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Cracking the Code of Linear B
(antigonejournal.com)
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What I find interesting the most about the decipherment of Linear B is how it was the decipherment equivalent of building a huge temple, stone by stone.
Ventris and others didn't have the same luxury as the ones deciphering the Rosetta Stone, who were "gifted" a big text in Egyptian (in two writing systems!) alongside a rather convenient translation to Ancient Greek. No, they were dealing with almost nothing, just a bunch of small pics alongside the text. The link represents this really well with the restroom signs.
Relevant tidbit: Ancient Greek lacks /w/. And if a cognate in another Indo-European has /w/ or /v/, you'll usually see nothing or /h/ in Greek (debuccalisation). Latin vs. Greek examples:
With that in mind, Ventris' take was extremely sensible. Somewhere down the road Greek dropped its /w/'s, but it's perfectly possible that it didn't affect Linear B.
I don't blame him. The [kʷ]→[p] sound change sounds fairly obvious when you look at the articulations, but unless you have a decent grasp of phonetics it sounds completely unintuitive. And Greek in special made an unholy mess of Proto-Indo-European labiovelars, they can surface in any of the three main points of articulation. (Actually helpful here, because it makes the mistake easier to spot later on.)
What an amazing text. Thanks OP for sharing this!