I wish there was just a website that had every piece of ancient writing we have, with translations, time periods, usage geography, spread, evolution, etc. It seems to me that if we activated all the information we have about ancient writing systems we could probably answer a lot more questions about our history. Like who has what legends and myths written could tell us if stories were based off of real events. It seems to me that everything gets so spread out into individual fields of study so much that we might actually know a lot more than we think we do it’s just in fragments across many disciplines.
I'm afraid that you're asking for a very difficult task. I've been thinking more modestly about a "Minoan studies" website, where all information about the Minoans are brought together, including Minoan archaeogenetics, art motifs, epigraphy, history, linguistics and religion. My channel tries to do that.
there are 3 more reasons why you would read the Phaistos disk from the inside out and left to right. 1. the human and animal characters are mostly all facing to the right. this indicates a sequence of events from left to right because some of them are walking/moving in that direction. 2. the disk is round so it would be nearly impossible for any writer to guess how many words they could fit on the disk.. this means that if they started from the edge and then realized they were running out of space then the words would get smaller towards the center as they to tried and compensate and fit them all in. (you'd still have this problem even when using stamps where the gaps between characters would decrease instead.) Conversely, if they start from the middle then the words can all be the same size because if you realize you are running out of space you just need to add more clay and make the disc a little bigger. 3. Smudging.. Clay, like paper is prone to smudging so it is much easier to work from the middle outward because if you accidentally touch the unwritten edges then no harm done, you can just smooth it over.. if, however, you start from the edges and work you way in and then accentually touch the clay that you have already written on, you can smudge it and perhaps even ruin the entire piece of work.
Egyptian does the opposite, though - the images face you as you read. Given the antiquity and prestige of Egyptian, you could argue that other systems would be likely to follow the Egyptian example.
When you said that Linear B does not distinguish phonetically between r and l, I immediately thought of relatives I have in Crete where they still do that in my family village. In both sounds the tongue curves backward and touches the back of the top of the uraniscus and sounds like the "r" vowel in Sanskrit. The village is called Ανώγεια and they even joke (as Cretans love to do) about the pronounciation among themselves. How wonderful it has survived to this day!
Thank you for your contribution. It is very fascinating as a possible example of the survival of a language feature, and it would complement the genetic survival that archaeogenetics has already shown in Crete. The historical record is interesting too. According to Wikipedia "When exactly Anogeia was founded and by whom, is not accurately known. Many believe that the original settlement was founded by villagers from the village Axos, which is west of Anogia, where the Minoan city Oaxos was."
@@PeterRevesz Indeed! I am thinking that PTSD suffering survivors from the Tsunami might have thought "never again" and moved as high up in the mountains as they could! It is a quite shielded area. This pronunciation is unique around the village and maybe a couple of other surrounding villages. They are extremely territorial and protective of their lands, so it is not impossible that this pronunciation quirk may have survived. It is very distinctive!
@@arisd1669 Thank you for your interesting description of Anogeia. I had to cancel a trip to Crete this year because of the pandemic, but I'd love to visit this place next time.
@@PeterRevesz Glad to be of assistance - thank you for uploading this lecture! If you do visit, make sure you try the "galaktoboureko" dessert from Mrs Alcyone when you visit. Its on the ζαχαροπλαστείο on the village square! If you have someone to help you chat with the locals you will definitely get to hear the unmistakeable "r/l" ! Can't miss it!
I'm an archaeologist who has been enamored with the Minoan civilization and their scripts. I've recently read peer-reviewed articles which suggest Linear A is an early dialect of Hurrian. This is not surprising considering Mycenaean Linear B stems from ancient Cypress, as well as the similarities between Linear A and the Cypro-Minoan script. The linear nature of the script also implies origins from cuneiform. Trade routes along the southern coast of Anatolia brought many languages, scripts, ceramic styles, commodities, etc. from the Levantine coast westward into the Aegean. The same route has been used for eons and was likely the route of the EB Oluburun merchant ship before it sunk.
@@PeterRevesz A substantial portion of the Linear A corpus is LM phase from sites like Hagia Triada and Knossos, ca. 1500 BCE. The Hurrians of Mitanni were contemporary with this period of the Minoans. Also, the article I referenced argued phonological similarities with a possible dialect of Hurrian. Regardless, it's kinda hard to be a European first civilization, as Arthur claimed, when your roots are looking more and more Semitic and Anatolian.
@@robertpenny7180 The Hurrians of 1500 BCE cannot be the originators of the Linear A script that was already used by the Minoans 300 years earlier. Moreover, the Linear A script likely developed from Cretan Hieroglyphs which go back to 2100 BCE.
Wow!! I am truly flabbergasted by this “tour de force”, Professor Revesz! I remember very well, while studying at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, ancient & Homeric Greek, and learning that the Mycenean Linear B syllabary encoded an archaic form of Greek, I remember as if it were yesterday that everyone was puzzling and phantasizing about the Phaistos Disk and Linear A, undeciphered and mysterious. And it had set my imagination alight. But then I went on to study social science and economics… Your discovery and translation are of the same historic caliber as Champollion’s with the Rosetta Stone. Did the students in that class realize what a momentous event they were listening to? Personally, it was a complete surprise to learn from you that the language the Minoans used to write (but perhaps did not speak?) is an Ugric language! I’d have put my money on some near-eastern language, probably of the semetic family like Phoenecian, but never on it being related to Hungarian which came from north of the Black Sea. But then, as you say, the Black Sea was criss-crossed in all directions by all manner of merchants and other travellers, so what people knew at one end of the sea people at the other end would soon know too! It’s amazing how much and how far people travelled, by land and by water, in those days, and had been from much earlier still. After all, about a million years ago, Homo Erectus colonized most of the planet and may already have used boats of some kind to reach the Indonesian island of Flores. Thank you Peter for this fascinating presentation! And let no-one be fooled by your calm, low-key, matter-of-fact tone of voice and composure! You are in the same league as Paul Dirac: a very humble attitude can hide an exceptionally brilliant mind!
I appreciate your very nice comment. I also learned about the Phaistos Disk in my graduate student days. I had a Cretan Greek Ph.D. advisor who kept a replica of it on his office desk at Brown University. He also liked to talk about Greek history. I was fascinated by the subject but was already busy with a Ph.D. dissertation. I had a chance to return to this subject only when I was invited as a Fulbright visiting professor by the University of Athens in 2008. It was at that time that I realized that Pre-Greek is related to Hungarian. That gave me an important clue to the decipherment. An early version of my vowel harmony testing algorithm th-cam.com/video/peKoVkokyf8/w-d-xo.html showed that the Phaistos Disk was written in a language that has vowel harmony, which is a characteristic of Hungarian and Uralic languages but is absent in Bronze Age Mediterranean languages.
Linear A 2100 BC Linear B 1700 BC is a writing that dates only to Greece and to no other region outside the Greek world Linear A Linear B is found in Central Greece, the Peloponnese, Crete and many islands that form a unified economic and social space The language of Linear B is Greek In the thousands of panels of Linear B we did not find a single one with a foreign language In Linear A we do not have many inscriptions to draw firm conclusions but its evolution Linear B is a further development of Linear A from it with different grammatical rules by the same people in the same Greek space the Minoan civilization as well as the Mycenaean civilization are anthropocentric civilizations centered on the free man the standards of Art are free as in classical Greece, e.g. the spiral or meander .The mythological names such as Asterios, Ariand, Androgeos, Idomeneas, Mirionis, Phaedra, Minos, Minotaur, etc. are Greek names and only
@@panagiotis7946 Marija Gimbutas, who was a world famous archaeologist and did many excavations in Greece too, has stated that the origin of Linear A is the Old European (also called Danubian) script. She gave a detailed table that compares Old European and Linear A script characters in one of her books from 1991.
I’m genuinely staggered by this research and I’m surprised it’s not getting more attention. I hope this opens the door to a much richer understanding of Minoan society and culture. Thank you for your work 🙏
because it's nonsense :D Minoans spoke Hungarian with modern Hungarian grammar, at the time Hungarians spoke ancient Hungarian. I'm missing how this relates to the fact that Etruscans and Jesus were also Hungarians
Not a true discovey; only a hypothesis which must be analyzed and confirmed by other scholars. The scientific method. But if it is definitively confirmed,it would be a great achievement.
Your presentation shed more light into my research on Linear A&B and the connection with some of the languages, such as Hungarian, an information new to me. Of course I would be happier when I see non-native Greek speakers researching on old forms of Greek, or pre-Greek as you may put it, write the sounds in Greek letters as well. That would help recognising the words. For example, at the example of substituting the syllabic value into Linear A Texts you write the word for 'shine' as fe-ne-je-n. I would not recognise the Greek word without looking at the translation and this word is still used today in Modern Greek: φέγγειν ('Feggein) and similar words are: feggari (moon), fos (light), ? fenomai (appear, be visible)
You're absolutely right that it would be easier to recognize some Greek words written with Greek letters under the inscriptions instead of just giving the list of Greek words in a table, although it would add some complexity. My work already puts together things that were never brought together before. Since my work is interdisciplinary, every reader needs to be patient and learn someting new, whether it's a new language, a new script, or some new computer methods.
ancient Greek has To pheggos/eos meaning shining (of the sun or of the day, light of the night(moon,stars). and pheggo, to shine, infititiv pheggein., but MOON in ancient greek is E selene. so not similar to modern greek feggari ( moon) as indicated here above.but this is how languages evolve over the milenias.If I were to meet a french-speaking person( my language) of 1000 years ago I very much doubt I would understand him/she and he/she me.
In modern Greek we still call the moon "Selene", it's the normal way to call the moon, but we also use the word "pheggari". The "lunar lander" is called "selenakatos" in (modern) Greek meaning "moon vessel"
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Good morning professor: we are currently studying Guatemalan mayan languages, modern ones, as a prerequisite for studying northern mayan languages. Your lecture and the strategies you depict are fabulous and much relevant for our effort in linguistics here in Central America. Best wishes. This is of primary importance for us, because, in our effort there is the possibility of renewing the mayan glossaries, while understanding the way ancient indoeuropean peoples constructed their own. For instance, the mountain maya do not have a word for "dolphin", presenting it just as another "fish", which is not a solution for such a construct. And it would be unfair to abandon mayan glossaries to their own fate, while spanish borrowed words from all other indoeuropean stock. Our aim is to find a linguistic way to solve the scarcity of mayan glossaries while embracing linguistic solutions that have proved successful in other ancient languages.
This presentation is primarily based on the following article that describes the translation of twenty-two Linear A inscriptions: www.wseas.org/multimedia/journals/information/2017/a605909-068.pdf Among the remaining undeciphered scripts, the Indus Valley Script seems very interesting. For a starter, there are some TH-cam videos on that subject too.
Thank you so much for your amazing work, Dr. Revesz! Your findings are more important than most realize today (and when you recorded this absorbing presentation). But more and more will learn through your continued efforts and research. Thank you for all you do to help reveal the secrets of history, language and communication using modern technology to 'crack' difficult codes whose legends have lost long ago. Kudos!
Fabulous, professor, thank you very much! I won’t pretend to follow much of it, but you show the complexity of the subject and the knowledge and skill needed to study this and many other subjects.
Thank you. The topic of each video can be further studied at one's own pace by reading the associated research papers, which in this case is the following: www.wseas.org/multimedia/journals/information/2017/a605909-068.pdf
Cette lecon est remarquable par son extreme intéret linguistique et par la maladresse du relateur qui fatigue à faire émerger une information précise. Le recours à des diapositives trop chargées et donc ILLISIBLES n' aide pas beaucoup la compréhension. C' est bien dommage !
Merci pour vos commentaires. La caméra était trop loin de moi, au fond de la salle de classe. Des images plus claires peuvent être trouvées dans l'article original du journal: www.wseas.org/multimedia/journals/information/2017/a605909-068.pdf
This is very interesting in light of recent DNA-based hypotheses that the Minoan/ancient Cretan people originated in the Danubian basin, perhaps even narrowed down to the Carpathian basin.
The early European farmers came from Anatolia and spread throughout Europe using the Danube River as their main gateway and means of trasportation. They met there native hunter-gatherers and the two groups eventually mixed and formed a culture that Marija Gimbutas called the Old European culture. This neolithic culture was originally centered on the Danube Basin but eventually spread west all the way to Ireland, north to Scandinavia and south to the Aegean area, where they formed, with the Aegean natives, the Cycladic and Minoan civilizations. Interestingly, the art motifs also support this sequence of development: th-cam.com/video/7RunFz_clqY/w-d-xo.html
Regarding your approach to decipherment of both Linear A and the Phaistos disc, I was wondering why you categorically exclude Linear B from your list of possibly related writing systems. There are words in Linear A, that, when read with the phonetic values of Linear B, do have great similarities to Mycenaean words, an example of which being the name of Phaistos written pa-i-to in LB and PA-I-TO in LA.
Thank you for your well-informed question. Linear A and Linear B have many similar-looking signs. However, similar-looking signs are usually not read the same way in different languages. For example, the @ sign is read as 'at' in English, but it is often read as something else in other languages. Based on that observation, I do not exclude the Linear B signs, but I do not assume that the Minoans read all the signs like the Mycenaeans did, that is with the same syllabic values. According to an old paper of L. Godart, who read Linear A with Linear B syllabic values, the word PA-I-TO occurs on two tablets from Hagia Triada. On tablet HT 97, it occurs in a list and is followed by the number 6, while on tablet 120, it also occurs in a list and is followed by the number 3 1/5, which is equivalent to 3.2 in decimal notation. That makes no sense because we would expect town names to appear in the header of the tablets instead of being one of the inventoried items. Another problem with L. Godart's approach is that he never found the town name KO-NO-SO in the Linear A corpus. That is strange because we would expect the name of Knossos to appear at least once.
@@PeterRevesz Thank you for your reply! If I conclude correctly, your reasoning is basically that 𐘂𐘚𐘄 cannot be a place name because in LB a place name wouldn't be in this position on a tablet. Thus, you seem to be assuming that the Mycenaeans borrowed the way of organizing goods/places on tablets from Minoan LA. I find this very doubtful, since you are assuming that the Mycenaean scribes that "invented" LB knew how to organize the words on a tablet in LA but not the writing system itself. And if they did happen to know the phonetic values of LA, why would they just invent their own values - that are also not exactly suitable to the Greek language? Regarding your issue with ko-no-so, according to a reading as LB, the signs 𐀜 and 𐀰 for no and so didn't exist in LA; the name Κνώσσος being written ko-no-so in LB justifies itself by a writing rule implemented by Mycenaean scribes that says that a vowel in a syllable can be a "dead" one when it follows a syllable with the same vowel. There are candidates for Knossos in LA, assuming a LB reading, the most probable ones being KU-NI-SU and KA-NU-TI.
@@unakanasi It does not matter that the @ sign is known to be read as AT in English, if in your language the at preposition is something else. Then the @ sign is naturally read as the at preposition in your language. The Mycenaeans likely treated many of the Minoan signs similarly to how the @ sign is treated in other languages. I appreciate your argument that KO-NO-SO in Linear B = KA-NU-TI in Linear A under certain assumptions. However, KA-NU-TI is seen only once in a list of items followed by the number 25. Hence, it seems to be some kind of produce rather than a town name.
@@PeterRevesz Thank you for replying! You can't compare the @ sign, a commonly and universally used sign across the globe that naturally changed its meaning due to frequent use, to signs that were only used regionally on Crete and later in mainland Greece. Additionally, the @ sign doesn't originally include any intention to be used phonetically, while still carrying a universal meaning, whereas LA, which likely evolved from Cretan Hieroglyphs, was originally written mostly phonetically. Regarding your issue with KA-NU-TI, Minoans tended to abbreviate place names with their first letter, as seen in the name DI-DE-RU -> DI (LB cognate: di-de-ro) or possibly PA for PA-I-TO, MA for MA-DI etc., and the sign KA is indeed very frequent standing on its own. overall, given the small amount of preserved LA text, the congruence between LA and LB is just too overwhelming to be considered coincidence if words like QA-QA-RU and qa-qa-ro, TA-NA-TE and ta-na-to, DA-I-PI-TA and da-i-pi-ta, PA-DE and pa-de etc. show similarity in phonetic meaning, shape of the sign and place of origin.
@@unakanasi I clearly referred to the @ sign's use in email addresses, and within emails the @ sign is usually read as 'at' in English and as the equivalent preposition in other languages even by those who know English. Arguing against that obvious fact is useless. The @ sign still stands as a good example for a sign that is associated with a word in one language and as the semantically equivalent word in other languages.
That was truly great, thank you! The amount of work involved in constructing the many tables is staggering, well done. I am not a linguist but the passion and dedication shown by you and your students is truly praiseworthy.
Very interesting video and a very nice and logical decipherment (although has some gaps). I do not understand though why no official source(at least from what I could find) has mentioned your name in the decipherment attempts.
Experts cannot read all decipherment claims because they do not have the time and do not know all the languages which were used in the various decipherment attempts. Experts need a compelling reason to learn a new langauge in order to evaluate a new claim. Now we may have such a compelling reason by supporting evidence from archaeology and archaeogenetics. Recently, I made videos regarding these supporting evidences. Please see them here: th-cam.com/video/gN_2Ok1gnLo/w-d-xo.html and th-cam.com/video/7RunFz_clqY/w-d-xo.html on this channel.
Hálás vagyok kedves Révész Péter professzor Úr, ezért a ragyogó munkáért! Bizonytalan vagyok benne, hogy létezett-e egy, az összes nyelvet kis vagy nagyrészben a mai napig átható ősnyelve. Az Ön munkája és sok más forrás mégis azt a következtetést sugallja, hogy a magyar nyelvben maradhatott talán a legtöbb, szinte alig megváltozott formában ebből a feltételezhető ősnyelvből. További kutatásaihoz kívánok fényes sikereket és kifogástalan egészséget. Megkülönböztetett tisztelettel: Tóth Sándor
Köszönöm! Egy másik videómban bemutatok néhány hegynevekkel kapcsolatos szót, amik kb. 50 ezer évesek, mert közép-afrikai és eurázsiai nyelvekben egyaránt megtalálhatók: th-cam.com/video/I_RCuwRx5hU/w-d-xo.html
It is amazing how things from different points of view and up on completely different results and a whole different parallel grammar comes by reading a very same text. Fpr example by my study until dotay the 1st letter on the ring (the T-like) was the letter A, same as in the deciphered Linear-B (35:38). I assumed that according to Ventri's alphabet (who deciphered the Linear ) as some letters remained the same they also kept their phonetic value. Then "Fe" = A! My opinion is that more research has to be made and nobody is completely wrong and i'd love to see more collaboration at this point. Many discoveries and breakthroughs has been made and it's time to start combining that knowledge! Linear-A still remains a mystery that waits to be revealed!
The Minoan language shows front-back vowel harmony, which is not a feature of ancient Greek: th-cam.com/video/peKoVkokyf8/w-d-xo.html. Moreover, since the two languages are different, the speakers of these two languages would say differently many depicted objects. For example, the T-like Linear A and Linear B signs originally may have depicted double axes. However, in ancient Greek the name of the double axe may have started with an A, while in the Minoan language, it may have started with the syllable PE or the similarly sounding FE. Hence, the differences in the phonetic values of the signs are simply the natural consequence of having two very different underlying languages for the Linear A and the Linear B inscriptions.
I don't understand how you go from Linear A symbols share some features with old hungarian & carian, & is agglutinative - to classifying it as a part of the language family that includes hungarian? To me this is a leap that does not (necessarily) logically follow. Equally plausible is that Minoan is not part of that family but gave loanwords to Old hungarian through trade/contact?
As a further explanation, I just uploaded a new video "A Vowel Harmony Testing Algorithm for Ancient Scripts applied to the Minoan Phaistos Disk" th-cam.com/video/peKoVkokyf8/w-d-xo.html that shows that the Minoan language had vowel harmony. That feature is very characteristic of the Finno-Ugric and Turkic languages and cannot be acquired by borrowing.
I sincerely doubt that. Minoan culture preceded the hungarian script by a few THOUSANDS of years. Ancient Hungarian script is actually _Medieval_ and came from Turkic and thus from Asia. Minoan Linear A dates bacl to 3000 - 1700 AC and the Hungarian from around the 800 of our age, thus the Viking age and the age of the expansion of Islam. that's a huge gap. I don't think that the Minoan language would have travelled to the region of Armenia / Caucasus, which is where the Turkic people came from, stayed there for 3000 years without leaving a single evidence and then travelled to modern day Hungary during the Viking age.
@@VFella Nobody said that the Minoan language moved anywhere outside of the Aegean area. Linguistics shows that Minoan is a Finno-Ugric language. That simply means that Minoan also originates from the common Finno-Ugric homeland. The exact location of the Finno-Ugric homeland is subject to debate, and it is presumed by some researchers to be near the Urals and others in the Danube Basin and Eastern Black Sea area: www.naun.org/main/NAUN/bio/2019/a302010-aag.pdf On the other hand, the Minoan Linear A syllabic script could have spread by trade, just like the Phoenician alphabet spread to Greece, Italy and eventually many other places wordwide. While the gap between our English alphabet and the Phoenician is about the same as between Linear A anad Old Hungarian, in both cases there are intermediate stages, reducing the apparent gap that you mention. In particular, the Carian alphabet, which was used from the 8th century BC to the 1st century, can be shown to be a descendant of Linear A and an ancestor of Old Hungarian: www.wseas.org/multimedia/journals/information/2017/a605909-068.pdf The Carian alphabet probably spread by trade to Black Sea area, where Carian towns such as Miletos had numerous colonies. Linear A writings were found both at Miletos and in Bulgaria. There are examples of the development of the Old Hungarian alphabet before the 8th century, that is, before the Old Turkish alphabet is first seen near the Black Sea.
