[split] An interview with Stephen Bax - 1 to 1 substitution discussion

[Stephen.Bax]

You need then to tell Michael Ventris, who deciphered Linear B and identified it as Greek, that his methodology was wrong :-)

I am not sure from your description that you have grasped the underlying principles of what I was trying to do. 

And also you have definitely not understood how I was referring to Arabic. It is simply wrong to say that I "maps words like Taurus and Centaur/Centaurus and Coriander to Arabic"..... where did I map the word Taurus to Arabic? Or Coriander? I cannot see how you got to this interpretation.

Michael Ventris was deciphering a natural language. There is no evidence yet that the VMS is a natural language. You are not the only person who has tried the same methods as Ventris—they are widely known.

Can you tell me who has tried to follow the same process, of working from the known, and then trying to identify sound/symbol correspondences?

I grasp what you are trying to do very well. I can follow the video step-by-step and see exactly what you are doing. But what you are doing does not acknowledge 1) why your system does not generalize to the rest of the text and

It is  early days and only a few signs have been identified. If we can identify more sound/symbol correspondences then we might start to see larger patterns, but we can't run before we can walk. Even so, it can be generalised to some extent - see the example discussed here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. where it helped us to identify a plant and perhaops a name.

2) the positional regularity and rigidity of specific VMS glyphs

What do you mean?

and 3) the reduced character set that is inherent in your system of mapping more than one glyph to related sounds.

What, reduced by one? What significance does this have? There are still plenty of characters to work with..

As for the Arabic, do you want me to quote from your video word for word? Whether you call it Arabic or "possibly some extinct language possibly a Semitic language" (or whatever weasel/waffle words you want to use), you completely missed the fact that the words you chose map naturally (and better) to Latin than they do to your system.

Sorry, this is getting offensive when you say my words are 'weasel' . If you believe it is Latin you should prove it. 


I've noticed you almost never answer honest questions about the specific problems inherent in your system, which is what legitimate, sincere researchers usually do. What you do instead is turn the question back on the person asking it and imply that they don't "understand" you or your system.

Again this is gettig offensive. I have a full blog where you can ask me questions and I have never refused to answer any. Look at my blog and you will find answers to many objections. Also, I am busy - too busy to deal with people who simply want to attack and not offer constructive discussion.