The reason linear A is so difficult is that the total remaining corpus of Linear A text is ~7500 characters, spread out over ~1500 inscriptions.
If you have a 4k screen, you can fit all remaining Linear A text on your screen at once, in 14pt high font.
An in addition to that, a vast majority of documents are lists which consist of a "header" (1 to 3 words) and word-number pairs afterwards. An another common class are small clay seals with 1, 2 characters carved into them. It's likely that in both cases, we may be dealing with abbreviations.
Some of the lists end with "ku-ro" and a number that's the sum of all the previous numbers, oddly frequently off by one.
It would be amusing if archaeologists in the future also end up spending countless hours trying to decipher my shopping lists and poor math skills
They hadn't yet decided whether to count from 0 or from 1.
Surprisingly this comes up more then you'd think, for instance in Ancient Rome, tomorrow is two days away so all the dates are off by one from what you'd think it was. They mainly count down and it goes, 5, 4, 3, day before, day.
I noticed that when I read Tom Holland's new translation of The Lives of the Caesars. All the dates were in the form "N days before Kalends/Ides".
“Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration.” — Stan Kelly-Bootle (first person to obtain a postgraduate degree in computer science)
ku-ro obviously means "carry in" :)
My French teacher told me a story of a Norwegian man who married a French woman. A few months after she'd moved to Norway, my French teacher had come to visit thrm.
When she was leaving, the woman said "pose, pose". My French teacher was puzzled, and asked why she'd said that, and the woman asked if it didn't mean "au revoir" in Norwegian?
Because it was what the cashier at the grocery store said to her every time.
It means (carrier) bag.
Very vaguely, it makes it like a one-time pad where it can be anything you want it to be. Not quite, but so little text leaves a lot of options open.
I wonder, is there a form of analysis which lets you quantify how ambiguous a set of symbols is? Maybe related to entropy?
Obviously one symbol can mean literally anything, but you could also have very long strings of symbols with many different meanings.
Yes. Somewhere in Claude Shannon's work, called the "unicity distance".
I would love to have this image available!
I’d send it to you but you probably wouldn’t understand it.
As observed by archaeologist John Younger, the entire Linear A corpus takes up only 1.84 pages of letter paper when typeset in 12 point font and 1-inch margins.
when I first read the title thought he was talking about linear algebra and I was like damn it's not that hard