@@VFella Turkic people do not come from the Caucasus, and Armenians are not Caucasians. What on planet earth are you talking about? Turks are Western Mongols, languages originate in the Altaic Mountains, this is 101. Real Caucasians are Georgians, Circassians, Chechen, Ingush, Lezgin - these are native Caucasians and this is where their languages originate. This is also 101. There's a Chinatown in downtown Washington, DC - do you think the ancient Han Chinese come from America?
@@PeterRevesz Still, sprachbunds. Vowel harmony is characteristic of Central Asia, and none of the languages there are related. So, unless you find real correspondences and sound changes from Old Hungarian, you cannot make assumptions like that, or you are falling into the realm of nationalistic pseudo-science.
omg. this is super interesting. i love the way intuition and logic both combine to generate a working phrase. the poetic interpretation however, can be further refined. it is after all human script. much as baudelaire refined poe from rudimentary to sublime. you have the goddess looking down from the clouds but it signifies the heavens. anyways, i am grateful that you allowed us to sit in to this very enightening discourse! congratulations to all your efforts.
Thank you for your comment. I already made some minor refinements of the translations. There are additional Minoan inscriptions that could be translated since this video was made.
just finished, really great, I like the overstamping detail. I've been interesting in this a lot, i'll check out your page for updates. Did you read the first results published from the Herculaneum scrolls xrays? It was basically some instagram influencers casting shade on some other influencers, it was all fun! Lovely to see such things in an ancient text, talking about taking all forms of indulgence as equally important matters to examine and compare, something like that - and that others who follow another form of philosophy were all too dour.
Being able to read the Herculaneum scrolls is a great feat. One of our students at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln was involved in developing the software for the visual recognition of the written characters. I verified the overstamping analysis by an experiment with some clay and stamps. You can read about the details in the following paper: www.maajournal.com/index.php/maa/article/view/653/580
In the QnA you mention that it's read "left to right, center to edge" yet in your reading of the golden ring the script was sequenced from the edge towards the center. How do you reconcile this fact? Also, it's well known that ancient Greek could be read both from left to right and right to left, depending on practical considerations and preference. Is this also a feature of Linear A?
This is a very good question that comes up frequently. I gave an answer with an explanation and illustration in another video that you can see here: th-cam.com/video/XVWa0WEn-e0/w-d-xo.html
Thank you for your interest and enthusiasm. The video had to leave out some details that can be found in the following journal article: www.wseas.org/multimedia/journals/information/2017/a605909-068.pdf
Dear Peter Revesz! I wanted to emphasize the symbol you point at @10:24 as the letter g, the upper one, is in Estonian, Meadow Mary, and Finnish called as jumi / jumo / jum / jume from which the word jumal or the Finno-Ugric heavenly god or god is derived. The same symbol is painted on Rezh river petroglyphs in Siberia which are dated into late Mesolithic or 15000 - 12000 BCE. In Mansi mythology there are joli-toorum and numi-toorum deities. Toorum in Mansi has the same linguistic context as jumi which is blanketing sky. Joli-toorum is the upper god, a female deity and the numi-toorum is the lower god who lives half the way between the upper sky and the earth. They are like sister and brother. In that context the fact you have the jumi sign as part of Hungarian rune is quite remarkable. Also all your other works in this filed give tremendous inside into details even when one doesn't spot them immediately. Unfortunately I can't post links in YT comments as the service will them remove automatically.
Thank you for oyur interesting observations. The symbol marked with a star @10:24 also occurs in the Old European culture c. 7500 years ago. That symbol could be related to the Minoan double axe symbol from the Bronze Age. This is one of the strange mirror symmetric symbols, which I discussed in another video: th-cam.com/video/XVWa0WEn-e0/w-d-xo.html If you would like to write to me, then please use my university email address: revesz AT cse.unl.edu
Is there somewhere I can stay updated on this? I would be interested in actually helping too, because it's more fun to do hands on studies, but that probably won't work because I am not an expert in Linguistics or Writing Software; plus very limited free time.
Thank you for your interest and enthusiasm. I suggest that you subscribe to my channel, which will feature further videos on Linguistics and Minoan Scripts: th-cam.com/channels/cmXasu7kcyira2D37TT2UA.html In addition, you can visit my publications webpage at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln: cse.unl.edu/~revesz/publications.htm Currently, I have some great students who help me with software as we are building the AIDA system that is described in a video on my channel. However, I would appreciate if you could spread the news among your friends and/or write something on appropriate websites such as this one: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_A
Thank you! You may enjoy on this channel the latest video, which discusses Minoan archaeogenetics, a technique that can be useful to identify movements of ancient people, if the data is analyzed carefully.
I say in the video that Minoan is a Finno-Ugric language, and hence related to Hungarian. I have not studied Etruscan in depth. However, the Italian linguist Mario Alinei thought that Etruscan is related to Hungarian. He wrote the book Etrusco: una forma arcaica di ungherese, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2003. This book may answer your questions regarding Etruscan.
@@chrisnewbury3793 It is a fascinating mystery. The Tartarian Tablets have no generally accepted translations, but its signs show a visual connection with Sumerian pictograms, the precursor of cuneiforms. Since archaeologists believe that the Tartarian Tablets are older than the Sumerian pictograms, there likely was some population movement from the Danube Basin, more specifically the Danube Delta, to Mesopotamia that may have brought writing there. Archaeogenetics shows a population movement from the Danube Basin to Crete as shown in my video: th-cam.com/video/gN_2Ok1gnLo/w-d-xo.html If we can imagine a movement to Crete, then it is also easy to imagine a movement by ship along the southern coast of Turkey to Mesopotamia. Currently, there are few Sumerian archaeogenetic samples, but hopefully we will be able to test this possibility in the next few years.
Being a layman, I at least cannot imagine anyone writing in a spiral pattern on a disc starting at the edge, so I am glad to hear the suffix/prefix agument also indicates this. Thank you for an interesting video! I love the ring inscription!
Professor have you ever "tested" this method by taking a language we have deciphered, leaving it out of your data set and using the method you show here of determining which symbol in the language is related to others and getting values based on that to then "read" that language and see if it matches the deciphered script's reading? If you can do that and show the method works for multiple languages I imagine you could garner a lot of support for your system.
In addition to using a matrix comparison between Linear A signs and Carian alphabet at 8:17, in this publication here wseas.com/journals/isa/2017/a605909-068.pdf , you can also see two other matrices comparing the Linear A to the Old Hungarian script and the Carian to the Old Hungarian script. The Carian and Old Hungarian scripts both already have known sound values, and interestingly, matching those letters based on visual features alone using the matrix method with feature vectors yielded sign pairs that also have similar sound values. This, in addition to the one-to-one mapping of signs, means that those scripts are developmentally related. A major advantage of the matrix method is its objectivity. Other researchers might also find such a method useful to analyze many other scripts as well. The matrix method has a variant, where a convolutional neural network is used to visually compare the signs instead of feature vectors. This variant of the matrix method was recently used to compare eight Bronze Age scripts and build similarity matrices with matches along the main diagonal: th-cam.com/video/dClYybZLF4o/w-d-xo.html As described in the video, this variant of the matrix method was verified because it could 'find' the sound values of the Greek alphabet based on the Phoenician alphabet. The two alphabets are visually and phonetically similar because the Greek alphabet developed from the Phoenician alphabet. Scripts that are developmentally related are visually and phonetically similar in general, and that is what these matrix methods take advantage of.
What archaeologists could be more interested in than this linguistics presentation is a journal article in which I compared ancient Anatolian and Southeastern European art motifs. It's a mathematical analysis of art motifs that shows that early Minoan art is closely related to Old European art: www.wseas.org/multimedia/journals/mathematics/2019/a695106-1169.pdf
It is obviously identical to the ancient Hungarian , at least some letters .Others are very close. This is significant to me , as I know Hungarian is extremely close to Sumerian .This is what I found as a source language on Linear A as well. Great video , sharing
Your observation that Sumerian has similarities to both Linear A and Hungarian seems correct. The video "Sumerian and Finno-Ugric Regular Sound Changes" th-cam.com/video/kv7pauLtUME/w-d-xo.html discusses some of the similarities between Sumerian and Hungarian. On the other hand, the Emegir dialect of Sumerian also has many Dravidian-related words in it. Please see: www.wseas.org/multimedia/journals/information/2019/a045109-930.pdf
@@PeterRevesz thanks will watch this , how old is the Hungarian writing you show right after the Carian ? Also, Carians I believe are an offshoot of the Phoenecians, I would have to check . Great work , I do not have as many letters of Linear A as you managed to collect, but I have found over 70 that are commonly used and most match proto-Sumerian , also known to be the same as the older Vincan/Danubian (Tartaria Tablet(s) and the Vincan script are dated some 1,500 years older than this writing appeared at Djmet Nasr in Mesopotamia ). Great work ! and thanks
@@josephbenner4806 The development seems to be the following: Linear A -> Carian -> Old Hungarian. This is likely because the Carians had many colonies on the Black Sea shore. The oldest generally accepted surviving examples of the Old Hungarian script are from the 7th century.
@@PeterRevesz Very cool, i have a Carian chart and some info in an old book by Waddell, will look into them more . I am going through and studying this taking notes !I am sure both these languages trace to Proto-Sumerian Linear pictographic ..I'll be sending you some charts I worked on , they are all on Facebook but not very professionally made however the letters are as you know , like fingerprints. Which can be traced, showing the movement of a people and their language..Also am very interested about the Hungarian /Sumerian connection , I have only worked on the letters not the etymology (yet) but I am learning alot from you , thanks !
I am an amateur linguist, pursuing this exciting subject within Egyptian, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Old English and Cuneiform contexts. I had little difficulty following this exciting lecture, and I am most grateful for the post-up. These findings are electrifying. Many thanks.
Fascinating! I maintain the hope that Linear A will be solved within my lifetime. This video suggests that it has been, and that it is connected with W Uralic languages, and scripts used by them. I have severe reservations, not least of which is a comparison with the notorious Ekwos Akvasas-ka text, in which sound and meaning were so mangled that every year a new way of speaking PIE was expected. More needs to be done, and I hope to see criticisms of this work. But at least work is ongoing.
Classics scholars who read Homer could easily check the Linear B translations proposed by Ventris and Chadwick because that required going back only about 500 years. In contrast, they cannot easily check my translations using a Proto-Finno-Ugric language. Even those classics scholars who may speak one of the Finno-Ugric languages (Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian etc.) would need to study the etymologically reconstructed Proto-Finno-Ugric words and grammar. Classics scholars are not used to do that, and Finno-Ugric linguists are not used to study the Aegean Bronze Age. Currently, that is the biggest problem.
Very interesting computer tool. Have you tested it's translation capabilities also on pairs of scripts, which are both well understood and deciphered, in order to verify the validity of the ruleset?
This is an excellent question. Right now our objective is to test the translation method on more Minoan Linear A and Cretan Hieroglypic inscriptions. While extending the translations the consistency of phonetic values has to be maintained.
@@PeterRevesz Trying this between, let's say the Latin, Greek and Cyrillic alphabet would be a good check. Also, I wonder how Scandinavian runes would do with this method and the Latin alphabet. There are some characters that look the same but have different phonetic values. Same with the Latin and Cyrillic alphabet. If you used your method there, you would get some garbled nonsense. I really hope you'll be successful with your approach in the end. It would be so cool if we could finally read Linear A.
@@johannageisel5390 As a test of our method, we experimented with matching the Phoenician alphabet with the Greek alphabet, and we got a very satisfying result where the letters were almost perfectly matched. However, you may be right that for modern scripts one may not get as good results as for older scripts that kept a pictogram-like form with many details. All scripts tend to simplify over time, which causes a general convergence to simple forms. Highly developed scripts and artificial ones like the Morse code tend to contain very simple forms. Our methods were not designed for such scripts.
@@ellen4956 Luwian is not going to work because it is an Indo-European language. I explain in my vowel harmony video why Indo-European languages will not work. Please check it out here: th-cam.com/video/peKoVkokyf8/w-d-xo.html There is only one standard refernce for Linear A, namely the following book: L. Godart and J.-P. Olivier, Recueil des inscriptions en Linéaire A (Études Crétoises 21), De Boccard, 1976.
The problem I have with this presentation is that the theory applied seems to accommodate the Linear A syllabic signs, ligatures, ideograms , and logograms with phonetic values. This doesn't make sense if we take for example a Mandarin symbol with a certain pronunciation, but the same symbol, let's say in Cantonese, or Japanese have totally different, and unrelated phonetic features. Perhaps, LA was initially written with hieroglyphs or logograms, and it became simplified as a syllabary, by extracting a section of logogram and assigning its phonetic value to be attached to another logogram to represent its sound, or to change its semantics.
Logographic scripts behave very differently than syllabic and alphabetic scripts. If Europe had an early logographic script, then today its descendant would be readable by English, German, etc. speakers just as well as Chinese logographs are readable throughout China. Moreover, English and German speakers would pronounce those logographs differently just as Chinese logographs are pronounced differently in various regions of China. Linear A is a syllabary according to the consensus of linguists. Syllabaries behave more like alphabets. The phonetic values are passed on, while the original logographic meaning is forgotten. For example, most of the English letters are pronounced similarly to how their ancestor Phoenician letters were pronounced thousands of years ago. However, few English speakers know that the letter A was originally written upside-down and was a logograph for an ox, whose Phoenician name was aleph, where the phoneme /a/ comes from. Hence, Chinese and European writings have developed differently and this needs to be taken into account.
@@PeterRevesz Thank you for the clarification. I enjoyed watching the whole class, which left me wanting to know and understand language more. Thank you very much.
Thank you. A recent analysis of archaeogenetic data supports the Minoans' origin from the Danube Basin, which was a Proto-Finno-Ugric language area around 3000 BC. A brief introductory video about this result can be seen here: th-cam.com/video/gN_2Ok1gnLo/w-d-xo.html
You are a true Hungarian-American Icon, like my mentor Prof, Rudolf Emil Kàlmàna, Inamori Laureate. I admire your mathematical approach, for various reasons, I followed all segments available, I have a problem with the Danube cradle of civilization. This is a time related problem, because I believe the Danube civilization was an atavistic consequence of the people living on the shores of the sweet water lake, before it got flooded, and so became the BlackSea. Where did these people come from? What was the linguistic structure, and when and from where did they arrive at the shore of that inland lake, before it became flooded. I intend to follow up this question, as the region North of the Tunguska region unfreezes,. We just might need to find a little bone, like a finger tip as to extract the hybrid of Neanderthal x Denisovans x Homo sapiens : (North Siberian) variety. Frischknecht Dieter L. Rueschlikon Switzerland.
Nice to meet you. The Kalman filter is a very beautiful invention. According to the Black Sea deluge hypothesis the Black Sea was flooded and the Bosporus Strait was created around 7500 BP. If this hypothesis is true, then the early European farmers could walk from Asia to Europe on land and settle on the western and northern shores of the Black Sea, which was a fresh water lake. My hypothesis is that after the early European farmers mixed with the local hunter-gatherers, the language became Proto-Finno-Ugric. The burst of the natural dam could have been described as a wound of the Earth from which salt water or 'blood' gushes forth. The Finnish people may remember this flood as a wound of Väinämöinen, who sometimes could represent an Earth god: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_flood_myth
38:55. ‘Kitana’ may refer to Kition on Cyprus? Also quite puzzling to me is that the core Cycladic ancestral Y-DNA haplogroup is within “E” (Keftiu, pre-Mycenian Peleset/Pelasgian, lower Adriatic Balkan coast). This usually has a direct bearing on the language family. “E” makes them related to early Egypt (pre-Semitic) and the North African coastline. Other Agean groups are “J2” which was the Anatolian shoreline and islands, pre-Mycenian mainland Greece and eventually Etruscans. The Carians were “J2”. The Kartvelian language group you listed is haplogroup “G” and they are very strongly presented in Sardinia and the early Italic peninsula. I believe they left traces of their language in Basque (they were present in the Iberian peninsula before the Indo-Europeans arrived) and in the non-Indo-European remnant words in Sardinian. The Finno-Ugrian haplogroup is “N”, and there is a possibility that they had a small presence in Anatolia as one of their favoured endonyms was ‘Moshka/Mesh/Mash/Mushki/Meskheti” but I can’t find that ethonym in the Agean as such. Very interesting correlations though. Keep up the great work!
Thank you for your thoughtful comments. Please see my paper "Minoan Archaeogenetic Data Mining Reveals Danube Basin and Western Black Sea Littoral Origin" for a discussion of why the archaeogenetic data points to a Danube Basin origin of the Minoans. There is no y-DNA haplogroup E sample for Minoans. The prevalence of E along the Adriatic Balkan coast is a relic of an ancient migration from Africa via Sicily to Southern Italy and then to the Adriatic Sea area. On that migration, which seems to have avoided Crete, please see my other video "Origin of European River and Mountain Names from Near East and Africa" th-cam.com/video/I_RCuwRx5hU/w-d-xo.html
@@user-ud7ei6zv7i thank you. I find the Ev-13 really interesting in relation to biblical references to the supposed ancestral connection to the Mediterranean “Casluhim” descending from Egyptian “Misr”, where other branches of E seem to be anchored.
very intresting and surprising that Linear A should be a Finno-Ugric language. Particularly since these are found today only in north of Eurasia and with Hungarian as an outlier to the south
It is surprising, but it is has several parallels. The Proto-Indo-European homeland likely was somewhere in today's Kazakhstan, which is a Turkic language area today.
Hungarian is not a Finno-Ugric language. It is an old theory and outside of Hungary people still refer to it unfortunately. An Austrian named Paul Hunsdorfer (later changed his name to Hunfalvy Pál) came up with it who didn't even speak Hungarian.
Have you been able to expand upon this decipherment to better understand the Old European cultures in Southern Europe? I have seen elsewhere that their script has also long defied decipherment.
It would be nice to expand the research in that direction. However, there are fewer Old European than Minoan inscriptions. It also seems to me that there were several different Old European scripts. Hence we may succeed only if we get first a complete decipherment of all the Minoan inscriptions and the Indus Valley Script inscriptions too. My feeling is that the IVS will be deciphered next by some researcher.
@@nathanalbright Of course, there are many attempts. I also worked with an excellent Ph.D. student from India on the Indus Valley Script. Our work centered not on any decipherment but simply on a careful categorization of the numerous signs of the Indus Valley Script. In particular, we could provide an improved classification that grouped together many signs that were considered as separate sigs before. I know that this is very far from a decipherment, but it is a necessary first step. If you are interested in the details, then please see it here: www.academia.edu/45170959/A_method_of_identifying_allographs_in_undeciphered_scripts_and_its_application_to_the_Indus_Valley_Script
I believe you may be mistaken in assuming the Phaistos disk is a piece of writing in the sense you suppose. Each of the symbols is well-known; they are (or are derived from) short-hand signs for specific constellations, stars and asterisms. For example the circle with dots inside it represents the Pleiades. The 'head' is or Orion, regarded as first/head of the constellations.. and so forth. Now the way in which the signs are placed, and use of the spiral, tells us the sequence is either describing the sailing route by what is later described as 'binding' pairs in sequence, or by the system described by the Arabs as nau' - that is one star in one direction and another in the opposite direction. As Odysseus called it 'By Arcturus and the Pleiades'. While this is reasonable given the range of Cretan sailings (as far as the Black Sea), it is also perfectly possible that individuals used star-based symbols for their trade and storage of goods. So the Disk might be a record of what was stored in a given location - on ship or on shore. But it's not 'a language' agglutinative or otherwise. What you might compare it with are the Indus script's forms.
Thank you for your comment. Although this theory is interesting, I do not know of any serious scholar who supports the idea that the Phaistos Disk signs describe star constellations. Please keep watching the other parts of the Minoan series to see how my translation theory is further supported. In particular my vowel harmony video gives a structural analysis of the linguistic characteristics of the writing: th-cam.com/video/peKoVkokyf8/w-d-xo.html
Nice question. I used the term "controlled acrophonic principle" for assigning phonetic values to Linear A signs. That means: (1) each sign S depicts an object/action which is pronounced in proto-Ugric as "CV...." for a C consonant, V vowel. (2) S has to be similar to a Carian or Old Hungarian alpabet letter L. (3) L has to have the same phonetic value C as in (1). In the above, (1) is the basic acrophonic principle, which in itself can be misleading because it leaves too many possibilities, i.e., it can lead to false positives. Controls (2) and (3) are based on an alphabet evolution study that implied the evolutionary sequence Linear A > Carian > Old Hungarian. The Carian and Old Hungarian phonetic values were already known, and the Linear A signs were matched with the Carian and Old Hungarian letters based on 13 visual features. See Tables 4, 5 and 6 in this paper: www.wseas.org/multimedia/journals/information/2017/a605909-068.pdf Of course, the final check occurs when the thus-derived CV phonetic values are substituted into the Linear A inscriptions and meaningful sentences are obtained. The above paper gives meaningful translations of twenty-eight inscriptions. Since then more translations were obtained using the same process. I suggest you read the above paper and sign up free for my youtube channel.
