(10 hours ago)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.- The decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphics could have happened 100 years earlier if Kircher had not declared them to be ideographic.
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...
This seems unlikely. Material like the Rosetta Stone and the Bankes obelisk were crucial for the decipherment.
Quote:Some of the "bumpiness" features listed by Nick seem to affect a relatively small fraction of the text, and (like transcription errors, or missing fragments on clay tablets) should not be a big obstacle to decipherment.
I don't see what on Nick's list affects a small fraction of the text, except maybe the right justified titles on a minority of folios. The rest of the issues - repetitions and word types varying across different positions of the text - are chronic problems, so chronic it seems something has been done to the plaintext, if there is one. And we can also add the You are not allowed to view links.
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Whether it is encryption, shorthand, or a combination of the two with changes for cosmetic reasons chucked into the mix, the result is a cacophony of noise. I do not see how natural reasons (e.g. subject matter or linguistic features) can be responsible for all this. It is just too bumpy and noisy throughout.
Quote:It is almost certain now that one-leg gallows are variants of the two-leg gallows, possibly combined with e or other letters, that are used mostly on the first line of a paragraph -- a convention that the Author picked up from the typical European manuscript style. I don't see reason to ascribe any other meaning to single-leg gallows, just as I don't think that split two-leg gallows or fancy decoration on gallows have any linguistic or semantic value.
My feverish ramble in that other thread was not terribly coherent but my point was that no simple explanation works with the ornamental gallows, since there is a fundamental mismatch between the Top Rows and the lines below them in a paragraph. Something far more complex is going on. We start with:
Problem 1:
Top Rows* have too many /p/ and too few /k/ in comparison to the lower lines. We don't see this in natural language. - --> Solution: The simple explanation is that p = k. It is just an ornamental flourish used when there is more space to expand.
Problem 2:
But in the lower lines, k is frequently followed by e. If p = k, where is pe in the Top Row? - --> Solution: The simple explanation is that p = ke. It operates as both an ornamental flourish and a ligature. A little more complex but nothing unusual.
Problem 3: But in Top Row, p is frequently followed by ch. Over 50% of times, usually! If p = ke, then pch = kech, but where are all the many kech we should see in the lower lines? - --> Solution: ?? Do we start suggesting /ch/ becomes e? Or something else?
We are now looking at having to mutate most if not all of the word type in order to find an equivalence. There is no neat exchange that allows us to match a Top Row word type with a word type in the below paragraph. It's more than just exchanging a few letters.
The initials are often different, the middles are often different, and the finals are often different. Why do we see more /sh/ at Top Row? Is this an ornamental form as well? Why are there so many missing initial ch at Top Row and so many word-middle ch? My idea is that initial ch has been shunted into middle position by adding /op/ or /qop/ to the ch words, but to make it work, I also have to mutate the glyphs after /ch/ because they don't match as expected. This is becoming highly complex and does not seem natural.
Quote:The peculiar features at the "margins" of the pages can have banal explanations too. For one thing, on many languages the final letters or words of a sentence may be strongly affected by the topic. In a narrative of past events, sentences are more likely to end with "-ed" in English, with "-ta" in Japanese; whereas in a herbal the sentences should be mostly in the present tense, hence more likely to end with "-desu" or "-masu" in Japanese. Others have pointed out the increased use of abbreviations at end of lines in European manuscripts.
I'm Team Abbreviation too, but if it is going on, it is in a highly complex way. We have the same issue here as with top rows: the mismatch between expected words and actual words at line start and line end is more complex than a change of ending by itself at the line end, or a change of initials at line start. If at line end, it was only daiin becoming dam, or kaiin becoming kam, this would work. But it isn't. Initials and word-middles are often different as well. The same is true for line start.
Line patterns at different positions of the text are serious problems for any idea that we are only seeing a natural language.
Quote:When single-leg gallows occur inside a parag, I would guess that the Scribe failed to see a parag break in the Author's draft and thus started the first line of the second parag as continuation of the last line of the previous one.
I'm not convinced by this but I find it interesting in that it could imply that if we have copying scribes following a layout by an "Author", they have agency in terms of how they lay out the text: they are not obliged to match their line starts with the Author's line starts, nor their line ends with the Author's line ends by cramming in text or widening spaces between words to make the ends match.
So a word that is line start for a scribe may be a mid-line word for the author in their original text, and word that is line end for a scribe may also be a mid-line word for the author. Given how word types seem to undergo complex mutations at these positions, this implies to me that the scribe has an understanding of the system and how to mutate the word: they are not blind copyists.
* by Top Row, I mean the first line of each paragraph but with its first word and last word omitted so as to isolate a top row effect from separate paragraph/line start effects and line end effects.