Questions tagged [undeciphered-writing]
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Two questions about Sinai 353
If all of Albright's identifications of the other letters on this stele are correct, what word could replace LPN at the top of the middle column if the topmost visible letter is gimel (G) rather than ...
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2answers
65 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.
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1answer
77 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 ...
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2answers
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, ...
8
votes
2answers
263 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
2k 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 ...
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0answers
125 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 ...
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0answers
172 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 ...
10
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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
247 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 ...