Ah, this was a helpful comment. For whatever reason, I missed the meaning of CV and other classifying symbols in your system. Thank you , this helps me understand how scholars approach this type of study.
Dear Peter Revesz, it's @lennutrajektoor here again. I'm the one with whom you discussed the etymology of Knossos in the Komi language. I have to admit that I've reached the point where I'm able to take a specific topo- or hydronym and check whether it stands fro Minoan culture substrate. So far I'm able to perform and discover such results in such great amount that I have quite a substantial body of evidence Estonia to have a mixed settlements by the Minoan culture and by the Sumerians. The theory of the name knossos to be reference to an arable land is not just true but based on the same linguistic construction I have discovered a place in Estonia on island Muhuma or Muhu to have a settlement of Kuivastu. The first proposed idea that Kuivast as Knossos has the same grammar approached led to the discovery of Muhu two rivers Soonda and Lõetsa to be confirmed Mioan culture substrate. Also, the Minoan culture can't be called Minoans as ме нас (me nas) and ми нас (mi nas) have very specific meanings that represents their function and such word as Minoa / Minos does not exist. I started to call them the Crete Island Ugric culture. Your method works both on the Crete island Ugric culture and and on Sumerians. For instance I was successfully able to translate the meaning of Gilgamesh and come to conclusion that the Sumerian epos has never been called such way. The reason why I post here is to ask whether you would like to exchange ideas or to see the result of the work. My practical side comes from the desire to associate Crete Ugric Linear-A glyphs to known words that have to be in their language like Muhu. Muhu in Crete Ugric is му гу (mu gu) or hole (in the) land / earth ; earth hole. What I found out there is no attested confirmation such a sound lke гу (gu) has been associated with a Linear-A glyph. There's a KU glyph but because the experience with Sumerian showed the K sounds might change to G sounds I wondered could we together look for possible candidate for гу (gu) , confirm its existence or in the result to prove the KU glyph is the correct sound and we are witnessing the sound change due to change in pronouncing consonants. I fully acknowledge that this might be a bit too intrusive but my results wouldn't be possible without your work or your engagement here on YT comments. As I can't post any links due to YT deleting the post immediately I wonder, in case you agree, we come up with the way to establish connection outside YT comment section. In any case your work have been fundamental. That's the core message I wanted to pass forward.
Thank you for your comment. I studied regular sound changes within the Ugric branch of the Finno-Ugric languages. I believe that this branch includes Minoan. A ku > gu sound change is possible and may be regular. My email address is revesz @ cse.unl.edu to communicate in mode details.
@39:00, in the three examples of the applied decipherment you attribute the Linear B 'ja' (𐀊) to the syllables ke, ku, and ki. How are these reconciled between the one character?
The same sign can have different syllabic values in Linear A and Linear B because Linear A and Linear B writers spoke different languages. They both considered the signs to depict objects, but the objects had different names, and hence different first syllables in their respective languages. I do not use 𐀊 with 'ku' syllabic value. It likely had a 'ke' value in the Minoan language, and I use it with 'ke' except in this case where I use 'ki' because the Minoan word meaning 'toward' had two variations ni-ki and ni-ke that were likely dialectical. For the details, please see wseas.com/journals/isa/2017/a605909-068.pdf
Wikipedia is actually a conservative website, which tries to follow the consensus view rather than report breakthrough results. While there is a growing acceptance of my decipherement, it has not reached a consensus for several reasons. First, many people like mysteries. They are happier believing that the Minoan inscriptions are still undeciphered than to admit that they are already decipherered. Second, there were many claims regarding the decipherment of the Minoan scripts in the past 120 years. Hence, there is some cry wolf effect too. Third, it is difficult for scholars to verify decipherment claims that rely on a language that they do not know. The decipherment uses Proto-Uralic and Proto-Ugric, which seems closest to the Minoan language. Nobody speaks those languages today. They were reconstructed by Uralic linguists. In addition, those languages are not as widely studied as some other proto-languages such as Proto-Indo-European. Fourth, there was a strong belief that the Minoans spoke some Mediterranean language. Many people overlook how easy it is to sail to the Aegean Sea from the Black Sea. There was trade between these two areas even in the Neolithic. Moreover, the northern Black Sea region was a Proto-Uralic area according to several scholars.
To be frank I do have some doubts both on the assignment of phonetic values to the glyphs and the etypologies. E.g. On etymology, there are words that are known to be Greek and not necessarily pre-Greek in the list: after only a cursory glance, τυμβος (lating tumba, English tomb) εκλείπω (e.g. eclipse in English, from ek+leipo) immediately stand out. Λείπω in particular appears to have a proto-indo-european root (e.g. Latin linquo, and English "loan" come from this root) and the same might be said for tomb with less certainty - and even though tomb and relinquish are loanwords from French, coming from Latin, their presence in Latin is unquestionable. I believe that there are other etymologies that have been mischaracterised in that manner, as being pre-Greek. To offer a constructive criticism for the glyph classification, the basis chosen is both too large and a bit arbitrary. If the similarity is real, then the vector entries could change to completely different categories from these and still give similar results. I.e. instead of three lines, or a single straight line have a straight line left, right or diagonally, or a curved line left, right, up down, or diagonally, etc. If the vector can classify any set of glyphs then it should do so in a different basis too. Trying with multiple different basis vectors would be the only way to secure a result. It also raises the question why Linear B and the Cypro-minoan and (greek) Cypriot syllabaries have a particular set phonetic values, but linear A, from which they descended, are all of a sudden completely different - even though substituting Linear B phonetic values for similar symbols allows some toponyms, such as Se-to-i-ja, Su-ki-ri-ta, Di-ki-te, Tu-ri-sa among others. These toponyms emerge more than could be expected by random chance, and it is often in the right context as well. So there needs to be a very good reason for abandoning the values of the daughter scripts, i.e. Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary.
I appreciate your detailed comment. The main point of my dictionary is that the Minoan vocabulary likely contained cognate words to those words that occur in both Greek and Uralic languages. Obviously, it is hard to say precisely for each Greek-Uralic pair of words when a borrowing took place and which way it went. Many linguists proposed very early interactions and borrowings between the Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Uralic languages. These very early borrowings may have taken place not in Crete but around the Black Sea. The very early borrowed words could have cognate versions in several Indo-European and several Uralic languages. Nevertheless, my main point remains that those early borrowed words likely occured in the Minoan language too. Linear A and Linear B phonetic values actually agree in many cases such as in the case of the fig tree sign with NI phonetic value in both. Probably Linear B speakers adopted the Linear A word for fig tree. When Linear A and Linear B had different words for some object that was clearly depicted by a sign, then that sign took different acrophonic values in Linear A and Linear B.
@@PeterRevesz Thank you for engaging. It's just that overall the methodological trap is having a target language family for the (algorithm-assisted) decipherment method. It should be possible to both apply the methodology to other decipherment cases and also using different target languages. Because, for example, another question that computational models should address is also "is the problem solvable by this method", which is difficult for Lin A, as so much of the administrative tablets contain mainly abbreviations or name lists, with the rest of the corpus being tiny.
@@Hecatonicosachoron I like discussing things and value your comments. My method of building a one-to-one match between the set of signs of two related scripts is generally applicable. In an earlier paper "Bioinformatics evolutionary tree algorithms reveal the history of the Cretan Script Family" I repeatedly used the method for eight different scripts to find an evolutionary tree of the scripts. The second algorithm for finding the phonetic values of an undeciphered script (in this case Linear A) using the best match to an already known script (in this case Carian and Old Hungarian) is also generally applicable. Carian and Old Hungarian were used because they gave the best matches to Linear A apart from Linear B. Linear B was not chosen as the target language because using Linear B sound values has not led to a decipherment for over sixty years. Sometimes we need to try something new.
@@PeterRevesz Thank you very much for your reply! How about other tests, such as attempting a decipherment to other languages using the method, as control cases? If the process can be automated that could be possible (although doing it without any human input would be quite difficult...) And there are other tests as well... e.g. generating a body of simulated texts, (e.g. by translating some Lin B tablets using the chosen Old Hungarian lexicon) and then performing a statistical analysis on e.g. sign frequencies or word lengths. Essentially if the decipherment is correct one would expect that a collection of simulated texts in the language of the script and the existing corpus should have a high degree of mutual information (in the information-theoretical sense). And of course there are other tests... essentially a more or less brute force translation should give unexpected insights in the new contexts. E.g. in administrative tablets talking about wine or wool or cloth one could encounter these words, or words for their containers or activities associated with the commodities. But I would insist that it has to be done as "blindly" as possible for it to be accurate. As for sharing the values with Lin B phonetic values... I do appreciate the need of doing something new, but there are also some perplexing occurances when using the Lin B phonetic values, e.g. the emergence of toponyms; the existence of phonological changes between mycenean and minoan (e.g. Lin A "U" series into Lib B "O" series, i.e. a "u" to "o" sound change during translation from Minoan into Mycenean Greek) and also the fact that E-series signs seem to be so heavily biased for the final syllable... also in Lin A (using Lin B phonetic assignments) the existence of "y" and "w" glides between appropriate vowels (usually "y" after -i and -e, and "w" after -u) resolving the diphthongs etc. It could be my chance, but at the same time the look suspiciously consistent. So I cannot say that I'm decided either way on the matter.
@@Hecatonicosachoron You ask a deep question with two main parts. The first part is about the generality of my method. In theory, my method is generally applicable as long as there is a similar script. For example, even the rongorongo script of Eastern Island could be solvable if we had available a close enough script. Unfortunately, nowhere can we find any close script. The Minoans on Crete apparently interacted more with their neighbors than the Eastern Islanders could interact with anyone outside. The second part of your question is getting really technical. I have a high respect for David Packard who made some seminal work on a statistical analysis of Linear A and discovered most of the things you mentioned. However, statistics of this type can be interpreted several different ways. I'd be glad to discuss these interpretations, but it would involve some tables and math, so probably the best thing would be if you would write to me at revesz@cse.unl.edu to continue our discussion.
32:44 did he mean „ladder“? Or is my English not good enough? What does „latter“ mean in that context? It’s not a noun I would recognize. (If it is a German borrowing, he did mean ladder (=Leiter)).
This is misleading. In "The Decipherment of Linear B" Chadwick says that he and Ventris explicitly avoided relying on Cypriot, since it could not be assumed that the phonetic values of corresponding signs had remained that same or that both systems used the same conventions (which they do not - for instance, Linear B omits final consonants whereas Cypriot uses a character whose consonant part corresponds with the desired final consonant.) Their actual method involved painstaking cross-correlation of the contexts in which each Linear B sign was used. among other things.
Here is a quote from Douglas Young's article "Is Linear B deciphered?" (Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, vol. 4, no. 3, 1965): "Grumbach, Grégoire, and others challenged Chadwick to describe in detail the stages of making the grids and assigning values. In particular, he was asked to state the use made of Cypriot values. It may be doubted, however, whether Chadwick is truly is in a position to answer for Ventris' operations at the relevant stages because Chadwick had no contact with Ventris till July 1952." Those who claim that Ventris used the Cypriot syllabary associations as tentative values before a more mathematical, cryptographic analysis examined Ventris' work notes, for example, his "Mid-Century Report" of 1950.
I am wondering if you have looked at the older Dispilio tablet and Vinca script? I ask in wondering if there was not perhaps an original script in the Hurranian area that seems to have a diaspora around 6.2 BCE (the 6.2 "event") north, south and throughout the Mediterranean; and that would change the development relations and time line I would guess.
In saying that I am wondering/thinking that there was an original ideographic writing that left Ethiopia at 70kbce, that developed in various areas to what we see as late Mesolithic scripts such as Harrapan, early Sumer, Egypt, Maya, Old Europe etc. and then a revolution coming from the same area producing Gobekli Tepe, the first cities, agriculture, astrology et. al. or perhaps the Tamil Merchants who seem to go back to 13kbce.
@@deepblack67 These are fascinating questions. There was no writing as we know it more than 10,000 years ago, but there could have been some frequently used symbols, for example for the sun, moon, men, women, animals, trees etc. These symbols could be very ancient and may go back to the Paleolithic era and could have eventually developed at some time into writing signs to make true writing that records entire sentences. It is unclear where the first true writing appeared, but the Dispilio tablet suggests that it may have taken place already in Neolithic Greece. Since the Dispilio tablet is made of wood, it could be carbon dated to 5202 (+/- 123) BC, which makes it the earliest datable inscription that may be true writing, although there is no definitive reading of it at the present time: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispilio_Tablet The Dispilio tablet signs are very abstract and take several columns showing a remarkable complexity. However, I do not see a clear continuity between the Dispilio tablet and the Minoan scripts. Writing sems to have been invented independently at several locations at different times.
I'm sorry to ask you this ,but how do you know that the minoan language is a ancestor of finno-hungaric languages ,when it can be posible to be a caucasian language like Hattian which combined with Kaneshite formed Hittite.
Proto-Finno-Ugric is the common ancestor of both Minoan and the other Finno-Ugric languages. In particular, Minoan seems to fit into the Ugric branch of the Finno-Ugric language family tree. While the Finno-Ugric family tree has a solid linguistic evidence, the presumed dates of separation into various branches are only guesses. Obviously, for Minoan to fit into the Ugric branch of the Finno-Ugric language family tree, the Ugric branch had to separate from the rest at least 5000 years ago. That is possible, and in fact, according to Marija Gimbutas' Kurgan Hypothesis, the Indo-European language family branches also separated around that time. Hittite is the earliest known Indo-European language in Central Anatolia. Hittite borrowed many words from Hattic. For example, Hattic Eštan (sun god) > Hittite Ištanu, cf. Hungarian Isten (god). However, grammar is considered a more important evidence than common vocabulary in deciding whether languages are cognate. A comparison of Hattic and Hungarian grammar can be found in Table 11 of the paper "Establishing the West Ugric language family with Minoan, Hattic and Hungarian by a decipherment of Linear A" www.wseas.org/multimedia/journals/information/2017/a605909-068.pdf
@@PeterRevesz But let's think to another possibility ,if hattic or minoan in your opinion is from a western finno-hungaric branch but they may have been came from Caucasian region, the question is: If these languages are finno-hungaric in your opinion,but they came from Caucasian region, can even Hungarian language (Magyár) being in a percent finno-hungaric and in other caucasian?
@@user-zadeu2makarites My etymological dictionary lists some interesting words as borrowings from various Caucasian languages. Among these words are Mingrelian 'kipuri', which is internationally wide-spread, including English, German and Hungarian 'kefir'. Other words are Nogai 'kertpe' (pear) > Hungarian 'körte' (pear) and Caucasian Avar 'rez' (copper) > Hungarian 'réz' (copper). While these words suggest some Hungarian-Caucasus area connections, it is hard to draw any firm conclusions from them. Nevertheless, I suspect that the last word pair comes from Urartian 'urišhe' (metal object, weapon) which may derive from Sumerian 'urud' (copper). I also suspect that the Sumerians came from the northern Black Sea area via the Caucasus to Mesopotamia. Sumerian seems to be a Finno-Ugric language. For more explanation, please see the video "Sumerian and Finno-Ugric Regular Sound Changes" th-cam.com/video/kv7pauLtUME/w-d-xo.html and the journal article www.wseas.org/multimedia/journals/information/2019/a045109-930.pdf
@@user-zadeu2makarites Magyar indeed shows similarities to the languages of Caucasus, especially to Avar and Georgian. It's not an Uralic language but I won't detail it here, I do that on my channel.
Thank you. Deciphering Linear A required new techniques because there is no Rosetta Stone. For example, a new vowel harmony analysis method helped narrow down the set of possible languages to be considered as relatives to the Minoan language. Please check out "A Vowel Harmony Testing Algorithm for Ancient Scripts | Minoans Part 2": th-cam.com/video/peKoVkokyf8/w-d-xo.html
hi peter. Regarding curian from other thread you have a gReat opertuniry. if you can use your ai routines to translate that fragment you mentioned by the Black Sea and have it make sense as curian fragment. (the script may show it as curian symbols ina different language.) I think you will have proven the case. untill then its the best guess we have. also the fact the script seems to have survived for 700 years (according to wiki) during one of the most turbulant points in alatonian history also supports. what do you make of minoan blue ladies on cirian aphrodite statue.
I am waiting for the publication of some inscriptions from the Black Sea area. The war in Ukraine delays the collection of data and the publication. Regarding the Aphrodite statue, could you provide a link to it? Thank you.
@nobodytrue8414 Do you know if there were specific articles that said some inscriptions around the Black Sea are considered Greek variants but have Carian symbols in them? If so, what are those articles? Marija Gimbutas has done an extensive study of Minoan art. She compared Minoan statues of goddesses with ancient statues of female deities throughout ancient Europe. She has found many similarities and considers the Minoans part of what she calls a wider Old European Culture.
@PeterRevesz as with everything chat gpt i wonder if its halusinating the only paper it gave is yours. this is what is said According to the web search results, there are some possible Carian scripts that have been found by the Black Sea. One of them is the Sinope alphabet, which is a variant of the Carian alphabet used in the ancient city of Sinope on the southern shore of the Black Sea1. The Sinope alphabet has 23 letters, some of which are similar to the Greek and Phoenician alphabets, while others are unique to Carian1. The Sinope alphabet was used to write both Carian and Greek languages, as evidenced by bilingual inscriptions found in the city1. Another possible Carian script that has been found by the Black Sea is the Olbia alphabet, which is a variant of the Greek alphabet used in the ancient city of Olbia on the northern shore of the Black Sea2. The Olbia alphabet has 24 letters, some of which are borrowed from the Ionic Greek alphabet, while others are modified or invented to represent Carian sounds2. The Olbia alphabet was used to write both Greek and Carian languages, as well as some local languages such as Scythian and Sarmatian2. These two alphabets show that the Carians had a strong presence and influence in the Black Sea region, where they founded several colonies and interacted with various peoples and cultures. They also demonstrate the diversity and adaptability of the Carian writing system, which evolved from the Greek alphabet but also incorporated elements from other scripts. i then asked it to double check. and it said I apologize for any mistake or confusion I may have caused. I checked my previous statement and the links I provided, and I found that some of the information I stated was incorrect or incomplete. Here are the corrections and clarifications I would like to make: The Cirian script, also known as the Syriac alphabet, was not developed in the 1st century AD, but in the 2nd century BC. However, the earliest known inscriptions in the Cirian script date back to the 1st century AD. The Sinope alphabet was not a variant of the Carian alphabet, but a variant of the Greek alphabet with some Carian influences. The Sinope alphabet was used to write both Greek and Carian languages, as well as some local languages such as Scythian and Sarmatian. The Olbia alphabet was not a variant of the Greek alphabet, but a variant of the Ionic Greek alphabet with some Carian influences. The Olbia alphabet was used to write both Greek and Carian languages, as well as some local languages such as Scythian and Sarmatian. I hope these corrections and clarifications help you with your query. I appreciate your feedback and patience. Please let me know if you have any other questions or requests. 😊 looks like all the sorces were wikipedia.
@38:52 ni ki ji / "ne ki" in Komi не [ne] is "not succeeding"; forgive / pardon; condone / excuse / forgive; ки [ki] is hand. Ни (ni) another form of negation, a preposition, that makes the root word into the negative form of the meaning like дзик ӧти or singular or the only one; can be turned into negating form with preposition ни ӧти or negation or not the only one / not singular or kind of reference to plurality. Ji or йи [ji] is in Komi ice. Ni ki ji in Minonian is in Komi Ни ки йи or "[with] not just a single ice hand" or "with all the ice cold hands". This is one deeply warm personal regards towards their fellow trade partners! ;) God, I love your work!
I appreciate your suggestion, which has some plausibility because Komi ni, ki, ji are cognates with Hungarian nem 'no', kéz 'hand', and jég 'ice', respectively. However, the suggested expression seems strange, while the Hungarian neki-(je) 'towards him/her" fits well in this case. Even this word has some Finno-Ugric cognates, because Mansi -nä is a locative suffix. The Mansi is commonly considered the closest to Hungarian within the Finno-Ugric family tree. I think the Ugric group of Finno-Ugrics lived south of the Finno-Permic people, and Minoan branched off from Proto-Hungarians the latest. Since Minoan and Proto-Hungarian are closest, it is natural for the translation to use some words that only they share.
@@PeterRevesz I agree that every discovery brings more questions than the answers and this is a normal way of discoveries as we unearth the details we didn't know prior and discover new connections should have been accounted also. The usual path of first explorers.
@@PeterRevesz The connection between Mansi and Komi people could be explained by Estonian ethnographer Art Leete from University of Tartu who have spend quite significant time in field work in Siberia. Per his lecture he once said that Mansi had their annual hunting territories on Komi peoples land which are West from Hansi peoples, over the Ural mountains. As late as in the 19th century 2nd half the Mansi hunters sold their hunting lands to Komi people as the Czar Russia officials wanted to increase produce of the region and demanded bigger capital of produce. For Komi that meant staying in their region and doing more forest related work without bigger changes. Mansi had to sell their lands. This might explain why there's connection between the two and frankly speaking we, Estonians, unknowingly, have a lot in common with Mansi and Komi peoples, including Ugric religion and related vocabulary. I lack access to proper Mansi vocabulary to double check how much the discovered vocabulary relates to Mansi language. In Estonia we have a good writer who has been in long contacts with Mansi peoples and have translated Mansi mythology and other literature into Estonian because he had to teach himself to understand Mansi and have become prolific. I think these new questions and relations between the languages could be to some extent explained. The fact I could read Minonian Linear A through Mansi natively in Estonian, comes as a total surprise. Seems there's more than one could perceive. To come to this conclusion it took me 2 years since watching this lecture first time.
