[Interview] An interview with Stephen Bax

[Torsten]

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. 

To use place name was only the last step in deciphering Linear B. This last step was build on previous steps resulting in profound knowledge about the relations between the signs in Linear B. Ventris was knowing that the signs for /ko/, /no/ and /so/ share the same vowel. Therefore it is indeed a misunderstanding of Ventris work to argue that he just luckily guessed some place names.