[Interview] An interview with Stephen Bax

[Stephen.Bax]

Note though that Stephen did not claim that those IDs were necessarily the right ones. What he did defend was his methodology - a slow and careful attempt to match some words and labels to names, and try to catch potential sound values that way. I agree that this method may prove succesful one day.

Now you have a point as well - and I hope Stephen will join us in this thread so he can debate it with us. What if a number of incorrect plant IDs caused you to match some completely wrong sounds with certain glyphs? Isn't there a point where you'd get so far down the wrong street that it's become impossible to turn back?

Thanks Koen for an interesting interview.

The point about the methodology is that it builds up step by step by trying to identify patterns. If one of the plant identifications is found later to be wrong (e.g. oror / juniper) then we would have to consider if the sounds which are found in that plant name (e.g. o and r) are still validated elesewhere in the scheme or not. This might cause us to revise them or reject them. This is exactly the way that Ventris worked when decoding Linear B in Crete. 

I have no doubt at all that some of what I proposed will need to be rejected or revised as we go - that is how the method works.