@@lennutrajektoor I was also surprised when I discovered the connection between Minoan and Hungarian while I was a visiting professor at the University of Athens in 2008. The tour guides and brochures described words that sounded familiar to me. When I inquired what those words mean in Greek, I regularly got the answer that their exact meaning is something unknown as they are borrowings from some Pre-Greek language. Please see the latter half of this video, where I describe my experience in detail: th-cam.com/video/XVWa0WEn-e0/w-d-xo.html
It makes so much more sense that the disk was impressed from the center and outwards from an "ouvrabilité" (workability) standpoint. It seems the rim was formed after the script was completed. Further, there is more leeway on the outer circumference to uniformly space imprints so that the full surface is evenly covered. There would also be mechanical arguments relating to cumulative stress on the pre-baked material, trust one amateur pizzaiolo. Thank you for this brilliant presentation, and for your outstanding work.
You mentioned some good reasons for a center-to-periphery direction of reading. I wrote a comprehensive review of this issue in the following journal article that you may like to read: maajournal.com/Issues/2022/Vol22-1/6_Revesz_22(1).pdf Also, take a look at the other videos in the Minoans series.
@@PeterRevesz I see you have computer science activities so I subscribed to your channel. I am in the process of learning Wolfram Language after he had mentioned that children who were exposed to his language early on would naturally speak it amongst themselves. That stirred my interest about what predates writing : structured language and how it came about. So the Google algorithm threw at me the work of Daniel Everett about the invention of language, Lots of homework, love it!
@@daniel-bertrand The basic vocabulary of languages include geographical features like 'rock', 'mountain', and 'river'. Some names of these may go back over 50,000 years to a proto-language that was once spoken in Africa and spread to Asia and Europe: th-cam.com/video/I_RCuwRx5hU/w-d-xo.html
Michael Ventris and John Chadwick were also mentioned in only one slide where Ventris' comparison of Linear B and the Cyriot syllabary was introduced as a precedent to my comparison of Linear A, the Carian alphabet and the Old Hungarian script. I mentioned Alice Kober's work in several other writings and presentations where I discussed grammar analysis, where her work fits in better.
@@PeterRevesz Hi Peter, thanks for your response. Can you please link your other presentation please, I am very interested in learning more about ancient scripts. This is an intellectual pursuit like no other.
@@soghosh My TH-cam channel has several other videos about ancient scripts. You may like the following video on linguistic analysis: th-cam.com/video/peKoVkokyf8/w-d-xo.html
this is very interesting, thanks for posting. The work you are doing is very impressive. One thing I was wondering while I watch this, you say that the Old Hungarian writing system was based on or influenced by either the Carian one or the one that influenced both of them, maybe Linear A. You say also that the Old Hungarian script started in around 500 CE, and that the Carian one was used until I think maybe the first century BCE or so, There seems to be a large time gap between the two, how did the script survive through that time to get into Old Hungarian when it did? Was it in isolation in some refugea? Was it lurking in Old Hungarian speakers but used in such little quantity that none have survived before a certain date? It doesn't seem like it could have passed directly to Old Hungarian from Carian or from Linear A because of the gap, where was it?
Thank you for the comment and great question. Although the mathematical feature matrix similarity analysis shows that the two scripts are related, filling in the gap that you mentioned is still an open question that requires looking at the few written records that are available.
Decryptions of unknown texts are usually exciting detective stories, and this was no exception. It's also triggered one of the most thoughtful comment streams I've read on TH-cam. One question, though; the implication seems to be that Minoans wrote (and read) left to right. That makes sense for right-handed people to don''t want to smudge what they've just written. However, I understand that Ancient Greek was first written right to left, went through a short boustrophedonic phase, then settled down to left-to-right. That means the direction was not the same as its predecessors.
I also enjoy the thoughtful comments and questions of the viewers of this video. Linear B was the earliest writing of the Greek language. It was written left-to-right because it was an adaptation of Linear A. Linear B ceased to be used around 1200 BC after a social catastrophe called the Bronze Age collapse. Writing was reintroduced to Greece around 800 BC by an adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet. Since Phoenician was written right-to-left, the same writing direction was followed right after this second adaptation. The writing direction was likely influenced by the writing material because the Minoans usually wrote on clay tablets, while the Phoenicians used paper made out of papyrus reeds.
I watched your lecture on river and mountain ⁷ discovered that you have studied Finnish. Very well. Now let me lead you to.something rather spectacular that will test your acumen. Plato said that 1) Poseidon gave his second son rule over eastern Atlantis. 2) this region was named for a land further east. 3) the second son had a title. That's all you need to find Atlantis.. Decipher the title into Finnish.
Dear Sir, an outstanding and convincing presentation on an apparently painstaking and very impressive research effort! I've enjoyed your presentation immensely!
I would be very hesitant to base any analysis of other ancient scripts using the Phaistos Disc until it can be definitively carbon dated and proved not to be a forgery. Also, does the Carian alphabet support Linear A? Being in closer proximity to the Minoans one would expect more similarities to Carian script rather than Old Hungarian. I am curious how Carian aligned with the Hungarian comparison to Linear A.
These are good questions. On the first issue, I suggest that you read the following work from an expert archaeologist, who defends the authenticity of the Phaistos Disc: Baldacci, G. (2017) Low-relief potters’ marks and the Phaistos Disc: A note on the “comb” sign (n. 21). Annuario della Scuola Archeologica di Atene e delle Missioni Italiane in Oriente, Vol. 95, pp. 65-79. Regarding the scripts, the basic observation is that there are a number of related scripts that belong to the Cretan Script Family, including the Linear A, the Carian, and the Old Hungarian scripts. Each pair of these three scripts were compared and each pair was found to be closely related in the following paper: wseas.com/journals/isa/2017/a605909-068.pdf The close relationship between the Carian and the Old Hungarian alphabets can be explained by the Carians, especially those from the city of Miletus, founding many colonies on the Black Sea costal areas, from where they could spread their alphabet to people living nearby. The Carians were followed by the Greeks, and later the Greek alphabet also spread widely in those areas.
Thank you. Some of the other videos go into more details. You can skip ahead to any part about archaeogenetics, art motifs, the possible common homeland of Minoans and other Uralic languages, and various details about the Minoan scripts depending on your interests.
Dear Professor, What is your opinion about Dr. János Borbola's work and theory? Where is the acceptance or rejection of this at the international level? Is it considered heresy at the international level or is it a matter of indifference?
There is no international reaction to Dr. Borbola's works because he has not presented his ideas in English language journals or books. Although I'm not an expert in Egyptology, my suspicion is that there are some problems with his theories because he cannot get them published in refereed international journals.
Very interesting presentation! My principal question - or maybe idea for further confirmation - is on the relationship between Linear A and Linear B. I've read that it has been suggested that on the accounting tablets, it appears the place names in Linear B are identical (or nearly so) to place names Linear A. Similarly, many symbols in Linear A resemble those of Linear B. Does your approach produce values consistent with those hypotheses? That is, are sound-values for the symbols in Linear A consistent with the hypothesized value from Linear B, particularly for place names where we might most expect the sounds to be the same?
The Phoenician alphabet was adopted at many places without a significant phonetic change. This fact suggested to many researchers that Linear A was adopted by Linear B similarly. However, Linear A is very different from the Phoenician alphabet. Linear A signs depict concrete objects whereas Phoenician alphabet letters are abstract with no obvious visual meaning. Hence Linear A signs could be read by Greek language speakers as the first syllables of the Greek words of the objects that the signs depict. Of course, when the depicted object did not have a Greek name, then the word for the object was simply borrowed from Minoan into Greek and the phonetic value remained the same. For example, this happned with the fig tree sign, which kept the NI phonetic value. When one substitutes Linear B phonetic values into Linear A inscriptions, there will be by random chance a few Linear A sequences that seem like words in other languages. I have not seen in David Packard's book or other publications any statistical analysis that the number of meaningful Greek toponymns or words that they seem to obtain are more frequent than the number of meaningful let's say Japanese toponyms or words that can be obtained.
Such an amazing lecture Peter, I was riveted! I'm very curious to hear if there's been much development since the time of the lecture! Also, you mention that Etruscan might bear some relation to the Minoan language which I find fascinating--how do you figure? Is it perhaps more likely that it is related to some form of proto-Etruscan? I have heard very little of these two cultures ever interacting.
Thank you. This is the first in a video series about the Minoans. For example, see Part 2 about "A Vowel Harmony Testing Algorithm for Ancient Scripts" th-cam.com/video/peKoVkokyf8/w-d-xo.html Herodotus wrote that the Etruscans came from Asia Minor. Etruscan writing was found on the island of Lemnos from the 6th century BC: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemnian_language. These facts hint at some relationship between the Etruscans and the MInoans, although this relationship needs to be further explored.
I just used some basic geometric and topological concepts that everyone knowns, and humans are apparently very sentitive to grasp and perceive. In addition, most features are fairly stable. For example, a closed region can be a circle of any size or an oval slanted to the left or the right, which is the case in many person's writing when they write the letter O.
Two languages can be proven to be cognate by showing that there are regular sound changes in the basic vocabularies of the two languages. For Sumerian this was difficult to prove because Sumerian is a composite of at least two language families: the Dravidian and the Uralic language families. Sumerian also contains Semitic origin words. This composite nature of the Sumerian language complicates the categorization of the Sumerian language. In another video that is based on another scientic journal article, I show that Sumerian and Finno-Ugric languages, a subset of the Uralic languages, have regular sound changes in their basic vocabularies: th-cam.com/video/kv7pauLtUME/w-d-xo.html
@@PeterRevesz since when is Mesopotamian even related to Tamil or Uralic??That's preposterous and that's like saying Old Hurrian has to be related to Hittite since the Hittites borrowed from the Hurrians
@@TonyJack74 Aristarchus of Samos (c. 310 - c. 230 BC) also lost credibility when he introduced the heliocentric model of the solar system. Truth is not always popular.
Could the Minoans have been or have been related to the “Sea Peoples” discussed by Egyptians and Hebrews, that conquered the Levant and attempted to conquer Egypt (and failed)
Archaeologists believe that the Minoans were conquered by the Mycenaeans around 1450 BC, which is well before the first appearance of the Sea Peoples around 1200 BC. Hence, the Minoans could not have been one of the Sea Peoples.
It looks to me that he uses too modern forms of FU words in his comparison. For example are f,s,h in Hungarian a development from p,t,k in many cases. But perhaps that change had already occurred before the Minoan time.
Okay Thank you! Very interesting! I'm also trying to get a piece of the puzzle. To understand lineair a we can of course look to lineair b that is based on lineair a but we have to know the origin of the language/ crete hieroglyphs. I think the theory of the Hungarian language linked with lineair is a thing to look further in it (i think they got the symbols from the minoans).
@@catinthehat906 Thank you for this info! Often the greatest threat to an environment is posed by invasive species, which may be deliberately introduced as pests. It remains to be seen which Aegean islands had lice at those times.
@@PeterRevesz Lice (Pediculus humanus) have been infesting humans probably for around 25,000 years but the interesting question is whether the Linea A reference might be to the even more unpleasant Phthirus pubis?
It's probably because everything seems quite straightforward in the video. Those who have seen some of the strained alternative translations and contorted explanations can appreciate better a sensible natural translation.
Oh yeah, I sure wouldn't want that poetic nonsense about stars gleaming love on my wedding ring 35:39 . I'd rather have a realistic sentence like...ten chickens were sold for three cows...it's more marvelous, wonderful, romantic
@@ribbon285 you fail to see the point in your rush to demonstrate your sarcastic brilliance - the point is the brilliance of his breakthrough in translation in contradistinction to your own 'brilliance'.
@@abrogard142 I'm sorry for misunderstanding. I thought you were being sarcastic. I suppose we can now realize that after all we both actually agree that his translation is good.
The Uralic languages, to which both Hungarian and Minoan belong, to has about 26 million native language speakers today. While this is a small language family, it is still larger than some other language families, for instance Basque, which is an isolate language forming its own language family.
Just want to mention Alice Kober. Her work must have been absolutely essential for Ventris' own work. Both were brilliant and both should be mentioned. It might be slightly off topic for this lecture though :)
Once again me here. Your comment at @40:30 where the Minonian text on the object was decipher and proposed to be as a curse. Turns out when I try translate the same meanings of the same context in Komi and Mansi I can derive the same meaning what they are deriving with the same contextual meaning in Estonian! The last glyph that you regarded to be unknown but remind an insect is in Komi language as жуг (žug, zhug) that means "[to] become out of order" in Estonian "rikki minema" or "[being] out of order" in Estonian is "rikkis". In Russian there is meaning жук that has a general name for insects but explicitly refers to pests (insects). This is first time I witness Russian or Eastern-Slavic tribes borrowing a meaning from Komi language and turn it into their specific etymology preserving both meaning and glyph of a insect that has the same etymological meaning in Linear A (Minonian) and Komi. Considering in which context this all is presented this has to be a direct evidence of agricultural contextuality in Minonian Linear A, Mansi and Estonian as "rikkis" or "rikki minema" could be and is used till this day for agricultural produce but especially in context of wheat. It does not explicitly refer to getting spoiled due to insects but it has so close and self-evident mental picture that it might be considered as self-evident and not worth even mentioning linguistically or in written. I have coming back to this lecture time to time but now when I have better background information about Mansi, Komi, Meadow Mari and Estonian connection I'm truly blown away that I can read the message in Estonian like it was meant to be cast upon back in the Minonian period. I'll try to write an article about this and contact later but to show the logical continuation between different Ugric languages and ethnos. You definitely have to continue your work because people who get into detailed knowledge glean in hindsight invaluable information and explanation of context.
Thank you for your nice comments and encouragement. For ancient agricultural people without pesticides, any infestation by a large number of insects was devastating. Even the Bible tells about the plague of locusts that devastated Egypt. Such disrupting events cause devastation and chaos or "being out of order". Hence a symbol of an insect could also be naturally associated with economic harship.
The cup (ostrakos) reminds me very much of Babylonian prayer-bowls, which were apotropaeic or.exorcistic, having been buried (sometimes stacked) upside-down beneath the corners and thresholds of houses. Where was the cup found, and was it upside-down?
The supposed direction of writing on the Phaistos disc is also similar to that of prayer bowls, which have similar meaning to the invocation in the cup (or no decipherable meaning, or even a nonce script, possibly because the "writer" was actually illiterate. I'd be very interested in comment on this comparison. 😁
@@lindsayheyes925 The cup at 38:48 was found by Arthur Evans at Knossos. There was another painted cup as well. Evans wrote that "They had been placed with other vessels on a later clay floor above the arly Crypt" (The Palace of Minos at Knossos, Vol 1, p. 616). Hence Evans gave no indication that these cups were upside-down or were in any corner. Both the translated cup inscription and the Phaistos disk are read from the inside out.
This is excellent stuff which I´ll inmediately share, with your kind permission. Could be this very method aplied to decipher tartessian, iberian, celt-iberian lenguages?
Thank you. I believe that the general idea is applicable to other scripts including the ones you listed. At the moment, I'm developing the method further with Shruti Daggumati, an excellent Ph.D. student from India, and applying it to the Indus Valley Script. Please see our first journal article on this subject here: www.nature.com/articles/s41599-021-00713-0.pdf
Those Minoan religious texts which we could translate so far do not contain any prophesy. It is possible that some text with a prophesy may be found later. Every religion has characteristic features, and the Minoan religion may or may not have prophesies or oracles.
There are several proposals regarding the Minoan language. Recent research places it into the West-Ugric languages that includes Hattic and Sumerian: www.wseas.org/multimedia/journals/information/2017/a605909-068.pdf
I am immensely pleased to see this kind of progress by people much smarter than me. The promise of getting to know more about such cultures, so long ago and mostly unknown to us, is frankly exhilarating. About the method comparing features of related glyphs, I kept thinking that perhaps some kind of weight of importance for each feature could be implemented as a free parameter. Let the computer calculate the score of similarity in real time as we change these weights and ponder the patterns of correspondence.
I appreciate your comment and the idea about using weights. I did not add weights because I did not have a solid argument for weighing some features higher than other features. Without a well-justified argument, the weights themselves can become a subject of criticism.
@@PeterRevesz Thank you for your answer. I see your point, your approach is already far better than any subjective assesment and beyond any criticism of bias, as it is. Weighting will add complexity that might be unwarranted at this point. Perhaps, in due time, from the wisdom gained in the solid ground of a good result, some rough weight estimates will suggest themselves; at least it stands to some amount of reason that every feature would not be equally important.
@@fisterB The features are not equally important, but weights have to be justified. One justification for different weights may be if we have statistics about the frequency of the occurrence of various features within the inscriptions.
Your argument is one of several arguments why many authors believe that it should be read from the center to the outside. Sir Arthur Evans' original numbering of the blocks of the Phaistos Disk also runs from the center to the outside. For more on the Phaistos Disk, please see: th-cam.com/video/peKoVkokyf8/w-d-xo.html
I wish there was just a website that had every piece of ancient writing we have, with translations, time periods, usage geography, spread, evolution, etc. It seems to me that if we activated all the information we have about ancient writing systems we could probably answer a lot more questions about our history. Like who has what legends and myths written could tell us if stories were based off of real events. It seems to me that everything gets so spread out into individual fields of study so much that we might actually know a lot more than we think we do it’s just in fragments across many disciplines.
I'm afraid that you're asking for a very difficult task. I've been thinking more modestly about a "Minoan studies" website, where all information about the Minoans are brought together, including Minoan archaeogenetics, art motifs, epigraphy, history, linguistics and religion. My channel tries to do that.
This would be a great idea for AI work.
@@PeterRevesz are there books that have pictures of all the extant linear A tablets and inscriptions?
@@christopherrattray4096 The standard book was written by Godart and Olivier and has the title "Recueil des Inscriptions en Linéaire A".
@@PeterRevesz thank you for sharing with us
there are 3 more reasons why you would read the Phaistos disk from the inside out and left to right.
1. the human and animal characters are mostly all facing to the right. this indicates a sequence of events from left to right because some of them are walking/moving in that direction.
2. the disk is round so it would be nearly impossible for any writer to guess how many words they could fit on the disk.. this means that if they started from the edge and then realized they were running out of space then the words would get smaller towards the center as they to tried and compensate and fit them all in. (you'd still have this problem even when using stamps where the gaps between characters would decrease instead.)
Conversely, if they start from the middle then the words can all be the same size because if you realize you are running out of space you just need to add more clay and make the disc a little bigger.
3. Smudging.. Clay, like paper is prone to smudging so it is much easier to work from the middle outward because if you accidentally touch the unwritten edges then no harm done, you can just smooth it over.. if, however, you start from the edges and work you way in and then accentually touch the clay that you have already written on, you can smudge it and perhaps even ruin the entire piece of work.
Thank you. These are perfectly valid reasons. Sir Arthur Evans, who had an excellent intuition, also intially advocated a center-to-outside reading.
Egyptian does the opposite, though - the images face you as you read. Given the antiquity and prestige of Egyptian, you could argue that other systems would be likely to follow the Egyptian example.
The gold ring's writing went from outside inwards, however, according to this lecture?
@@blixten2928 This is a good observation. I explain the reason in the following video segment: th-cam.com/video/XVWa0WEn-e0/w-d-xo.html
@@johnleake5657 You emphasize the difference and overlook the similarity. The similarity is that the faces look towards the right.
When you said that Linear B does not distinguish phonetically between r and l, I immediately thought of relatives I have in Crete where they still do that in my family village. In both sounds the tongue curves backward and touches the back of the top of the uraniscus and sounds like the "r" vowel in Sanskrit. The village is called Ανώγεια and they even joke (as Cretans love to do) about the pronounciation among themselves. How wonderful it has survived to this day!
*almost touches* the top of the uraniscus
Thank you for your contribution. It is very fascinating as a possible example of the survival of a language feature, and it would complement the genetic survival that archaeogenetics has already shown in Crete. The historical record is interesting too. According to Wikipedia "When exactly Anogeia was founded and by whom, is not accurately known. Many believe that the original settlement was founded by villagers from the village Axos, which is west of Anogia, where the Minoan city Oaxos was."
@@PeterRevesz Indeed! I am thinking that PTSD suffering survivors from the Tsunami might have thought "never again" and moved as high up in the mountains as they could! It is a quite shielded area. This pronunciation is unique around the village and maybe a couple of other surrounding villages. They are extremely territorial and protective of their lands, so it is not impossible that this pronunciation quirk may have survived. It is very distinctive!
@@arisd1669 Thank you for your interesting description of Anogeia. I had to cancel a trip to Crete this year because of the pandemic, but I'd love to visit this place next time.
@@PeterRevesz Glad to be of assistance - thank you for uploading this lecture! If you do visit, make sure you try the "galaktoboureko" dessert from Mrs Alcyone when you visit. Its on the ζαχαροπλαστείο on the village square! If you have someone to help you chat with the locals you will definitely get to hear the unmistakeable "r/l" ! Can't miss it!
