of the more obvious contents of Linear A texts (mostly, lists of goods) and the fact that some Linear A symbols have been reused in Linear B.
But, how were they reused? And what good is that knowledge without knowing anything about the language transcribed by Linear A? I can read German, a language that I don't speak, because I can read Latin script, but the meaning of the script might as well be Greek to me [9].
I'm a computer scientists, I guess, these days [10]. The problem of deciphering Linear A, or the Phaistos Disk, or any other script (that may not even be a script) that transliterates a language that we don't know is a problem of reconstructing information that we don't have, from other information that we don't have. I'm not saying it's completely impossible. I mean, who knows? Maybe we're just missing the right maths. But, what we're really trying to do here is de-noise a message garbled by the passage of time without even a guess as to the language the message is written in. Claude Shannon would tell you that it's a fantasy that is not worth pursuing. You don't have to ask him, you can just read his magnum opus [11] and check out Section 3 titled "The Series of Approximations to English" for an idea of what the mechanics of deciphering a script when the language is known look like with the only technology we have that can do the job reliably.
When Turing and the other Brits at Bletchley Park cracked the Enigma code, they at least knew it was, ultimately, a coded form of German. We may have a lot more compute now, and much more advanced tech overall, but there are some barriers that you cannot physically cross, no matter what resources you have. For example, you can't go faster than light and you can't escape the event horizon of a black hole. In the same way you can't translate text written in an unknown script, encoding an unknown language, without any parallel texts with a known language. There is just not enough information to do the job. Worse, if you try, you can endlessly come up with plausible "translations" and convince yourself that you have the right one, but you have no way to know you do.
I'm sorry but this claim is just a wild guess trying to link Hebrew to Linear A, without any serious evidence that the two are linked and without any evidence that the link is real, other than "look, I can guess what all the texts say!".
_________________
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Indian_theory
[2] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/destruction-of-cit...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worlds_in_Collision
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priam%27s_Treasure#/media/File...
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mask_of_Agamemnon
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaistos_Disc_decipherment_cla...
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropa_stones
[8] I can read ancient Greek. The further back in time it goes, the harder it gets to understand what it means but I can still read the script. It has changed in 5000 years but not enough that I can't read it. Nothing like that ability survived for Linear A. I blame Thera.
[9] Except of course then I would understand it. But it's just German to me.
[10] I can assure you that took me by surprised, first of all.
[11] https://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shanno...