Questions tagged [undeciphered-writing]
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7
questions
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2answers
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Could the Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs have been deciphered without the Rosetta Stone with modern tech?
The Rosetta Stone was one of the most important documents in the history of linguistics. Discovered around 1800, it allowed Ancient Egyptian to be deciphered. Let's say that the stone didn't exist, ...
8
votes
2answers
247 views
Why are the scripts of Crete known as “Linear”?
Two famous, apparently related scripts now known as Linear A (which encoded an as-yet undeciphered language) and Linear B (used to write Greek) were discovered on the island of Crete.
Why are these ...
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6answers
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How would someone begin translating an unknown language?
Excuse my ignorance. I'm writing a work of fiction wherein an archeologist finds a tomb that contains not only the bodies of an unknown/unstudied society, but also samples of writing in that society's ...
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0answers
113 views
Attempts at distributed deciphering of Linear A
Possibly related: Current prospective efforts in the decipherment of ancient scripts
Are there any active attempts at coding and indexing all available examples of Linear A in a manner that would ...
6
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0answers
165 views
Current prospective efforts in the decipherment of ancient scripts
Reading a bit about the decipherment of ancient scripts gave me the impression that those scripts which remain mostly undeciphered as of today have such a small and restricted corpus (I'm thinking of ...
9
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2answers
1k views
Is Stephen Bax' partial decoding of the Voynich Manuscript plausible?
Having browsed Stephen Bax' paper "A proposed partial decoding of the Voynich script" (available here), as a scientist in the natural sciences (physics, mathematics), I find his proposed decoding of ...
8
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1answer
237 views
What statistical methods are used to test whether a corpus of symbols is linguistic?
In their 2009 paper on the Indus Script, Rao et al. describe a test for deciding whether a corpus of symbols is in fact a collection of texts in some language. Over-simplifying a bit, the approach ...