I'm an archaeologist who has been enamored with the Minoan civilization and their scripts. I've recently read peer-reviewed articles which suggest Linear A is an early dialect of Hurrian. This is not surprising considering Mycenaean Linear B stems from ancient Cypress, as well as the similarities between Linear A and the Cypro-Minoan script. The linear nature of the script also implies origins from cuneiform.
Trade routes along the southern coast of Anatolia brought many languages, scripts, ceramic styles, commodities, etc. from the Levantine coast westward into the Aegean. The same route has been used for eons and was likely the route of the EB Oluburun merchant ship before it sunk.
Thank you for the comment. However, please note that the beginning of the Minoan civilization is older than the Hurrian Kingdom.
@@PeterRevesz A substantial portion of the Linear A corpus is LM phase from sites like Hagia Triada and Knossos, ca. 1500 BCE. The Hurrians of Mitanni were contemporary with this period of the Minoans. Also, the article I referenced argued phonological similarities with a possible dialect of Hurrian.
Regardless, it's kinda hard to be a European first civilization, as Arthur claimed, when your roots are looking more and more Semitic and Anatolian.
@@robertpenny7180 The Hurrians of 1500 BCE cannot be the originators of the Linear A script that was already used by the Minoans 300 years earlier. Moreover, the Linear A script likely developed from Cretan Hieroglyphs which go back to 2100 BCE.
That was truly excellent, thank you! The effort required to create so many tables is remarkable.
Glad you liked it! The tables were indeed quite a lot of work.
Wow!! I am truly flabbergasted by this “tour de force”, Professor Revesz! I remember very well, while studying at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, ancient & Homeric Greek, and learning that the Mycenean Linear B syllabary encoded an archaic form of Greek, I remember as if it were yesterday that everyone was puzzling and phantasizing about the Phaistos Disk and Linear A, undeciphered and mysterious. And it had set my imagination alight. But then I went on to study social science and economics… Your discovery and translation are of the same historic caliber as Champollion’s with the Rosetta Stone. Did the students in that class realize what a momentous event they were listening to? Personally, it was a complete surprise to learn from you that the language the Minoans used to write (but perhaps did not speak?) is an Ugric language! I’d have put my money on some near-eastern language, probably of the semetic family like Phoenecian, but never on it being related to Hungarian which came from north of the Black Sea. But then, as you say, the Black Sea was criss-crossed in all directions by all manner of merchants and other travellers, so what people knew at one end of the sea people at the other end would soon know too! It’s amazing how much and how far people travelled, by land and by water, in those days, and had been from much earlier still. After all, about a million years ago, Homo Erectus colonized most of the planet and may already have used boats of some kind to reach the Indonesian island of Flores. Thank you Peter for this fascinating presentation! And let no-one be fooled by your calm, low-key, matter-of-fact tone of voice and composure! You are in the same league as Paul Dirac: a very humble attitude can hide an exceptionally brilliant mind!
I appreciate your very nice comment. I also learned about the Phaistos Disk in my graduate student days. I had a Cretan Greek Ph.D. advisor who kept a replica of it on his office desk at Brown University. He also liked to talk about Greek history. I was fascinated by the subject but was already busy with a Ph.D. dissertation. I had a chance to return to this subject only when I was invited as a Fulbright visiting professor by the University of Athens in 2008. It was at that time that I realized that Pre-Greek is related to Hungarian. That gave me an important clue to the decipherment. An early version of my vowel harmony testing algorithm th-cam.com/video/peKoVkokyf8/w-d-xo.html showed that the Phaistos Disk was written in a language that has vowel harmony, which is a characteristic of Hungarian and Uralic languages but is absent in Bronze Age Mediterranean languages.
Linear A 2100 BC Linear B 1700 BC is a writing that dates only to Greece and to no other region outside the Greek world
Linear A Linear B is found in Central Greece, the Peloponnese, Crete and many islands that form a unified economic and social space
The language of Linear B is Greek
In the thousands of panels of Linear B we did not find a single one with a foreign language
In Linear A we do not have many inscriptions to draw firm conclusions but its evolution
Linear B is a further development of Linear A from it with different grammatical rules by the same people in the same Greek space
the Minoan civilization as well as the Mycenaean civilization are anthropocentric civilizations centered on the free man
the standards of Art are free as in classical Greece, e.g. the spiral or meander
.The mythological names such as Asterios, Ariand, Androgeos, Idomeneas, Mirionis, Phaedra, Minos, Minotaur, etc. are Greek names and only
@@panagiotis7946 Marija Gimbutas, who was a world famous archaeologist and did many excavations in Greece too, has stated that the origin of Linear A is the Old European (also called Danubian) script. She gave a detailed table that compares Old European and Linear A script characters in one of her books from 1991.
I’m genuinely staggered by this research and I’m surprised it’s not getting more attention. I hope this opens the door to a much richer understanding of Minoan society and culture. Thank you for your work 🙏
Thank you. You can see more videos on this channel or see my scientific publications to learn more.
because it's nonsense :D Minoans spoke Hungarian with modern Hungarian grammar, at the time Hungarians spoke ancient Hungarian. I'm missing how this relates to the fact that Etruscans and Jesus were also Hungarians
This was a great lecture. I can't believe they didn't ask any questions at the end. He had to do it for them!
Unbelievable discovery. Very impressive. Congratulations to the team!!
Thank you so much 😀
Not a true discovey; only a hypothesis which must be analyzed and confirmed by other scholars. The scientific method. But if it is definitively confirmed,it would be a great achievement.
Your presentation shed more light into my research on Linear A&B and the connection with some of the languages, such as Hungarian, an information new to me. Of course I would be happier when I see non-native Greek speakers researching on old forms of Greek, or pre-Greek as you may put it, write the sounds in Greek letters as well. That would help recognising the words. For example, at the example of substituting the syllabic value into Linear A Texts you write the word for 'shine' as fe-ne-je-n. I would not recognise the Greek word without looking at the translation and this word is still used today in Modern Greek: φέγγειν ('Feggein) and similar words are: feggari (moon), fos (light), ? fenomai (appear, be visible)
You're absolutely right that it would be easier to recognize some Greek words written with Greek letters under the inscriptions instead of just giving the list of Greek words in a table, although it would add some complexity. My work already puts together things that were never brought together before. Since my work is interdisciplinary, every reader needs to be patient and learn someting new, whether it's a new language, a new script, or some new computer methods.
And Phoebe
ancient Greek has To pheggos/eos meaning shining (of the sun or of the day, light of the night(moon,stars). and pheggo, to shine, infititiv pheggein., but MOON in ancient greek is E selene. so not similar to modern greek feggari ( moon) as indicated here above.but this is how languages evolve over the milenias.If I were to meet a french-speaking person( my language) of 1000 years ago I very much doubt I would understand him/she and he/she me.
Linear b isn't pre Greek it's proto Greek and there's no similarities between either linear a/linear b and Hungarian
In modern Greek we still call the moon "Selene", it's the normal way to call the moon, but we also use the word "pheggari". The "lunar lander" is called "selenakatos" in (modern) Greek meaning "moon vessel"
Good morning professor: we are currently studying Guatemalan mayan languages, modern ones, as a prerequisite for studying northern mayan languages. Your lecture and the strategies you depict are fabulous and much relevant for our effort in linguistics here in Central America. Best wishes.
This is of primary importance for us, because, in our effort there is the possibility of renewing the mayan glossaries, while understanding the way ancient indoeuropean peoples constructed their own.
For instance, the mountain maya do not have a word for "dolphin", presenting it just as another "fish", which is not a solution for such a construct. And it would be unfair to abandon mayan glossaries to their own fate, while spanish borrowed words from all other indoeuropean stock.
Our aim is to find a linguistic way to solve the scarcity of mayan glossaries while embracing linguistic solutions that have proved successful in other ancient languages.
Thank you. I'm glad to hear that. Best wishes with your work on Guatemalan languages.
1. Where can I learn to read this now?
2. How do I get my hands on scripts that need translating?
This is exciting
This presentation is primarily based on the following article that describes the translation of twenty-two Linear A inscriptions: www.wseas.org/multimedia/journals/information/2017/a605909-068.pdf Among the remaining undeciphered scripts, the Indus Valley Script seems very interesting. For a starter, there are some TH-cam videos on that subject too.
Thank you so much for your amazing work, Dr. Revesz! Your findings are more important than most realize today (and when you recorded this absorbing presentation). But more and more will learn through your continued efforts and research. Thank you for all you do to help reveal the secrets of history, language and communication using modern technology to 'crack' difficult codes whose legends have lost long ago. Kudos!
31:00 should the word 'latter' be 'ladder'?
Yes, I noticed it. Thank you.
This is the most interesting thing I've found in years. Many thanks for posting.
That's a great comment. You will enjoy the other videos of the Minoans series too.
Fabulous, professor, thank you very much! I won’t pretend to follow much of it, but you show the complexity of the subject and the knowledge and skill needed to study this and many other subjects.
Thank you. The topic of each video can be further studied at one's own pace by reading the associated research papers, which in this case is the following: www.wseas.org/multimedia/journals/information/2017/a605909-068.pdf
Very interesting topic. Hope this study gets more advanced and use the similar approach to decipher other ancient languages.
Too bad Hungarian Academics are not interested. I really dislike them.
Cette lecon est remarquable par son extreme intéret linguistique et par la maladresse du relateur qui fatigue à faire émerger une information précise. Le recours à des diapositives trop chargées et donc ILLISIBLES n' aide pas beaucoup la compréhension. C' est bien dommage !
Merci pour vos commentaires. La caméra était trop loin de moi, au fond de la salle de classe. Des images plus claires peuvent être trouvées dans l'article original du journal: www.wseas.org/multimedia/journals/information/2017/a605909-068.pdf
This is very interesting in light of recent DNA-based hypotheses that the Minoan/ancient Cretan people originated in the Danubian basin, perhaps even narrowed down to the Carpathian basin.
The early European farmers came from Anatolia and spread throughout Europe using the Danube River as their main gateway and means of trasportation. They met there native hunter-gatherers and the two groups eventually mixed and formed a culture that Marija Gimbutas called the Old European culture. This neolithic culture was originally centered on the Danube Basin but eventually spread west all the way to Ireland, north to Scandinavia and south to the Aegean area, where they formed, with the Aegean natives, the Cycladic and Minoan civilizations. Interestingly, the art motifs also support this sequence of development: th-cam.com/video/7RunFz_clqY/w-d-xo.html
Regarding your approach to decipherment of both Linear A and the Phaistos disc, I was wondering why you categorically exclude Linear B from your list of possibly related writing systems. There are words in Linear A, that, when read with the phonetic values of Linear B, do have great similarities to Mycenaean words, an example of which being the name of Phaistos written pa-i-to in LB and PA-I-TO in LA.
Thank you for your well-informed question. Linear A and Linear B have many similar-looking signs. However, similar-looking signs are usually not read the same way in different languages. For example, the @ sign is read as 'at' in English, but it is often read as something else in other languages. Based on that observation, I do not exclude the Linear B signs, but I do not assume that the Minoans read all the signs like the Mycenaeans did, that is with the same syllabic values. According to an old paper of L. Godart, who read Linear A with Linear B syllabic values, the word PA-I-TO occurs on two tablets from Hagia Triada. On tablet HT 97, it occurs in a list and is followed by the number 6, while on tablet 120, it also occurs in a list and is followed by the number 3 1/5, which is equivalent to 3.2 in decimal notation. That makes no sense because we would expect town names to appear in the header of the tablets instead of being one of the inventoried items. Another problem with L. Godart's approach is that he never found the town name KO-NO-SO in the Linear A corpus. That is strange because we would expect the name of Knossos to appear at least once.
@@PeterRevesz Thank you for your reply! If I conclude correctly, your reasoning is basically that 𐘂𐘚𐘄 cannot be a place name because in LB a place name wouldn't be in this position on a tablet. Thus, you seem to be assuming that the Mycenaeans borrowed the way of organizing goods/places on tablets from Minoan LA. I find this very doubtful, since you are assuming that the Mycenaean scribes that "invented" LB knew how to organize the words on a tablet in LA but not the writing system itself. And if they did happen to know the phonetic values of LA, why would they just invent their own values - that are also not exactly suitable to the Greek language?
Regarding your issue with ko-no-so, according to a reading as LB, the signs 𐀜 and 𐀰 for no and so didn't exist in LA; the name Κνώσσος being written ko-no-so in LB justifies itself by a writing rule implemented by Mycenaean scribes that says that a vowel in a syllable can be a "dead" one when it follows a syllable with the same vowel. There are candidates for Knossos in LA, assuming a LB reading, the most probable ones being KU-NI-SU and KA-NU-TI.
@@unakanasi It does not matter that the @ sign is known to be read as AT in English, if in your language the at preposition is something else. Then the @ sign is naturally read as the at preposition in your language. The Mycenaeans likely treated many of the Minoan signs similarly to how the @ sign is treated in other languages.
I appreciate your argument that KO-NO-SO in Linear B = KA-NU-TI in Linear A under certain assumptions. However, KA-NU-TI is seen only once in a list of items followed by the number 25. Hence, it seems to be some kind of produce rather than a town name.
@@PeterRevesz Thank you for replying! You can't compare the @ sign, a commonly and universally used sign across the globe that naturally changed its meaning due to frequent use, to signs that were only used regionally on Crete and later in mainland Greece. Additionally, the @ sign doesn't originally include any intention to be used phonetically, while still carrying a universal meaning, whereas LA, which likely evolved from Cretan Hieroglyphs, was originally written mostly phonetically. Regarding your issue with KA-NU-TI, Minoans tended to abbreviate place names with their first letter, as seen in the name DI-DE-RU -> DI (LB cognate: di-de-ro) or possibly PA for PA-I-TO, MA for MA-DI etc., and the sign KA is indeed very frequent standing on its own.
overall, given the small amount of preserved LA text, the congruence between LA and LB is just too overwhelming to be considered coincidence if words like QA-QA-RU and qa-qa-ro, TA-NA-TE and ta-na-to, DA-I-PI-TA and da-i-pi-ta, PA-DE and pa-de etc. show similarity in phonetic meaning, shape of the sign and place of origin.
@@unakanasi I clearly referred to the @ sign's use in email addresses, and within emails the @ sign is usually read as 'at' in English and as the equivalent preposition in other languages even by those who know English. Arguing against that obvious fact is useless. The @ sign still stands as a good example for a sign that is associated with a word in one language and as the semantically equivalent word in other languages.
Nice work!
Thank you. Check out the other videos on my channel.
That was truly great, thank you! The amount of work involved in constructing the many tables is staggering, well done. I am not a linguist but the passion and dedication shown by you and your students is truly praiseworthy.
Glad you enjoyed it! Check out the other videos too in this series.
@@PeterRevesz I did tyvm.
Very interesting video and a very nice and logical decipherment (although has some gaps). I do not understand though why no official source(at least from what I could find) has mentioned your name in the decipherment attempts.
Experts cannot read all decipherment claims because they do not have the time and do not know all the languages which were used in the various decipherment attempts. Experts need a compelling reason to learn a new langauge in order to evaluate a new claim. Now we may have such a compelling reason by supporting evidence from archaeology and archaeogenetics. Recently, I made videos regarding these supporting evidences. Please see them here: th-cam.com/video/gN_2Ok1gnLo/w-d-xo.html and th-cam.com/video/7RunFz_clqY/w-d-xo.html on this channel.
Hálás vagyok kedves Révész Péter professzor Úr, ezért a ragyogó munkáért! Bizonytalan vagyok benne, hogy létezett-e egy, az összes nyelvet kis vagy nagyrészben a mai napig átható ősnyelve. Az Ön munkája és sok más forrás mégis azt a következtetést sugallja, hogy a magyar nyelvben maradhatott talán a legtöbb, szinte alig megváltozott formában ebből a feltételezhető ősnyelvből. További kutatásaihoz kívánok fényes sikereket és kifogástalan egészséget. Megkülönböztetett tisztelettel: Tóth Sándor
Köszönöm! Egy másik videómban bemutatok néhány hegynevekkel kapcsolatos szót, amik kb. 50 ezer évesek, mert közép-afrikai és eurázsiai nyelvekben egyaránt megtalálhatók: th-cam.com/video/I_RCuwRx5hU/w-d-xo.html
❤
Utterly fascinating, thank you for sharing.
Thank you. Enjoy the other videos in the series.
Deciphering even most of the Minoan language would be the greatest achievement since ancient Mayan was deciphered.
Well, we are making progress towards that goal.
Well...until Harappan is deciphered.
It is amazing how things from different points of view and up on completely different results and a whole different parallel grammar comes by reading a very same text. Fpr example by my study until dotay the 1st letter on the ring (the T-like) was the letter A, same as in the deciphered Linear-B (35:38). I assumed that according to Ventri's alphabet (who deciphered the Linear ) as some letters remained the same they also kept their phonetic value. Then "Fe" = A! My opinion is that more research has to be made and nobody is completely wrong and i'd love to see more collaboration at this point. Many discoveries and breakthroughs has been made and it's time to start combining that knowledge! Linear-A still remains a mystery that waits to be revealed!
The Minoan language shows front-back vowel harmony, which is not a feature of ancient Greek: th-cam.com/video/peKoVkokyf8/w-d-xo.html. Moreover, since the two languages are different, the speakers of these two languages would say differently many depicted objects. For example, the T-like Linear A and Linear B signs originally may have depicted double axes. However, in ancient Greek the name of the double axe may have started with an A, while in the Minoan language, it may have started with the syllable PE or the similarly sounding FE. Hence, the differences in the phonetic values of the signs are simply the natural consequence of having two very different underlying languages for the Linear A and the Linear B inscriptions.
I don't understand how you go from Linear A symbols share some features with old hungarian & carian, & is agglutinative - to classifying it as a part of the language family that includes hungarian?
To me this is a leap that does not (necessarily) logically follow.
Equally plausible is that Minoan is not part of that family but gave loanwords to Old hungarian through trade/contact?
As a further explanation, I just uploaded a new video "A Vowel Harmony Testing Algorithm for Ancient Scripts applied to the Minoan Phaistos Disk" th-cam.com/video/peKoVkokyf8/w-d-xo.html that shows that the Minoan language had vowel harmony. That feature is very characteristic of the Finno-Ugric and Turkic languages and cannot be acquired by borrowing.
I sincerely doubt that. Minoan culture preceded the hungarian script by a few THOUSANDS of years. Ancient Hungarian script is actually _Medieval_ and came from Turkic and thus from Asia.
Minoan Linear A dates bacl to 3000 - 1700 AC and the Hungarian from around the 800 of our age, thus the Viking age and the age of the expansion of Islam. that's a huge gap.
I don't think that the Minoan language would have travelled to the region of Armenia / Caucasus, which is where the Turkic people came from, stayed there for 3000 years without leaving a single evidence and then travelled to modern day Hungary during the Viking age.
@@VFella Nobody said that the Minoan language moved anywhere outside of the Aegean area. Linguistics shows that Minoan is a Finno-Ugric language. That simply means that Minoan also originates from the common Finno-Ugric homeland. The exact location of the Finno-Ugric homeland is subject to debate, and it is presumed by some researchers to be near the Urals and others in the Danube Basin and Eastern Black Sea area: www.naun.org/main/NAUN/bio/2019/a302010-aag.pdf
On the other hand, the Minoan Linear A syllabic script could have spread by trade, just like the Phoenician alphabet spread to Greece, Italy and eventually many other places wordwide. While the gap between our English alphabet and the Phoenician is about the same as between Linear A anad Old Hungarian, in both cases there are intermediate stages, reducing the apparent gap that you mention. In particular, the Carian alphabet, which was used from the 8th century BC to the 1st century, can be shown to be a descendant of Linear A and an ancestor of Old Hungarian: www.wseas.org/multimedia/journals/information/2017/a605909-068.pdf
The Carian alphabet probably spread by trade to Black Sea area, where Carian towns such as Miletos had numerous colonies. Linear A writings were found both at Miletos and in Bulgaria. There are examples of the development of the Old Hungarian alphabet before the 8th century, that is, before the Old Turkish alphabet is first seen near the Black Sea.
@@VFella Turkic people do not come from the Caucasus, and Armenians are not Caucasians. What on planet earth are you talking about? Turks are Western Mongols, languages originate in the Altaic Mountains, this is 101. Real Caucasians are Georgians, Circassians, Chechen, Ingush, Lezgin - these are native Caucasians and this is where their languages originate. This is also 101.
There's a Chinatown in downtown Washington, DC - do you think the ancient Han Chinese come from America?
@@PeterRevesz Still, sprachbunds. Vowel harmony is characteristic of Central Asia, and none of the languages there are related. So, unless you find real correspondences and sound changes from Old Hungarian, you cannot make assumptions like that, or you are falling into the realm of nationalistic pseudo-science.
Fascinating! I can't wait to see the field you're breaking ground in in ten years.
Thank you. I hope for major changes in fewer than ten years. There are new publications coming out that will be followed by new videos next year.
omg. this is super interesting. i love the way intuition and logic both combine to generate a working phrase. the poetic interpretation however, can be further refined. it is after all human script. much as baudelaire refined poe from rudimentary to sublime. you have the goddess looking down from the clouds but it signifies the heavens. anyways, i am grateful that you allowed us to sit in to this very enightening discourse! congratulations to all your efforts.
