The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

At first, I thought Chinese was just an example to explain something.
But the sheer volume of explanations surprised me a little.
Now I think you really mean it. Chinese?
Just to make it understandable to another person, he needs a two-year language trip.

Yes, I do mean it.  But, again, not "Chinese" specifically, but any language whose "words" are mostly single syllables with a nontrivial structure.  Like the Chinese languages, Tibetan, Vietnamese, Khmer, Thai, Burmese...

No cryptographic code is as hard to crack as a natural language, if you don't know it or any close relative.  See the use of Navajo speakers by the US in WWII.   

• Hittite was deciphered only after and because it was recognized as an Indo-European language.
  
• Linear B, used by the Myceneans ~1450, was deciphered when recognized as an old form of Greek.
  
• Linear A, used by the Minoans 1800-1450 BCE, is still undeciphered.
  
• Meroitic, used by the Egyptian neighbors to the South (who stole the head of Augustus and built some OK Very Nice But Cannot Call Them Great pyramids) is still largely undeciphered (but it was recently found to be related to other African languages, which promises progress).
  
• Proto-Elamite is still undeciphered.
  
• Etruscan is still mostly undeciphered; even though script can be read, we don't know the meaning of most words.  (Until recently Etruscologists knew the words for "six" and "four", but did not know which was which.  This riddle has been solved by studying the arrangement of numbers 1-6 in Etruscan playing dice.  That should show how bad things still are.)
  
• The decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics could have happened 100 years earlier if Kircher had not declared them to be ideographic.
  
• The Mayan writing idem 50 idem J. Eric Thompson idem idem.
  

The last two examples show how decipherment can been delayed by centuries because of "obvious" but wrong assumptions about the language or the nature of the script...