15-03-2019, 07:04 PM
First of all, thank you Rene and Marco for providing more detailed critical comments. I appreciate them and I think such critical discussion can be the basis for a deeper investigation, regardless of the ultimate evaluation of my tentative proposal here. For example, the idea of syllable transposition could be worth investigating, whether or not my particular character letter values or languages or interpretations prove to have any validity or not.
Marco, I understand your skepticism and your comparison to other attempts. I get it. At the same time, one could also say the following:
"Does "eraiwo" mean "olive oil" in Greek? No, but the author was using a script that had no /l/ and did not allow for word-final consonants, so he had to write "eraiwo" for "elaiwon" or "elaion"."
"Does "kono" mean "rope" in Greek? No, come on, that word is "skhoinos", surely you must be joking! Oh, but in this script the author cannot indicate "s" before another consonant, cannot distinguish /kh/ from /k/, cannot indicate the diphthong /oi/, and cannot indicate word-final /s/. So "kono" it is!"
"Does "karawe" mean "old men" in Greek? No, come on again, are you talking about "grawes", plural of "greus" = "old"? So this script does not distinguish /g/ from /k/ either? And it inserts a vowel in the middle of consonant clusters where there is none in Greek, and it omits word-final /s/ again? Does the creator of this theory really expect anyone to believe any of these proposals?"
These examples are far, far worse than my "skiiois tis" for "skiais tais" = "in the shadows".
And yet all of the above examples are from Ventris and Chadwick's correct deciphering of Linear B as Mycenaean Greek.
If someone brought Ventris' entire Linear B deciphering theory to this forum today, it would be laughed out of the discussion as another bad example of the "four-steps method", or something even worse than that.
I will respond to Rene's latest comments as well, which I very much appreciate, as I do Marco's and others' comments. But I do want to call everyone's attention to what the Linear B deciphering actually looked like, so that we can make a fair comparison with our current efforts, and so that we can have fair expectations for how "neat" or "messy" an actual correct solution may actually appear to be at the level of the details of individual words.
Marco, I understand your skepticism and your comparison to other attempts. I get it. At the same time, one could also say the following:
"Does "eraiwo" mean "olive oil" in Greek? No, but the author was using a script that had no /l/ and did not allow for word-final consonants, so he had to write "eraiwo" for "elaiwon" or "elaion"."
"Does "kono" mean "rope" in Greek? No, come on, that word is "skhoinos", surely you must be joking! Oh, but in this script the author cannot indicate "s" before another consonant, cannot distinguish /kh/ from /k/, cannot indicate the diphthong /oi/, and cannot indicate word-final /s/. So "kono" it is!"
"Does "karawe" mean "old men" in Greek? No, come on again, are you talking about "grawes", plural of "greus" = "old"? So this script does not distinguish /g/ from /k/ either? And it inserts a vowel in the middle of consonant clusters where there is none in Greek, and it omits word-final /s/ again? Does the creator of this theory really expect anyone to believe any of these proposals?"
These examples are far, far worse than my "skiiois tis" for "skiais tais" = "in the shadows".
And yet all of the above examples are from Ventris and Chadwick's correct deciphering of Linear B as Mycenaean Greek.
If someone brought Ventris' entire Linear B deciphering theory to this forum today, it would be laughed out of the discussion as another bad example of the "four-steps method", or something even worse than that.
I will respond to Rene's latest comments as well, which I very much appreciate, as I do Marco's and others' comments. But I do want to call everyone's attention to what the Linear B deciphering actually looked like, so that we can make a fair comparison with our current efforts, and so that we can have fair expectations for how "neat" or "messy" an actual correct solution may actually appear to be at the level of the details of individual words.