Thank you for your comment. I already made some minor refinements of the translations. There are additional Minoan inscriptions that could be translated since this video was made.
just finished, really great, I like the overstamping detail. I've been interesting in this a lot, i'll check out your page for updates.
Did you read the first results published from the Herculaneum scrolls xrays?
It was basically some instagram influencers casting shade on some other influencers, it was all fun! Lovely to see such things in an ancient text, talking about taking all forms of indulgence as equally important matters to examine and compare, something like that - and that others who follow another form of philosophy were all too dour.
Being able to read the Herculaneum scrolls is a great feat. One of our students at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln was involved in developing the software for the visual recognition of the written characters.
I verified the overstamping analysis by an experiment with some clay and stamps. You can read about the details in the following paper: www.maajournal.com/index.php/maa/article/view/653/580
In the QnA you mention that it's read "left to right, center to edge" yet in your reading of the golden ring the script was sequenced from the edge towards the center. How do you reconcile this fact? Also, it's well known that ancient Greek could be read both from left to right and right to left, depending on practical considerations and preference. Is this also a feature of Linear A?
This is a very good question that comes up frequently. I gave an answer with an explanation and illustration in another video that you can see here: th-cam.com/video/XVWa0WEn-e0/w-d-xo.html
@@PeterRevesz thanks!
The new Champollion? Awesome! Must confess I get lost somewhere in the third part of this presentation.
Thank you for your interest and enthusiasm. The video had to leave out some details that can be found in the following journal article: www.wseas.org/multimedia/journals/information/2017/a605909-068.pdf
I would love this peaceful kind of genius!!
I also love a kind audience. Enjoy watching the rest of the videos in this series.
Dear Peter Revesz! I wanted to emphasize the symbol you point at @10:24 as the letter g, the upper one, is in Estonian, Meadow Mary, and Finnish called as jumi / jumo / jum / jume from which the word jumal or the Finno-Ugric heavenly god or god is derived. The same symbol is painted on Rezh river petroglyphs in Siberia which are dated into late Mesolithic or 15000 - 12000 BCE. In Mansi mythology there are joli-toorum and numi-toorum deities. Toorum in Mansi has the same linguistic context as jumi which is blanketing sky. Joli-toorum is the upper god, a female deity and the numi-toorum is the lower god who lives half the way between the upper sky and the earth. They are like sister and brother. In that context the fact you have the jumi sign as part of Hungarian rune is quite remarkable. Also all your other works in this filed give tremendous inside into details even when one doesn't spot them immediately. Unfortunately I can't post links in YT comments as the service will them remove automatically.
Thank you for oyur interesting observations. The symbol marked with a star @10:24 also occurs in the Old European culture c. 7500 years ago. That symbol could be related to the Minoan double axe symbol from the Bronze Age. This is one of the strange mirror symmetric symbols, which I discussed in another video: th-cam.com/video/XVWa0WEn-e0/w-d-xo.html If you would like to write to me, then please use my university email address: revesz AT cse.unl.edu
Is there somewhere I can stay updated on this? I would be interested in actually helping too, because it's more fun to do hands on studies, but that probably won't work because I am not an expert in Linguistics or Writing Software; plus very limited free time.
Thank you for your interest and enthusiasm. I suggest that you subscribe to my channel, which will feature further videos on Linguistics and Minoan Scripts: th-cam.com/channels/cmXasu7kcyira2D37TT2UA.html In addition, you can visit my publications webpage at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln: cse.unl.edu/~revesz/publications.htm Currently, I have some great students who help me with software as we are building the AIDA system that is described in a video on my channel. However, I would appreciate if you could spread the news among your friends and/or write something on appropriate websites such as this one: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_A
I’ve seen Dr. Revesz’ lectures before, he’s amazing.
Thank you! You may enjoy on this channel the latest video, which discusses Minoan archaeogenetics, a technique that can be useful to identify movements of ancient people, if the data is analyzed carefully.
I wonder if there is also a connection to lemnic (and etruscan) or is this considered to be of a different language family?
I say in the video that Minoan is a Finno-Ugric language, and hence related to Hungarian. I have not studied Etruscan in depth. However, the Italian linguist Mario Alinei thought that Etruscan is related to Hungarian. He wrote the book Etrusco: una forma arcaica di ungherese, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2003. This book may answer your questions regarding Etruscan.
@@PeterRevesz have you ever looked into the Tartarian Tablets?
@@chrisnewbury3793 It is a fascinating mystery. The Tartarian Tablets have no generally accepted translations, but its signs show a visual connection with Sumerian pictograms, the precursor of cuneiforms. Since archaeologists believe that the Tartarian Tablets are older than the Sumerian pictograms, there likely was some population movement from the Danube Basin, more specifically the Danube Delta, to Mesopotamia that may have brought writing there. Archaeogenetics shows a population movement from the Danube Basin to Crete as shown in my video: th-cam.com/video/gN_2Ok1gnLo/w-d-xo.html If we can imagine a movement to Crete, then it is also easy to imagine a movement by ship along the southern coast of Turkey to Mesopotamia. Currently, there are few Sumerian archaeogenetic samples, but hopefully we will be able to test this possibility in the next few years.
Well it's about time!
Thank you.
You're welcome!
Being a layman, I at least cannot imagine anyone writing in a spiral pattern on a disc starting at the edge, so I am glad to hear the suffix/prefix agument also indicates this. Thank you for an interesting video! I love the ring inscription!
but if you are reading from the center you would have to read right to left; and most languages are read from left to right.
@@ryanb9749 Hm, if that is true, then I can see how that is an argument against it.
@@bjornsoderstrom2152 they probably drew the spiral before the text. Like how our paper has pre printed lines so that we can draw it straight.
Actually, reading from the center to the outside means reading left to right.
@@PeterRevesz it is a disk, so technically we are both correct, but one of us is reading it upside-down. Probably me due to lack of experience. Lol
Professor have you ever "tested" this method by taking a language we have deciphered, leaving it out of your data set and using the method you show here of determining which symbol in the language is related to others and getting values based on that to then "read" that language and see if it matches the deciphered script's reading? If you can do that and show the method works for multiple languages I imagine you could garner a lot of support for your system.
In addition to using a matrix comparison between Linear A signs and Carian alphabet at 8:17, in this publication here wseas.com/journals/isa/2017/a605909-068.pdf , you can also see two other matrices comparing the Linear A to the Old Hungarian script and the Carian to the Old Hungarian script. The Carian and Old Hungarian scripts both already have known sound values, and interestingly, matching those letters based on visual features alone using the matrix method with feature vectors yielded sign pairs that also have similar sound values. This, in addition to the one-to-one mapping of signs, means that those scripts are developmentally related. A major advantage of the matrix method is its objectivity. Other researchers might also find such a method useful to analyze many other scripts as well.
The matrix method has a variant, where a convolutional neural network is used to visually compare the signs instead of feature vectors.
This variant of the matrix method was recently used to compare eight Bronze Age scripts and build similarity matrices with matches along the main diagonal: th-cam.com/video/dClYybZLF4o/w-d-xo.html As described in the video, this variant of the matrix method was verified because it could 'find' the sound values of the Greek alphabet based on the Phoenician alphabet. The two alphabets are visually and phonetically similar because the Greek alphabet developed from the Phoenician alphabet. Scripts that are developmentally related are visually and phonetically similar in general, and that is what these matrix methods take advantage of.
Amazing!!! Dr. Revesz, keep going. It will surprise archeologists!
What archaeologists could be more interested in than this linguistics presentation is a journal article in which I compared ancient Anatolian and Southeastern European art motifs. It's a mathematical analysis of art motifs that shows that early Minoan art is closely related to Old European art: www.wseas.org/multimedia/journals/mathematics/2019/a695106-1169.pdf
It is obviously identical to the ancient Hungarian , at least some letters .Others are very close. This is significant to me , as I know Hungarian is extremely close to Sumerian .This is what I found as a source language on Linear A as well. Great video , sharing
Your observation that Sumerian has similarities to both Linear A and Hungarian seems correct. The video "Sumerian and Finno-Ugric Regular Sound Changes" th-cam.com/video/kv7pauLtUME/w-d-xo.html discusses some of the similarities between Sumerian and Hungarian. On the other hand, the Emegir dialect of Sumerian also has many Dravidian-related words in it. Please see: www.wseas.org/multimedia/journals/information/2019/a045109-930.pdf
@@PeterRevesz thanks will watch this , how old is the Hungarian writing you show right after the Carian ? Also, Carians I believe are an offshoot of the Phoenecians, I would have to check . Great work , I do not have as many letters of Linear A as you managed to collect, but I have found over 70 that are commonly used and most match proto-Sumerian , also known to be the same as the older Vincan/Danubian (Tartaria Tablet(s) and the Vincan script are dated some 1,500 years older than this writing appeared at Djmet Nasr in Mesopotamia ). Great work ! and thanks
@@josephbenner4806 The development seems to be the following: Linear A -> Carian -> Old Hungarian. This is likely because the Carians had many colonies on the Black Sea shore. The oldest generally accepted surviving examples of the Old Hungarian script are from the 7th century.
@@PeterRevesz Very cool, i have a Carian chart and some info in an old book by Waddell, will look into them more . I am going through and studying this taking notes !I am sure both these languages trace to Proto-Sumerian Linear pictographic ..I'll be sending you some charts I worked on , they are all on Facebook but not very professionally made however the letters are as you know , like fingerprints. Which can be traced, showing the movement of a people and their language..Also am very interested about the Hungarian /Sumerian connection , I have only worked on the letters not the etymology (yet) but I am learning alot from you , thanks !
@@josephbenner4806 I would recommend the book by Adiego, The Carian Language, Brill, 2007. You can write to me at: revesz AT cse DOT unl DOT edu
I am an amateur linguist, pursuing this exciting subject within Egyptian, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Old English and Cuneiform contexts. I had little difficulty following this exciting lecture, and I am most grateful for the post-up. These findings are electrifying. Many thanks.
Fascinating. I look forward to hearing more about the progress of these studies 🤩
Thank you. I'm working on a new video now. You may also like to watch the Minoans series Parts 2, 3 and 4 on this channel.
This is just wonderful... I have dreamed of this. Thank you so much for your hard work!
Thank you. Welcome to the channel.
Fascinating! I maintain the hope that Linear A will be solved within my lifetime. This video suggests that it has been, and that it is connected with W Uralic languages, and scripts used by them. I have severe reservations, not least of which is a comparison with the notorious Ekwos Akvasas-ka text, in which sound and meaning were so mangled that every year a new way of speaking PIE was expected. More needs to be done, and I hope to see criticisms of this work. But at least work is ongoing.
Classics scholars who read Homer could easily check the Linear B translations proposed by Ventris and Chadwick because that required going back only about 500 years. In contrast, they cannot easily check my translations using a Proto-Finno-Ugric language. Even those classics scholars who may speak one of the Finno-Ugric languages (Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian etc.) would need to study the etymologically reconstructed Proto-Finno-Ugric words and grammar. Classics scholars are not used to do that, and Finno-Ugric linguists are not used to study the Aegean Bronze Age. Currently, that is the biggest problem.
Very interesting computer tool. Have you tested it's translation capabilities also on pairs of scripts, which are both well understood and deciphered, in order to verify the validity of the ruleset?
This is an excellent question. Right now our objective is to test the translation method on more Minoan Linear A and Cretan Hieroglypic inscriptions. While extending the translations the consistency of phonetic values has to be maintained.
@@PeterRevesz Trying this between, let's say the Latin, Greek and Cyrillic alphabet would be a good check.
Also, I wonder how Scandinavian runes would do with this method and the Latin alphabet.
There are some characters that look the same but have different phonetic values.
Same with the Latin and Cyrillic alphabet.
If you used your method there, you would get some garbled nonsense.
I really hope you'll be successful with your approach in the end. It would be so cool if we could finally read Linear A.
@@johannageisel5390 As a test of our method, we experimented with matching the Phoenician alphabet with the Greek alphabet, and we got a very satisfying result where the letters were almost perfectly matched. However, you may be right that for modern scripts one may not get as good results as for older scripts that kept a pictogram-like form with many details. All scripts tend to simplify over time, which causes a general convergence to simple forms. Highly developed scripts and artificial ones like the Morse code tend to contain very simple forms. Our methods were not designed for such scripts.
@@PeterRevesz I see. Thanks for explaining.
@@ellen4956 Luwian is not going to work because it is an Indo-European language. I explain in my vowel harmony video why Indo-European languages will not work. Please check it out here: th-cam.com/video/peKoVkokyf8/w-d-xo.html There is only one standard refernce for Linear A, namely the following book: L. Godart and J.-P. Olivier, Recueil des inscriptions en Linéaire A (Études Crétoises 21), De Boccard, 1976.
Very interesting, thank you. Is the AIDA system available online? (I did look before asking)
AIDA is being upgraded.
The problem I have with this presentation is that the theory applied seems to accommodate the Linear A syllabic signs, ligatures, ideograms , and logograms with phonetic values. This doesn't make sense if we take for example a Mandarin symbol with a certain pronunciation, but the same symbol, let's say in Cantonese, or Japanese have totally different, and unrelated phonetic features. Perhaps, LA was initially written with hieroglyphs or logograms, and it became simplified as a syllabary, by extracting a section of logogram and assigning its phonetic value to be attached to another logogram to represent its sound, or to change its semantics.
Logographic scripts behave very differently than syllabic and alphabetic scripts. If Europe had an early logographic script, then today its descendant would be readable by English, German, etc. speakers just as well as Chinese logographs are readable throughout China. Moreover, English and German speakers would pronounce those logographs differently just as Chinese logographs are pronounced differently in various regions of China.
Linear A is a syllabary according to the consensus of linguists. Syllabaries behave more like alphabets. The phonetic values are passed on, while the original logographic meaning is forgotten. For example, most of the English letters are pronounced similarly to how their ancestor Phoenician letters were pronounced thousands of years ago. However, few English speakers know that the letter A was originally written upside-down and was a logograph for an ox, whose Phoenician name was aleph, where the phoneme /a/ comes from.
Hence, Chinese and European writings have developed differently and this needs to be taken into account.
@@PeterRevesz Thank you for the clarification. I enjoyed watching the whole class, which left me wanting to know and understand language more. Thank you very much.
Well, that was just awesome.
Thank you. A recent analysis of archaeogenetic data supports the Minoans' origin from the Danube Basin, which was a Proto-Finno-Ugric language area around 3000 BC. A brief introductory video about this result can be seen here: th-cam.com/video/gN_2Ok1gnLo/w-d-xo.html
Wow, this is great. I really like this and would to recommend this video to my friends.
You are a true Hungarian-American Icon, like my mentor Prof, Rudolf Emil Kàlmàna, Inamori Laureate. I admire your mathematical approach, for various reasons, I followed all segments available,
I have a problem with the Danube cradle of civilization. This is a time related problem, because I believe the Danube civilization was an atavistic consequence of the people living on the shores of the sweet water lake, before it got flooded, and so became the BlackSea. Where did these people come from? What was the linguistic structure, and when and from where did they arrive at the shore of that inland lake, before it became flooded. I intend to follow up this question, as the region North of the Tunguska region unfreezes,. We just might need to find a little bone, like a finger tip as to extract the hybrid of Neanderthal x Denisovans x Homo sapiens : (North Siberian) variety. Frischknecht Dieter L. Rueschlikon Switzerland.
Nice to meet you. The Kalman filter is a very beautiful invention. According to the Black Sea deluge hypothesis the Black Sea was flooded and the Bosporus Strait was created around 7500 BP. If this hypothesis is true, then the early European farmers could walk from Asia to Europe on land and settle on the western and northern shores of the Black Sea, which was a fresh water lake. My hypothesis is that after the early European farmers mixed with the local hunter-gatherers, the language became Proto-Finno-Ugric. The burst of the natural dam could have been described as a wound of the Earth from which salt water or 'blood' gushes forth. The Finnish people may remember this flood as a wound of Väinämöinen, who sometimes could represent an Earth god: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_flood_myth
38:55. ‘Kitana’ may refer to Kition on Cyprus?
Also quite puzzling to me is that the core Cycladic ancestral Y-DNA haplogroup is within “E” (Keftiu, pre-Mycenian Peleset/Pelasgian, lower Adriatic Balkan coast).
This usually has a direct bearing on the language family. “E” makes them related to early Egypt (pre-Semitic) and the North African coastline.
Other Agean groups are “J2” which was the Anatolian shoreline and islands, pre-Mycenian mainland Greece and eventually Etruscans. The Carians were “J2”. The Kartvelian language group you listed is haplogroup “G” and they are very strongly presented in Sardinia and the early Italic peninsula. I believe they left traces of their language in Basque (they were present in the Iberian peninsula before the Indo-Europeans arrived) and in the non-Indo-European remnant words in Sardinian. The Finno-Ugrian haplogroup is “N”, and there is a possibility that they had a small presence in Anatolia as one of their favoured endonyms was ‘Moshka/Mesh/Mash/Mushki/Meskheti” but I can’t find that ethonym in the Agean as such.
Very interesting correlations though. Keep up the great work!
Thank you for your thoughtful comments. Please see my paper "Minoan Archaeogenetic Data Mining Reveals Danube Basin and Western Black Sea Littoral Origin" for a discussion of why the archaeogenetic data points to a Danube Basin origin of the Minoans. There is no y-DNA haplogroup E sample for Minoans. The prevalence of E along the Adriatic Balkan coast is a relic of an ancient migration from Africa via Sicily to Southern Italy and then to the Adriatic Sea area. On that migration, which seems to have avoided Crete, please see my other video "Origin of European River and Mountain Names from Near East and Africa" th-cam.com/video/I_RCuwRx5hU/w-d-xo.html
Thanks for your clarification. I’ll check these out. Glenn
@@user-ud7ei6zv7i thank you. I find the Ev-13 really interesting in relation to biblical references to the supposed ancestral connection to the Mediterranean “Casluhim” descending from Egyptian “Misr”, where other branches of E seem to be anchored.
very intresting and surprising that Linear A should be a Finno-Ugric language. Particularly since these are found today only in north of Eurasia and with Hungarian as an outlier to the south
It is surprising, but it is has several parallels. The Proto-Indo-European homeland likely was somewhere in today's Kazakhstan, which is a Turkic language area today.
Hungarian is not a Finno-Ugric language. It is an old theory and outside of Hungary people still refer to it unfortunately. An Austrian named Paul Hunsdorfer (later changed his name to Hunfalvy Pál) came up with it who didn't even speak Hungarian.
It's not a Finno-Ugric language. This is malarkey.
@@aaaaaa2206 You are drunk.
Have you been able to expand upon this decipherment to better understand the Old European cultures in Southern Europe? I have seen elsewhere that their script has also long defied decipherment.
It would be nice to expand the research in that direction. However, there are fewer Old European than Minoan inscriptions. It also seems to me that there were several different Old European scripts. Hence we may succeed only if we get first a complete decipherment of all the Minoan inscriptions and the Indus Valley Script inscriptions too. My feeling is that the IVS will be deciphered next by some researcher.
@@PeterRevesz Have there been any IVS decipherment efforts that have made progress by looking at Dravidian languages?
@@nathanalbright Of course, there are many attempts. I also worked with an excellent Ph.D. student from India on the Indus Valley Script. Our work centered not on any decipherment but simply on a careful categorization of the numerous signs of the Indus Valley Script. In particular, we could provide an improved classification that grouped together many signs that were considered as separate sigs before. I know that this is very far from a decipherment, but it is a necessary first step. If you are interested in the details, then please see it here: www.academia.edu/45170959/A_method_of_identifying_allographs_in_undeciphered_scripts_and_its_application_to_the_Indus_Valley_Script
I believe you may be mistaken in assuming the Phaistos disk is a piece of writing in the sense you suppose. Each of the symbols is well-known; they are (or are derived from) short-hand signs for specific constellations, stars and asterisms. For example the circle with dots inside it represents the Pleiades. The 'head' is or Orion, regarded as first/head of the constellations.. and so forth. Now the way in which the signs are placed, and use of the spiral, tells us the sequence is either describing the sailing route by what is later described as 'binding' pairs in sequence, or by the system described by the Arabs as nau' - that is one star in one direction and another in the opposite direction. As Odysseus called it 'By Arcturus and the Pleiades'. While this is reasonable given the range of Cretan sailings (as far as the Black Sea), it is also perfectly possible that individuals used star-based symbols for their trade and storage of goods. So the Disk might be a record of what was stored in a given location - on ship or on shore. But it's not 'a language' agglutinative or otherwise. What you might compare it with are the Indus script's forms.
Thank you for your comment. Although this theory is interesting, I do not know of any serious scholar who supports the idea that the Phaistos Disk signs describe star constellations. Please keep watching the other parts of the Minoan series to see how my translation theory is further supported. In particular my vowel harmony video gives a structural analysis of the linguistic characteristics of the writing: th-cam.com/video/peKoVkokyf8/w-d-xo.html
I just want to let you know that I appreciate your work, consistency and directness. I trust that he has a dignified recognition! Thank you. ❤🙏
Love it. How are you controlling for false positives?
Nice question. I used the term "controlled acrophonic principle" for assigning phonetic values to Linear A signs. That means:
(1) each sign S depicts an object/action which is pronounced in proto-Ugric as "CV...." for a C consonant, V vowel.
(2) S has to be similar to a Carian or Old Hungarian alpabet letter L.
