The following article appeared on my Google feed and I thought it might be of interest to others, although I confess that I haven't read it->
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It's a nice read but not ground-breaking in any way. If you are interested in Egyptian hieroglyphs and Linear B, then it's highly possible that the discussed stuff will be familiar to you.
It also contains a bit of moaning that people treat you like a weirdo when you try to break unknown scripts
The comparison with Egyptian hieroglyphics, cuneiform and Linear B is of not much help to us. There were many samples of those texts, obtained from many archaeological sites. They were the writing of known civilisations, and the writing from all these sites was generally consistent. But we do not have this with the VMS. We do not know for definite in which country the manuscript was written. We cannot say whether the VMS is in a known language, is in some sort of cypher, or is in some sort of shorthand, or whether it was some sort of private folly of some private individual. Statistical analysis of the text has failed to say which of these is the more likely. If Jean-François Champollion, Henry Rawlinson or Michael Ventris were alive today they would be just as baffled as the rest of us.
(07-04-2025, 05:58 PM)Rafal Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.It also contains a bit of moaning that people treat you like a weirdo when you try to break unknown scripts
One should take that with pride.
It's a weird job but some weirdo has to do it.
Quote:We do not know for definite in which country the manuscript was written. We cannot say whether the VMS is in a known language, is in some sort of cypher
Actually when people tried to crack hieroglyphs and Linear B they also had no idea what language was it written in.
Today people in Egypt speak Arabic. Champollion could expect that hieroglyphs are not in Arabic. But if not Arabic then what?
It turned out that they are in extinct language which we call today Ancient Egyptian. It is similar to still exisiting Coptic so people were able to understand it. But the job of reading the hieroglyphs actually involved 2 steps - reading the symbols and learning the language by comparing it to Coptic.
The same is with Linear B. Many candidate languages were considered for it, like for example Etruscan. Only when Ventris cracked the first few words it turned out that it was some very ancient Greek. I believe it was actually a surprise for scientists.