(17-09-2017, 12:34 AM)Stephen.Bax Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(16-09-2017, 07:27 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.2) the positional regularity and rigidity of specific VMS glyphs

Bax responded: What do you mean?

(16-09-2017, 12:51 PM)Stephen.Bax Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.You need then to tell Michael Ventris, who deciphered Linear B and identified it as Greek, that his methodology was wrong :-)

(17-09-2017, 02:32 AM)Torsten Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(16-09-2017, 12:51 PM)Stephen.Bax Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.You need then to tell Michael Ventris, who deciphered Linear B and identified it as Greek, that his methodology was wrong :-)

Dear Stephen,

 the deciphering of Linear B was not made by Ventris alone. The first step in deciphering was made by Alice Kober. She noticed that the words in Linear B have common roots and suffixes. This way she was able to determine that Linear B was a syllabic script. Moreover she identified patterns like three-word sets sharing similar suffixes. Ventris later named this patterns “Kober’s triplets”. This "Kober triples" were the key for deciphering Linear B since this way it was possible to identify signs sharing the same consonant. Ventris used this triplets to construct a series of grids associating the symbols on the tablets with consonants and vowels. In the end he was able to read 'ko-no-so' as his first word. This was possible since he was knowing that the signs for /ko/, /no/ and /so/ were related to each other and share the same vowel. [see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.]

Sorry, but it is simply wrong to argue that your method has something in common with the way Linear B was deciphered. You are simply trying to identify some names. But you do so without even a basic understanding of the script. You didn't even try to understand any of the patterns known for the VMS. For instance the patterns described by Currier are very interesting. One pattern he describes is the line as a functional entity. Currier also noticed that some word-finals have an obvious and statistically-significant effect on the initial symbol of a following word. ...

(16-09-2017, 12:09 PM)Stephen.Bax Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.... The point about the methodology is that it builds up step by step by trying to identify patterns. ...

(17-09-2017, 01:45 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(16-09-2017, 10:44 PM)MarcoP Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

(16-09-2017, 10:13 PM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Whatever he may have said to Nick about bigraphs and trigraphs is not relevant until it's established that they exist.

I find this point of view peculiar. If you think everything that is not established is irrelevant, we can resume our conversation when the manuscript is fully translated.

Oh goodness, this is way off track.

I meant in the context of Nick's criticism. Not in general. Of course I don't think that unestablished facts are irrelevant, you surely know me well enough by now to know that.


Bax responded to Nick with irrelevant arguments about things that Nick obviously already knows and which were NOT part of the system he explained in the video, RATHER THAN ANSWERING THE QUESTION.


I have no problem with Bax having any theory he wants. That's not the problem. The problem is whenever you ask him to explain something that doesn't compute, he turns it around into another question or throws it back at the person or makes a personal attack.

it's not a professional way to do things and undermines his credibility by making it look either like he doesn't believe in his own idea (or believes so strongly he feels he doesn't have to defend it, which is also not very professional).

(17-09-2017, 10:07 AM)Emma May Smith Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Kober's Triplets were actually first recognized by another researcher as a possible route into understanding the script, and she wasn't the one who identified it as mostly syllabic. However, she was the one who documented all the triplets which occurred and made a number of useful insights. Also, the first word read was 'a-mi-ni-so', for Amnisos. 'Ko-no-so', for Knossos, was the second word.

However you are quite correct that Bax's method is nothing like Ventris's. I don't know why he insists on this. It's as thought he misunderstands both what he is doing and what Ventris did.

(17-09-2017, 01:51 AM)-JKP- Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.This cannot be answered in one sentence and I'm surprised that you are unaware of what I mean. But I have done my best to try to phrase a cogent answer and here it is:

You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

As for your question do I think the VMS is Latin?

I did not say that! Read my post again.

I said that Latin maps more naturally to the examples you posted in your video than Arabic, using systems already in place in the 15th century that were known to all scribes that used Latin scribal conventions. That doesn't mean I think the text is Latin (other than the possibility of a few loan words, a possibility I mentioned upthread). It means that YOUR SYSTEM works for more than one language and the other language it works for is a more natural fit than Arabic both in terms of the glyph shapes and also in terms of how abbreviations are normally expanded, so why would one choose Arabic (or the other possibilities you mentioned in the video) to systemize the specific examples that you chose for your video when Latin works better?

It's a sincere question.

(17-09-2017, 10:22 AM)bi3mw Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I have a fundamental question to understand your methodology. Is it true that an identification of a plant name must be assumed as given to have a comparison pattern ( e.g. Coriander ) ?

(22-09-2017, 01:11 AM)Stephen.Bax Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I never claimed that my approach was identical to Ventris' (and those others who worked on Linear B) in every way, just in the crucial aspect: identifying words which were (thought to be) known by other means (such as place names) and then working from these possible sound/symbol corrspondences by means of a lot of trial and error, to build up a bigger picture of patterns. Seems pretty obvious to me. Even Wikipedia tells us:

"Ventris [aware of Kober's  work] made the inspired guess that those were place names on the island. This proved to be correct. Armed with the symbols he could decipher from this, Ventris soon unlocked much text and determined that the underlying language of Linear B was in fact Greek." (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.)

So once again - he used the real-world knowledge of (in his case) place names to help him decode key words of the text, just as I was trying to do with the VM using other referents. Surely that is so obvious as not to need reiterating yet again?

This means that to say that "Bax's method is nothing like Ventris's"  (Emma) or that "it is simply wrong to argue that your method has something in common with the way Linear B was deciphered"  (Torsten) is either a wilful distortion of what I said, or an amazingly gross misunderstanding of what Ventris did, or both.

In short, if you really think that my approach, as set out in the 2014 paper and here, share NOTHING in common with Ventris' approach, then we are really talking at cross purposes.