(3) L has to have the same phonetic value C as in (1).
In the above, (1) is the basic acrophonic principle, which in itself can be misleading because it leaves too many possibilities, i.e., it can lead to false positives. Controls (2) and (3) are based on an alphabet evolution study that implied the evolutionary sequence Linear A > Carian > Old Hungarian. The Carian and Old Hungarian phonetic values were already known, and the Linear A signs were matched with the Carian and Old Hungarian letters based on 13 visual features. See Tables 4, 5 and 6 in this paper: www.wseas.org/multimedia/journals/information/2017/a605909-068.pdf
Of course, the final check occurs when the thus-derived CV phonetic values are substituted into the Linear A inscriptions and meaningful sentences are obtained. The above paper gives meaningful translations of twenty-eight inscriptions. Since then more translations were obtained using the same process. I suggest you read the above paper and sign up free for my youtube channel.
Ah, this was a helpful comment. For whatever reason, I missed the meaning of CV and other classifying symbols in your system.
Thank you , this helps me understand how scholars approach this type of study.
Dear Peter Revesz, it's @lennutrajektoor here again. I'm the one with whom you discussed the etymology of Knossos in the Komi language. I have to admit that I've reached the point where I'm able to take a specific topo- or hydronym and check whether it stands fro Minoan culture substrate. So far I'm able to perform and discover such results in such great amount that I have quite a substantial body of evidence Estonia to have a mixed settlements by the Minoan culture and by the Sumerians. The theory of the name knossos to be reference to an arable land is not just true but based on the same linguistic construction I have discovered a place in Estonia on island Muhuma or Muhu to have a settlement of Kuivastu. The first proposed idea that Kuivast as Knossos has the same grammar approached led to the discovery of Muhu two rivers Soonda and Lõetsa to be confirmed Mioan culture substrate. Also, the Minoan culture can't be called Minoans as ме нас (me nas) and ми нас (mi nas) have very specific meanings that represents their function and such word as Minoa / Minos does not exist. I started to call them the Crete Island Ugric culture. Your method works both on the Crete island Ugric culture and and on Sumerians. For instance I was successfully able to translate the meaning of Gilgamesh and come to conclusion that the Sumerian epos has never been called such way.
The reason why I post here is to ask whether you would like to exchange ideas or to see the result of the work. My practical side comes from the desire to associate Crete Ugric Linear-A glyphs to known words that have to be in their language like Muhu. Muhu in Crete Ugric is му гу (mu gu) or hole (in the) land / earth ; earth hole. What I found out there is no attested confirmation such a sound lke гу (gu) has been associated with a Linear-A glyph. There's a KU glyph but because the experience with Sumerian showed the K sounds might change to G sounds I wondered could we together look for possible candidate for гу (gu) , confirm its existence or in the result to prove the KU glyph is the correct sound and we are witnessing the sound change due to change in pronouncing consonants.
I fully acknowledge that this might be a bit too intrusive but my results wouldn't be possible without your work or your engagement here on YT comments. As I can't post any links due to YT deleting the post immediately I wonder, in case you agree, we come up with the way to establish connection outside YT comment section. In any case your work have been fundamental. That's the core message I wanted to pass forward.
Thank you for your comment. I studied regular sound changes within the Ugric branch of the Finno-Ugric languages. I believe that this branch includes Minoan. A ku > gu sound change is possible and may be regular. My email address is revesz @ cse.unl.edu to communicate in mode details.
@39:00, in the three examples of the applied decipherment you attribute the Linear B 'ja' (𐀊) to the syllables ke, ku, and ki. How are these reconciled between the one character?
The same sign can have different syllabic values in Linear A and Linear B because Linear A and Linear B writers spoke different languages. They both considered the signs to depict objects, but the objects had different names, and hence different first syllables in their respective languages. I do not use 𐀊 with 'ku' syllabic value. It likely had a 'ke' value in the Minoan language, and I use it with 'ke' except in this case where I use 'ki' because the Minoan word meaning 'toward' had two variations ni-ki and ni-ke that were likely dialectical. For the details, please see wseas.com/journals/isa/2017/a605909-068.pdf
Why does the Wikipedia article on linear a script? Say it is still undeciphered? Have they not seen this video?
I apologize for this phone’s horrendous transliteration of what I was trying to say
Wikipedia is actually a conservative website, which tries to follow the consensus view rather than report breakthrough results. While there is a growing acceptance of my decipherement, it has not reached a consensus for several reasons.
First, many people like mysteries. They are happier believing that the Minoan inscriptions are still undeciphered than to admit that they are already decipherered.
Second, there were many claims regarding the decipherment of the Minoan scripts in the past 120 years. Hence, there is some cry wolf effect too.
Third, it is difficult for scholars to verify decipherment claims that rely on a language that they do not know. The decipherment uses Proto-Uralic and Proto-Ugric, which seems closest to the Minoan language. Nobody speaks those languages today. They were reconstructed by Uralic linguists. In addition, those languages are not as widely studied as some other proto-languages such as Proto-Indo-European.
Fourth, there was a strong belief that the Minoans spoke some Mediterranean language. Many people overlook how easy it is to sail to the Aegean Sea from the Black Sea. There was trade between these two areas even in the Neolithic. Moreover, the northern Black Sea region was a Proto-Uralic area according to several scholars.
To be frank I do have some doubts both on the assignment of phonetic values to the glyphs and the etypologies. E.g. On etymology, there are words that are known to be Greek and not necessarily pre-Greek in the list: after only a cursory glance, τυμβος (lating tumba, English tomb) εκλείπω (e.g. eclipse in English, from ek+leipo) immediately stand out. Λείπω in particular appears to have a proto-indo-european root (e.g. Latin linquo, and English "loan" come from this root) and the same might be said for tomb with less certainty - and even though tomb and relinquish are loanwords from French, coming from Latin, their presence in Latin is unquestionable. I believe that there are other etymologies that have been mischaracterised in that manner, as being pre-Greek.
To offer a constructive criticism for the glyph classification, the basis chosen is both too large and a bit arbitrary. If the similarity is real, then the vector entries could change to completely different categories from these and still give similar results. I.e. instead of three lines, or a single straight line have a straight line left, right or diagonally, or a curved line left, right, up down, or diagonally, etc. If the vector can classify any set of glyphs then it should do so in a different basis too. Trying with multiple different basis vectors would be the only way to secure a result.
It also raises the question why Linear B and the Cypro-minoan and (greek) Cypriot syllabaries have a particular set phonetic values, but linear A, from which they descended, are all of a sudden completely different - even though substituting Linear B phonetic values for similar symbols allows some toponyms, such as Se-to-i-ja, Su-ki-ri-ta, Di-ki-te, Tu-ri-sa among others. These toponyms emerge more than could be expected by random chance, and it is often in the right context as well. So there needs to be a very good reason for abandoning the values of the daughter scripts, i.e. Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary.
I appreciate your detailed comment. The main point of my dictionary is that the Minoan vocabulary likely contained cognate words to those words that occur in both Greek and Uralic languages. Obviously, it is hard to say precisely for each Greek-Uralic pair of words when a borrowing took place and which way it went. Many linguists proposed very early interactions and borrowings between the Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Uralic languages. These very early borrowings may have taken place not in Crete but around the Black Sea. The very early borrowed words could have cognate versions in several Indo-European and several Uralic languages. Nevertheless, my main point remains that those early borrowed words likely occured in the Minoan language too.
Linear A and Linear B phonetic values actually agree in many cases such as in the case of the fig tree sign with NI phonetic value in both. Probably Linear B speakers adopted the Linear A word for fig tree. When Linear A and Linear B had different words for some object that was clearly depicted by a sign, then that sign took different acrophonic values in Linear A and Linear B.
@@PeterRevesz Thank you for engaging. It's just that overall the methodological trap is having a target language family for the (algorithm-assisted) decipherment method. It should be possible to both apply the methodology to other decipherment cases and also using different target languages. Because, for example, another question that computational models should address is also "is the problem solvable by this method", which is difficult for Lin A, as so much of the administrative tablets contain mainly abbreviations or name lists, with the rest of the corpus being tiny.
@@Hecatonicosachoron I like discussing things and value your comments. My method of building a one-to-one match between the set of signs of two related scripts is generally applicable. In an earlier paper "Bioinformatics evolutionary tree algorithms reveal the history of the Cretan Script Family" I repeatedly used the method for eight different scripts to find an evolutionary tree of the scripts. The second algorithm for finding the phonetic values of an undeciphered script (in this case Linear A) using the best match to an already known script (in this case Carian and Old Hungarian) is also generally applicable. Carian and Old Hungarian were used because they gave the best matches to Linear A apart from Linear B. Linear B was not chosen as the target language because using Linear B sound values has not led to a decipherment for over sixty years. Sometimes we need to try something new.
@@PeterRevesz Thank you very much for your reply!
How about other tests, such as attempting a decipherment to other languages using the method, as control cases? If the process can be automated that could be possible (although doing it without any human input would be quite difficult...)
And there are other tests as well... e.g. generating a body of simulated texts, (e.g. by translating some Lin B tablets using the chosen Old Hungarian lexicon) and then performing a statistical analysis on e.g. sign frequencies or word lengths. Essentially if the decipherment is correct one would expect that a collection of simulated texts in the language of the script and the existing corpus should have a high degree of mutual information (in the information-theoretical sense).
And of course there are other tests... essentially a more or less brute force translation should give unexpected insights in the new contexts. E.g. in administrative tablets talking about wine or wool or cloth one could encounter these words, or words for their containers or activities associated with the commodities. But I would insist that it has to be done as "blindly" as possible for it to be accurate.
As for sharing the values with Lin B phonetic values... I do appreciate the need of doing something new, but there are also some perplexing occurances when using the Lin B phonetic values, e.g. the emergence of toponyms; the existence of phonological changes between mycenean and minoan (e.g. Lin A "U" series into Lib B "O" series, i.e. a "u" to "o" sound change during translation from Minoan into Mycenean Greek) and also the fact that E-series signs seem to be so heavily biased for the final syllable... also in Lin A (using Lin B phonetic assignments) the existence of "y" and "w" glides between appropriate vowels (usually "y" after -i and -e, and "w" after -u) resolving the diphthongs etc. It could be my chance, but at the same time the look suspiciously consistent. So I cannot say that I'm decided either way on the matter.
@@Hecatonicosachoron You ask a deep question with two main parts. The first part is about the generality of my method. In theory, my method is generally applicable as long as there is a similar script. For example, even the rongorongo script of Eastern Island could be solvable if we had available a close enough script. Unfortunately, nowhere can we find any close script. The Minoans on Crete apparently interacted more with their neighbors than the Eastern Islanders could interact with anyone outside. The second part of your question is getting really technical. I have a high respect for David Packard who made some seminal work on a statistical analysis of Linear A and discovered most of the things you mentioned. However, statistics of this type can be interpreted several different ways. I'd be glad to discuss these interpretations, but it would involve some tables and math, so probably the best thing would be if you would write to me at revesz@cse.unl.edu to continue our discussion.
32:44 did he mean „ladder“? Or is my English not good enough? What does „latter“ mean in that context? It’s not a noun I would recognize. (If it is a German borrowing, he did mean ladder (=Leiter)).
Thank you for the correction.
This is misleading. In "The Decipherment of Linear B" Chadwick says that he and Ventris explicitly avoided relying on Cypriot, since it could not be assumed that the phonetic values of corresponding signs had remained that same or that both systems used the same conventions (which they do not - for instance, Linear B omits final consonants whereas Cypriot uses a character whose consonant part corresponds with the desired final consonant.) Their actual method involved painstaking cross-correlation of the contexts in which each Linear B sign was used. among other things.
Here is a quote from Douglas Young's article "Is Linear B deciphered?" (Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, vol. 4, no. 3, 1965): "Grumbach, Grégoire, and others challenged Chadwick to describe in detail the stages of making the grids and assigning values. In particular, he was asked to state the use made of Cypriot values. It may be doubted, however, whether Chadwick is truly is in a position to answer for Ventris' operations at the relevant stages because Chadwick had no contact with Ventris till July 1952." Those who claim that Ventris used the Cypriot syllabary associations as tentative values before a more mathematical, cryptographic analysis examined Ventris' work notes, for example, his "Mid-Century Report" of 1950.
I am wondering if you have looked at the older Dispilio tablet and Vinca script? I ask in wondering if there was not perhaps an original script in the Hurranian area that seems to have a diaspora around 6.2 BCE (the 6.2 "event") north, south and throughout the Mediterranean; and that would change the development relations and time line I would guess.
In saying that I am wondering/thinking that there was an original ideographic writing that left Ethiopia at 70kbce, that developed in various areas to what we see as late Mesolithic scripts such as Harrapan, early Sumer, Egypt, Maya, Old Europe etc. and then a revolution coming from the same area producing Gobekli Tepe, the first cities, agriculture, astrology et. al. or perhaps the Tamil Merchants who seem to go back to 13kbce.
@@deepblack67 These are fascinating questions. There was no writing as we know it more than 10,000 years ago, but there could have been some frequently used symbols, for example for the sun, moon, men, women, animals, trees etc. These symbols could be very ancient and may go back to the Paleolithic era and could have eventually developed at some time into writing signs to make true writing that records entire sentences. It is unclear where the first true writing appeared, but the Dispilio tablet suggests that it may have taken place already in Neolithic Greece. Since the Dispilio tablet is made of wood, it could be carbon dated to 5202 (+/- 123) BC, which makes it the earliest datable inscription that may be true writing, although there is no definitive reading of it at the present time: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispilio_Tablet The Dispilio tablet signs are very abstract and take several columns showing a remarkable complexity. However, I do not see a clear continuity between the Dispilio tablet and the Minoan scripts. Writing sems to have been invented independently at several locations at different times.
I'm sorry to ask you this ,but how do you know that the minoan language is a ancestor of finno-hungaric languages ,when it can be posible to be a caucasian language like Hattian which combined with Kaneshite formed Hittite.
Proto-Finno-Ugric is the common ancestor of both Minoan and the other Finno-Ugric languages. In particular, Minoan seems to fit into the Ugric branch of the Finno-Ugric language family tree. While the Finno-Ugric family tree has a solid linguistic evidence, the presumed dates of separation into various branches are only guesses. Obviously, for Minoan to fit into the Ugric branch of the Finno-Ugric language family tree, the Ugric branch had to separate from the rest at least 5000 years ago. That is possible, and in fact, according to Marija Gimbutas' Kurgan Hypothesis, the Indo-European language family branches also separated around that time. Hittite is the earliest known Indo-European language in Central Anatolia. Hittite borrowed many words from Hattic. For example, Hattic Eštan (sun god) > Hittite Ištanu, cf. Hungarian Isten (god). However, grammar is considered a more important evidence than common vocabulary in deciding whether languages are cognate. A comparison of Hattic and Hungarian grammar can be found in Table 11 of the paper "Establishing the West Ugric language family with Minoan, Hattic and Hungarian by a decipherment of Linear A" www.wseas.org/multimedia/journals/information/2017/a605909-068.pdf
@@PeterRevesz But let's think to another possibility ,if hattic or minoan in your opinion is from a western finno-hungaric branch but they may have been came from Caucasian region, the question is: If these languages are finno-hungaric in your opinion,but they came from Caucasian region, can even Hungarian language (Magyár) being in a percent finno-hungaric and in other caucasian?
@@user-zadeu2makarites My etymological dictionary lists some interesting words as borrowings from various Caucasian languages. Among these words are Mingrelian 'kipuri', which is internationally wide-spread, including English, German and Hungarian 'kefir'. Other words are Nogai 'kertpe' (pear) > Hungarian 'körte' (pear) and Caucasian Avar 'rez' (copper) > Hungarian 'réz' (copper). While these words suggest some Hungarian-Caucasus area connections, it is hard to draw any firm conclusions from them. Nevertheless, I suspect that the last word pair comes from Urartian 'urišhe' (metal object, weapon) which may derive from Sumerian 'urud' (copper). I also suspect that the Sumerians came from the northern Black Sea area via the Caucasus to Mesopotamia. Sumerian seems to be a Finno-Ugric language. For more explanation, please see the video "Sumerian and Finno-Ugric Regular Sound Changes" th-cam.com/video/kv7pauLtUME/w-d-xo.html and the journal article www.wseas.org/multimedia/journals/information/2019/a045109-930.pdf
@@PeterRevesz Köszönöm szépen!
@@user-zadeu2makarites Magyar indeed shows similarities to the languages of Caucasus, especially to Avar and Georgian. It's not an Uralic language but I won't detail it here, I do that on my channel.
Well spoken, I'm an amateur but understood your presentation well. Much like code deciphering.
I'm glad to hear.. You may learn more about the Minoans from the other videos in this series. This was just the first part.
Pretty important deciphering. Linear A script had eluded decipher since discovery.
Thank you. Deciphering Linear A required new techniques because there is no Rosetta Stone. For example, a new vowel harmony analysis method helped narrow down the set of possible languages to be considered as relatives to the Minoan language. Please check out "A Vowel Harmony Testing Algorithm for Ancient Scripts | Minoans Part 2": th-cam.com/video/peKoVkokyf8/w-d-xo.html
hi peter. Regarding curian from other thread you have a gReat opertuniry.
if you can use your ai routines to translate that fragment you mentioned by the Black Sea and have it make sense as curian fragment. (the script may show it as curian symbols ina different language.) I think you will have proven the case. untill then its the best guess we have. also the fact the script seems to have survived for 700 years (according to wiki) during one of the most turbulant points in alatonian history also supports.
what do you make of minoan blue ladies on cirian aphrodite statue.
I am waiting for the publication of some inscriptions from the Black Sea area. The war in Ukraine delays the collection of data and the publication. Regarding the Aphrodite statue, could you provide a link to it? Thank you.
@nobodytrue8414 Do you know if there were specific articles that said some inscriptions around the Black Sea are considered Greek variants but have Carian symbols in them? If so, what are those articles?
Marija Gimbutas has done an extensive study of Minoan art. She compared Minoan statues of goddesses with ancient statues of female deities throughout ancient Europe. She has found many similarities and considers the Minoans part of what she calls a wider Old European Culture.
@PeterRevesz
as with everything chat gpt i wonder if its halusinating the only paper it gave is yours.
this is what is said
According to the web search results, there are some possible Carian scripts that have been found by the Black Sea. One of them is the Sinope alphabet, which is a variant of the Carian alphabet used in the ancient city of Sinope on the southern shore of the Black Sea1. The Sinope alphabet has 23 letters, some of which are similar to the Greek and Phoenician alphabets, while others are unique to Carian1. The Sinope alphabet was used to write both Carian and Greek languages, as evidenced by bilingual inscriptions found in the city1.
Another possible Carian script that has been found by the Black Sea is the Olbia alphabet, which is a variant of the Greek alphabet used in the ancient city of Olbia on the northern shore of the Black Sea2. The Olbia alphabet has 24 letters, some of which are borrowed from the Ionic Greek alphabet, while others are modified or invented to represent Carian sounds2. The Olbia alphabet was used to write both Greek and Carian languages, as well as some local languages such as Scythian and Sarmatian2.
These two alphabets show that the Carians had a strong presence and influence in the Black Sea region, where they founded several colonies and interacted with various peoples and cultures. They also demonstrate the diversity and adaptability of the Carian writing system, which evolved from the Greek alphabet but also incorporated elements from other scripts.
i then asked it to double check. and it said
I apologize for any mistake or confusion I may have caused. I checked my previous statement and the links I provided, and I found that some of the information I stated was incorrect or incomplete. Here are the corrections and clarifications I would like to make:
The Cirian script, also known as the Syriac alphabet, was not developed in the 1st century AD, but in the 2nd century BC. However, the earliest known inscriptions in the Cirian script date back to the 1st century AD.
The Sinope alphabet was not a variant of the Carian alphabet, but a variant of the Greek alphabet with some Carian influences. The Sinope alphabet was used to write both Greek and Carian languages, as well as some local languages such as Scythian and Sarmatian.
The Olbia alphabet was not a variant of the Greek alphabet, but a variant of the Ionic Greek alphabet with some Carian influences. The Olbia alphabet was used to write both Greek and Carian languages, as well as some local languages such as Scythian and Sarmatian.
I hope these corrections and clarifications help you with your query. I appreciate your feedback and patience. Please let me know if you have any other questions or requests. 😊
looks like all the sorces were wikipedia.
Marija Gimbutas describes her study of Minoan art in her book titled The Language of the Goddess.
@38:52 ni ki ji / "ne ki" in Komi не [ne] is "not succeeding"; forgive / pardon; condone / excuse / forgive; ки [ki] is hand. Ни (ni) another form of negation, a preposition, that makes the root word into the negative form of the meaning like дзик ӧти or singular or the only one; can be turned into negating form with preposition ни ӧти or negation or not the only one / not singular or kind of reference to plurality. Ji or йи [ji] is in Komi ice. Ni ki ji in Minonian is in Komi Ни ки йи or "[with] not just a single ice hand" or "with all the ice cold hands". This is one deeply warm personal regards towards their fellow trade partners! ;) God, I love your work!
