[Interview] An interview with Stephen Bax

[Stephen.Bax]

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.

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. 

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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:

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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.

I used Arabic merely as an example, party to push the debate from the same old European languages. I do not at this stage believe that Arabic is the underlying language.

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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 ) ?

Sorry, I don't get what you mean