Language Decryption

Followup of Code Decryption

Prerequisite: none

The Code Book by Simon Singh has a nice chapter on cracking ancient languages.

Hieroglyphs

People first assumed that hieroglyphs were semantic pictographs and ideographs, and nothing more. No one bothered to challenge the assumption since the Ancient Egyptians were supposedly too "primitive" to come up with a phonetic system.

Then Rosetta Stone came around which contained hieroglyphs, demotic, and Greek on one slab, making a convenient crib, except that the Ancient Egyptian language has not been spoken for centuries. When Thomas Young spotted a cartouche on the Rosetta Stone, he suspected that it signified a pharaoh's name and that hieroglyphs might actually be phonetic.

He considered the historical context of several artifacts and associated names with cartouches. He could then deduce the sound values of each character. But his idea died down when he convinced himself that the alphabet was only applied to foreign names. Even with a collection of sounds, it did not seem to make meaning in regular text. At least, it made no sense to him..

Jean-François Champollion came across a cartouche. He figured that the the repeated letters are probably the repeated "s" in "Ramses". Being fluent in Coptic, he further suspected that the circumpunct reads "ra" as a rebus image.

And it worked. Ramses. After much substitution, it turns out the Egyptian hieroglyphs represented an ancestor of the Coptic language where some characters are phonetic and some are semantic. When Champollion traveled to Egypt he could really read hieroglyphs. Read-read hieroglyphs. Read. Hieroglyphs.

Linear B

The Linear B tablet was found on Crete so the first speculation was that it is in Greek. But many Greek words end in "s", and the lack of a common last letter refutes that. Since the consensus was that the tablet contained a lost Minoan language, there was not much deciphering effort.

Alice Kober noted that there are around 100 characters, too much to be alphabetic and too few to be logographic, which makes it syllabic. She also noticed commonly occurring root words and suffixes, indicating an inflective language. It allowed her to associate syllables with the same consonants. Take Japanese as an example (except that Linear B had longer root words):

かく --> かきます
kaku      kakimasu
よむ --> よみます
yomu     yomimasu

つくる --> つくります
tsukuru      tsukurimasu

あぶ --> あびます

abu        abimasu

ぬぐ --> ぬぎます
nugu      nugimasu

Kober did the same analysis and grouped the Linear B characters by consonant, although she did not know what the consonants were.

Michael Ventris examined Kober's work and considered the geographical context of the tablet. He associated a regularly appearing word with "Knossos" and used it as a crib to identify other words such as "Pylos". Soon, he had enough cribs to substitute most of the text and fill in the gaps himself. The text was indeed in Greek, although there were some words he could not recognize. John Chadwick further identified the language as a kind of Archaic Greek. The ending "s" was dropped as a convention.