Questions tagged [undeciphered-writing]
The undeciphered-writing tag has no usage guidance.
12
questions
0
votes
1
answer
69
views
Do we know enough to become fluent in written Mayan?
There are about 7000 languages but only three origins of writing: The Middle East, China, and Mesoamerica. The most studied writing system in Mesoamerica is Mayan script. It was once the official ...
- 109
0
votes
2
answers
203
views
Can you decipher a language without any translation?
So, I was thinking, if we have the tech to store information for billions of years (which we strangely enough do - I'm talking about the 5D storage devices), what if we store a vast collection of ...
- 1
3
votes
2
answers
130
views
Decipherment challenge
I am not a linguist, but I'm looking for examples of decipherment competitions when multiple linguists have tried to independently translate the same script. I know only this one:
Rawlinson, H., ...
- 43
0
votes
2
answers
84
views
Could the language(s) of the Proto-Sinaitic incriptions have words with no known cognates?
If so, this could be a part of the reason why we haven't completely deciphered these inscriptions.
0
votes
1
answer
114
views
Will we ever decipher the Wadi el-Ḥol and Serabit el-Khadim inscriptions? [closed]
In his book Letter perfect: the marvelous history of our alphabet from A to Z, David Sacks says that we'll probably never decipher the Wadi el-Ḥol inscriptions (and he was probably implying the same ...
47
votes
2
answers
10k
views
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, ...
- 1,493
8
votes
2
answers
340
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 ...
- 1,006
11
votes
6
answers
4k
views
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 ...
- 111
1
vote
0
answers
146
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 ...
- 111
7
votes
0
answers
199
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 ...
- 349
10
votes
2
answers
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 ...
- 201
10
votes
1
answer
286
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 ...
- 293