I appreciate your suggestion, which has some plausibility because Komi ni, ki, ji are cognates with Hungarian nem 'no', kéz 'hand', and jég 'ice', respectively. However, the suggested expression seems strange, while the Hungarian neki-(je) 'towards him/her" fits well in this case. Even this word has some Finno-Ugric cognates, because Mansi -nä is a locative suffix. The Mansi is commonly considered the closest to Hungarian within the Finno-Ugric family tree. I think the Ugric group of Finno-Ugrics lived south of the Finno-Permic people, and Minoan branched off from Proto-Hungarians the latest. Since Minoan and Proto-Hungarian are closest, it is natural for the translation to use some words that only they share.
@@PeterRevesz I agree that every discovery brings more questions than the answers and this is a normal way of discoveries as we unearth the details we didn't know prior and discover new connections should have been accounted also. The usual path of first explorers.
@@PeterRevesz The connection between Mansi and Komi people could be explained by Estonian ethnographer Art Leete from University of Tartu who have spend quite significant time in field work in Siberia. Per his lecture he once said that Mansi had their annual hunting territories on Komi peoples land which are West from Hansi peoples, over the Ural mountains. As late as in the 19th century 2nd half the Mansi hunters sold their hunting lands to Komi people as the Czar Russia officials wanted to increase produce of the region and demanded bigger capital of produce. For Komi that meant staying in their region and doing more forest related work without bigger changes. Mansi had to sell their lands. This might explain why there's connection between the two and frankly speaking we, Estonians, unknowingly, have a lot in common with Mansi and Komi peoples, including Ugric religion and related vocabulary. I lack access to proper Mansi vocabulary to double check how much the discovered vocabulary relates to Mansi language. In Estonia we have a good writer who has been in long contacts with Mansi peoples and have translated Mansi mythology and other literature into Estonian because he had to teach himself to understand Mansi and have become prolific. I think these new questions and relations between the languages could be to some extent explained. The fact I could read Minonian Linear A through Mansi natively in Estonian, comes as a total surprise. Seems there's more than one could perceive. To come to this conclusion it took me 2 years since watching this lecture first time.
@@lennutrajektoor That's absolutely right, and the discoveries make science exciting.
@@lennutrajektoor I was also surprised when I discovered the connection between Minoan and Hungarian while I was a visiting professor at the University of Athens in 2008. The tour guides and brochures described words that sounded familiar to me. When I inquired what those words mean in Greek, I regularly got the answer that their exact meaning is something unknown as they are borrowings from some Pre-Greek language. Please see the latter half of this video, where I describe my experience in detail: th-cam.com/video/XVWa0WEn-e0/w-d-xo.html
It makes so much more sense that the disk was impressed from the center and outwards from an "ouvrabilité" (workability) standpoint. It seems the rim was formed after the script was completed. Further, there is more leeway on the outer circumference to uniformly space imprints so that the full surface is evenly covered. There would also be mechanical arguments relating to cumulative stress on the pre-baked material, trust one amateur pizzaiolo. Thank you for this brilliant presentation, and for your outstanding work.
You mentioned some good reasons for a center-to-periphery direction of reading. I wrote a comprehensive review of this issue in the following journal article that you may like to read: maajournal.com/Issues/2022/Vol22-1/6_Revesz_22(1).pdf Also, take a look at the other videos in the Minoans series.
@@PeterRevesz I see you have computer science activities so I subscribed to your channel. I am in the process of learning Wolfram Language after he had mentioned that children who were exposed to his language early on would naturally speak it amongst themselves. That stirred my interest about what predates writing : structured language and how it came about. So the Google algorithm threw at me the work of Daniel Everett about the invention of language, Lots of homework, love it!
@@daniel-bertrand The basic vocabulary of languages include geographical features like 'rock', 'mountain', and 'river'. Some names of these may go back over 50,000 years to a proto-language that was once spoken in Africa and spread to Asia and Europe: th-cam.com/video/I_RCuwRx5hU/w-d-xo.html
Brilliant presentation, but I think Alice Kober's name should have been mentioned in relation to decipherment of Linear B.
Michael Ventris and John Chadwick were also mentioned in only one slide where Ventris' comparison of Linear B and the Cyriot syllabary was introduced as a precedent to my comparison of Linear A, the Carian alphabet and the Old Hungarian script. I mentioned Alice Kober's work in several other writings and presentations where I discussed grammar analysis, where her work fits in better.
@@PeterRevesz Hi Peter, thanks for your response. Can you please link your other presentation please, I am very interested in learning more about ancient scripts. This is an intellectual pursuit like no other.
@@soghosh My TH-cam channel has several other videos about ancient scripts. You may like the following video on linguistic analysis: th-cam.com/video/peKoVkokyf8/w-d-xo.html
@@PeterRevesz Thanks Peter.
this is very interesting, thanks for posting. The work you are doing is very impressive. One thing I was wondering while I watch this, you say that the Old Hungarian writing system was based on or influenced by either the Carian one or the one that influenced both of them, maybe Linear A. You say also that the Old Hungarian script started in around 500 CE, and that the Carian one was used until I think maybe the first century BCE or so, There seems to be a large time gap between the two, how did the script survive through that time to get into Old Hungarian when it did? Was it in isolation in some refugea? Was it lurking in Old Hungarian speakers but used in such little quantity that none have survived before a certain date? It doesn't seem like it could have passed directly to Old Hungarian from Carian or from Linear A because of the gap, where was it?
Thank you for the comment and great question. Although the mathematical feature matrix similarity analysis shows that the two scripts are related, filling in the gap that you mentioned is still an open question that requires looking at the few written records that are available.
Decryptions of unknown texts are usually exciting detective stories, and this was no exception. It's also triggered one of the most thoughtful comment streams I've read on TH-cam.
One question, though; the implication seems to be that Minoans wrote (and read) left to right. That makes sense for right-handed people to don''t want to smudge what they've just written. However, I understand that Ancient Greek was first written right to left, went through a short boustrophedonic phase, then settled down to left-to-right. That means the direction was not the same as its predecessors.
I also enjoy the thoughtful comments and questions of the viewers of this video.
Linear B was the earliest writing of the Greek language. It was written left-to-right because it was an adaptation of Linear A. Linear B ceased to be used around 1200 BC after a social catastrophe called the Bronze Age collapse.
Writing was reintroduced to Greece around 800 BC by an adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet. Since Phoenician was written right-to-left, the same writing direction was followed right after this second adaptation.
The writing direction was likely influenced by the writing material because the Minoans usually wrote on clay tablets, while the Phoenicians used paper made out of papyrus reeds.
For a sculptor it is easier to work on a language from right to left than the contrary.
I watched your lecture on river and mountain ⁷ discovered that you have studied Finnish.
Very well. Now let me lead you to.something rather spectacular that will test your acumen.
Plato said that 1) Poseidon gave his second son rule over eastern Atlantis.
2) this region was named for a land further east.
3) the second son had a title.
That's all you need to find Atlantis..
Decipher the title into Finnish.
Interesting. Could you please repeat this question under the river and mountain names video?
Dear Sir, an outstanding and convincing presentation on an apparently painstaking and very impressive research effort!
I've enjoyed your presentation immensely!
I'm glad that you enjoyed the video. There are some newer videos that give more details that you may be interested in.
@@PeterRevesz Thank you, Sir, for the tip!
I would be very hesitant to base any analysis of other ancient scripts using the Phaistos Disc until it can be definitively carbon dated and proved not to be a forgery. Also, does the Carian alphabet support Linear A? Being in closer proximity to the Minoans one would expect more similarities to Carian script rather than Old Hungarian. I am curious how Carian aligned with the Hungarian comparison to Linear A.
These are good questions. On the first issue, I suggest that you read the following work from an expert archaeologist, who defends the authenticity of the Phaistos Disc: Baldacci, G. (2017) Low-relief potters’ marks and the Phaistos Disc: A note on the “comb” sign (n. 21). Annuario della Scuola Archeologica di Atene e delle Missioni Italiane in Oriente, Vol. 95, pp. 65-79.
Regarding the scripts, the basic observation is that there are a number of related scripts that belong to the Cretan Script Family, including the Linear A, the Carian, and the Old Hungarian scripts. Each pair of these three scripts were compared and each pair was found to be closely related in the following paper: wseas.com/journals/isa/2017/a605909-068.pdf
The close relationship between the Carian and the Old Hungarian alphabets can be explained by the Carians, especially those from the city of Miletus, founding many colonies on the Black Sea costal areas, from where they could spread their alphabet to people living nearby. The Carians were followed by the Greeks, and later the Greek alphabet also spread widely in those areas.
Fascinating
Thank you. Some of the other videos go into more details. You can skip ahead to any part about archaeogenetics, art motifs, the possible common homeland of Minoans and other Uralic languages, and various details about the Minoan scripts depending on your interests.
Dear Professor,
What is your opinion about Dr. János Borbola's work and theory? Where is the acceptance or rejection of this at the international level? Is it considered heresy at the international level or is it a matter of indifference?
There is no international reaction to Dr. Borbola's works because he has not presented his ideas in English language journals or books. Although I'm not an expert in Egyptology, my suspicion is that there are some problems with his theories because he cannot get them published in refereed international journals.
@@PeterRevesz
Thank you very much for the quick and correct answer!
Very interesting presentation! My principal question - or maybe idea for further confirmation - is on the relationship between Linear A and Linear B. I've read that it has been suggested that on the accounting tablets, it appears the place names in Linear B are identical (or nearly so) to place names Linear A. Similarly, many symbols in Linear A resemble those of Linear B. Does your approach produce values consistent with those hypotheses? That is, are sound-values for the symbols in Linear A consistent with the hypothesized value from Linear B, particularly for place names where we might most expect the sounds to be the same?
The Phoenician alphabet was adopted at many places without a significant phonetic change. This fact suggested to many researchers that Linear A was adopted by Linear B similarly. However, Linear A is very different from the Phoenician alphabet. Linear A signs depict concrete objects whereas Phoenician alphabet letters are abstract with no obvious visual meaning. Hence Linear A signs could be read by Greek language speakers as the first syllables of the Greek words of the objects that the signs depict. Of course, when the depicted object did not have a Greek name, then the word for the object was simply borrowed from Minoan into Greek and the phonetic value remained the same. For example, this happned with the fig tree sign, which kept the NI phonetic value.
When one substitutes Linear B phonetic values into Linear A inscriptions, there will be by random chance a few Linear A sequences that seem like words in other languages. I have not seen in David Packard's book or other publications any statistical analysis that the number of meaningful Greek toponymns or words that they seem to obtain are more frequent than the number of meaningful let's say Japanese toponyms or words that can be obtained.
Such an amazing lecture Peter, I was riveted! I'm very curious to hear if there's been much development since the time of the lecture! Also, you mention that Etruscan might bear some relation to the Minoan language which I find fascinating--how do you figure? Is it perhaps more likely that it is related to some form of proto-Etruscan? I have heard very little of these two cultures ever interacting.
Thank you. This is the first in a video series about the Minoans. For example, see Part 2 about "A Vowel Harmony Testing Algorithm for Ancient Scripts" th-cam.com/video/peKoVkokyf8/w-d-xo.html Herodotus wrote that the Etruscans came from Asia Minor. Etruscan writing was found on the island of Lemnos from the 6th century BC: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemnian_language. These facts hint at some relationship between the Etruscans and the MInoans, although this relationship needs to be further explored.
Most Interesting. How did you arrive to the 'base vectors' of geometric features that you use to analyze the different scripts ?
I just used some basic geometric and topological concepts that everyone knowns, and humans are apparently very sentitive to grasp and perceive. In addition, most features are fairly stable. For example, a closed region can be a circle of any size or an oval slanted to the left or the right, which is the case in many person's writing when they write the letter O.
What if the Minoan language is a language isolate? I mean, Sumerian is also agglutinative but has nothing to do with Finno-Ugric languages.
Two languages can be proven to be cognate by showing that there are regular sound changes in the basic vocabularies of the two languages. For Sumerian this was difficult to prove because Sumerian is a composite of at least two language families: the Dravidian and the Uralic language families. Sumerian also contains Semitic origin words. This composite nature of the Sumerian language complicates the categorization of the Sumerian language. In another video that is based on another scientic journal article, I show that Sumerian and Finno-Ugric languages, a subset of the Uralic languages, have regular sound changes in their basic vocabularies: th-cam.com/video/kv7pauLtUME/w-d-xo.html
@@PeterRevesz since when is Mesopotamian even related to Tamil or Uralic??That's preposterous and that's like saying Old Hurrian has to be related to Hittite since the Hittites borrowed from the Hurrians
@@PeterRevesz you lose credibility regardless of being a scholar when you say Sumerian is related to Uralic
@@TonyJack74 Aristarchus of Samos (c. 310 - c. 230 BC) also lost credibility when he introduced the heliocentric model of the solar system. Truth is not always popular.
@@TonyJack74 Please read the new results on Sumerian language relations: www.wseas.org/multimedia/journals/information/2017/a605909-068.pdf
Could the Minoans have been or have been related to the “Sea Peoples” discussed by Egyptians and Hebrews, that conquered the Levant and attempted to conquer Egypt (and failed)
Archaeologists believe that the Minoans were conquered by the Mycenaeans around 1450 BC, which is well before the first appearance of the Sea Peoples around 1200 BC. Hence, the Minoans could not have been one of the Sea Peoples.
It looks to me that he uses too modern forms of FU words in his comparison. For example are f,s,h in Hungarian a development from p,t,k in many cases. But perhaps that change had already occurred before the Minoan time.
Yes, there are indications that those sound changes already occured by that time.
is the ADA system available for use?
It is still available to use, but it needs some grant suport for further development and maintenance.
Okay Thank you! Very interesting! I'm also trying to get a piece of the puzzle. To understand lineair a we can of course look to lineair b that is based on lineair a but we have to know the origin of the language/ crete hieroglyphs. I think the theory of the Hungarian language linked with lineair is a thing to look further in it (i think they got the symbols from the minoans).
At 39:54 do you mean 'louse' as in small biting insect?
That's correct.
@@PeterRevesz So its an invocation, spell or prayer that these other cities become infested with lice? Interesting.
@@catinthehat906 It seems that they used the lice as some kind of bioweapon.
@@catinthehat906 Thank you for this info! Often the greatest threat to an environment is posed by invasive species, which may be deliberately introduced as pests. It remains to be seen which Aegean islands had lice at those times.
@@PeterRevesz Lice (Pediculus humanus) have been infesting humans probably for around 25,000 years but the interesting question is whether the Linea A reference might be to the even more unpleasant Phthirus pubis?
why didn't they all break out clapping when he said that stuff about bright gleaming shining down etc... ? This is marvellous. Wonderful.
It's probably because everything seems quite straightforward in the video. Those who have seen some of the strained alternative translations and contorted explanations can appreciate better a sensible natural translation.
@@PeterRevesz I think you are being kind to them. But okay, way to go...... :)
Oh yeah, I sure wouldn't want that poetic nonsense about stars gleaming love on my wedding ring 35:39 . I'd rather have a realistic sentence like...ten chickens were sold for three cows...it's more marvelous, wonderful, romantic
@@ribbon285 you fail to see the point in your rush to demonstrate your sarcastic brilliance - the point is the brilliance of his breakthrough in translation in contradistinction to your own 'brilliance'.
@@abrogard142 I'm sorry for misunderstanding. I thought you were being sarcastic. I suppose we can now realize that after all we both actually agree that his translation is good.
Fascinating. I've always wondered why Hungarian is so weird. :)
Útközben Bécsben, Scott
The Uralic languages, to which both Hungarian and Minoan belong, to has about 26 million native language speakers today. While this is a small language family, it is still larger than some other language families, for instance Basque, which is an isolate language forming its own language family.
@@PeterRevesz Wow, what an unexpected conneciton (at least for me). Köszönöm szépen (I speak a little Hungarian) from Vienna, Scott
Just want to mention Alice Kober. Her work must have been absolutely essential for Ventris' own work. Both were brilliant and both should be mentioned. It might be slightly off topic for this lecture though :)
Thank you. I have a high regard for Alice Kober and mentioned her name too in some longer, more detailed presentations on this subject.
Once again me here. Your comment at @40:30 where the Minonian text on the object was decipher and proposed to be as a curse. Turns out when I try translate the same meanings of the same context in Komi and Mansi I can derive the same meaning what they are deriving with the same contextual meaning in Estonian! The last glyph that you regarded to be unknown but remind an insect is in Komi language as жуг (žug, zhug) that means "[to] become out of order" in Estonian "rikki minema" or "[being] out of order" in Estonian is "rikkis". In Russian there is meaning жук that has a general name for insects but explicitly refers to pests (insects). This is first time I witness Russian or Eastern-Slavic tribes borrowing a meaning from Komi language and turn it into their specific etymology preserving both meaning and glyph of a insect that has the same etymological meaning in Linear A (Minonian) and Komi. Considering in which context this all is presented this has to be a direct evidence of agricultural contextuality in Minonian Linear A, Mansi and Estonian as "rikkis" or "rikki minema" could be and is used till this day for agricultural produce but especially in context of wheat. It does not explicitly refer to getting spoiled due to insects but it has so close and self-evident mental picture that it might be considered as self-evident and not worth even mentioning linguistically or in written. I have coming back to this lecture time to time but now when I have better background information about Mansi, Komi, Meadow Mari and Estonian connection I'm truly blown away that I can read the message in Estonian like it was meant to be cast upon back in the Minonian period. I'll try to write an article about this and contact later but to show the logical continuation between different Ugric languages and ethnos. You definitely have to continue your work because people who get into detailed knowledge glean in hindsight invaluable information and explanation of context.
Thank you for your nice comments and encouragement. For ancient agricultural people without pesticides, any infestation by a large number of insects was devastating. Even the Bible tells about the plague of locusts that devastated Egypt. Such disrupting events cause devastation and chaos or "being out of order". Hence a symbol of an insect could also be naturally associated with economic harship.
The cup (ostrakos) reminds me very much of Babylonian prayer-bowls, which were apotropaeic or.exorcistic, having been buried (sometimes stacked) upside-down beneath the corners and thresholds of houses. Where was the cup found, and was it upside-down?
The supposed direction of writing on the Phaistos disc is also similar to that of prayer bowls, which have similar meaning to the invocation in the cup (or no decipherable meaning, or even a nonce script, possibly because the "writer" was actually illiterate.
I'd be very interested in comment on this comparison. 😁
@@lindsayheyes925 The cup at 38:48 was found by Arthur Evans at Knossos. There was another painted cup as well. Evans wrote that "They had been placed with other vessels on a later clay floor above the arly Crypt" (The Palace of Minos at Knossos, Vol 1, p. 616). Hence Evans gave no indication that these cups were upside-down or were in any corner. Both the translated cup inscription and the Phaistos disk are read from the inside out.
This is excellent stuff which I´ll inmediately share, with your kind permission. Could be this very method aplied to decipher tartessian, iberian, celt-iberian lenguages?
Thank you. I believe that the general idea is applicable to other scripts including the ones you listed. At the moment, I'm developing the method further with Shruti Daggumati, an excellent Ph.D. student from India, and applying it to the Indus Valley Script. Please see our first journal article on this subject here: www.nature.com/articles/s41599-021-00713-0.pdf
@@PeterRevesz I really appreciate your kind response. Thank you so much.
How's it that with all these written profesies there are none recorded in the old glyphs...where they should be
Those Minoan religious texts which we could translate so far do not contain any prophesy. It is possible that some text with a prophesy may be found later. Every religion has characteristic features, and the Minoan religion may or may not have prophesies or oracles.
Such an old civilisation, with such advanced art and technology! I wonder what their language and names were like.
There are several proposals regarding the Minoan language. Recent research places it into the West-Ugric languages that includes Hattic and Sumerian: www.wseas.org/multimedia/journals/information/2017/a605909-068.pdf
This is really fascinating indeed, Dr. Revesz!
Thank you for your comment. Enjoy the other videos too.
I am immensely pleased to see this kind of progress by people much smarter than me. The promise of getting to know more about such cultures, so long ago and mostly unknown to us, is frankly exhilarating. About the method comparing features of related glyphs, I kept thinking that perhaps some kind of weight of importance for each feature could be implemented as a free parameter. Let the computer calculate the score of similarity in real time as we change these weights and ponder the patterns of correspondence.
I appreciate your comment and the idea about using weights. I did not add weights because I did not have a solid argument for weighing some features higher than other features. Without a well-justified argument, the weights themselves can become a subject of criticism.
@@PeterRevesz Thank you for your answer. I see your point, your approach is already far better than any subjective assesment and beyond any criticism of bias, as it is. Weighting will add complexity that might be unwarranted at this point. Perhaps, in due time, from the wisdom gained in the solid ground of a good result, some rough weight estimates will suggest themselves; at least it stands to some amount of reason that every feature would not be equally important.
@@fisterB The features are not equally important, but weights have to be justified. One justification for different weights may be if we have statistics about the frequency of the occurrence of various features within the inscriptions.
Wouldn't it be obvious to start 'printing' from the middle of the Phaistos disc, as clay could always be added to the outer rim if the script overran?
Your argument is one of several arguments why many authors believe that it should be read from the center to the outside. Sir Arthur Evans' original numbering of the blocks of the Phaistos Disk also runs from the center to the outside. For more on the Phaistos Disk, please see: th-cam.com/video/peKoVkokyf8/w-d-xo.html
@@PeterRevesz Thank you Peter for finding the time to reply. I really enjoyed your fascinating talk. I will look at the link which you sent.
That Phaistos A translation makes sense with the ideas of Joseph Campbell as well.
Thank you. Joseph Campbell had great insights.