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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday February 17 2021, @12:08PM   Printer-friendly
from the it's-all-Greek-or-not-Greek-to-me dept.

SigLA is an interdisciplinary project blending linguistics and computer science and aiming at developing a systematic, exhaustive and user friendly open access database of all inscriptions known to date written in the Linear A script of Bronze Age Greece (ca. 1800-1450 BCE), to date still undeciphered. Such a research tool is currently missing, and is highly desirable inasmuch as essential in order to carry out statistical and palæographic analyses within the epigraphic corpus, currently available in print form only. In fact, one of the hindrances to decipherment prospects is the current impossibility to carry out any meaningful linguistic statistical analysis and palæographic sign comparison covering the whole corpus of Linear A inscriptions due to the limited resources available. This is especially true with respect to research tools, as all material is only available in (cumbersome) print form. Collecting the Linear A inscriptions in a unified database is of paramount importance to be able to answer sophisticated palæographical and linguistic questions about the Linear A script as well as the language (Minoan) it encodes, which will help us reconstruct the socio-historical context of the Minoan civilisation.

(Summary taken from the accompanying paper.)

[N.B. follows below. - Fnord]

From "About SigLA":

SigLA is an interactive database of inscriptions written in the (still undeciphered) Linear A script of Bronze Age Greece. SigLA aim at developing a systematic, exhaustive and user-friendly open access database of all Linear A inscriptions. Such a research tool is currently missing, and is essential in order to carry out statistical and palæographic analyses within the epigraphic corpus, only available in print form at the moment.


Original Submission

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  • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 17 2021, @12:49PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 17 2021, @12:49PM (#1114009)

    "What's reality? I don't know. When my bird was looking at my computer
    I thought, 'that bird has no idea what he's looking at.' And yet what does the bird do?
    Does he panic? No, he can't really panic, he just does the best he can. Is he able
    to live in a world where he's so ignorant? Well, he doesn't really have a choice.
    The bird is okay even though he doesn't understand the world.

    You're that bird looking at the monitor, And you're thinking to yourself, 'I can figure this out.'
    Maybe you have some bird ideas. Maybe that's the best you can do."

    - Terry A. Davis

  • (Score: 2) by nostyle on Wednesday February 17 2021, @09:59PM (4 children)

    by nostyle (11497) on Wednesday February 17 2021, @09:59PM (#1114179) Journal

    Some comments that show up on this site might as well be written in Linear A for all the sense that they make.

    Maybe we could add a feature where, once a comment has been modded as spam, it is auto-converted into Linear A, so that the vast majority of us can truly ignore it, and those who want to waste their time with it can convert it back to some readable form.

    ---
    I also heard that Apple released some brand new emojis today, so we are on track for our descent back into hieroglyphics. I'll race you to the bottom!

    • (Score: 2) by aristarchus on Wednesday February 17 2021, @10:47PM (1 child)

      by aristarchus (2645) on Wednesday February 17 2021, @10:47PM (#1114193) Journal

      I have to say, it's not Greek to me!

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 18 2021, @12:20PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 18 2021, @12:20PM (#1114420)

        Looks like a lot of shit emojis and farming implements. Bow and arrow, shield.

        https://sigla.phis.me/document/HT%2024a/ [sigla.phis.me] - these hieroglyphics look like a ledger of hunted animals with tallies and depictions of each creature shot dead.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 17 2021, @10:50PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 17 2021, @10:50PM (#1114195)

      How, tey prell, are you proposing to do this?

      Linear A script of Bronze Age Greece (ca. 1800-1450 BCE), to date still undeciphered

      If covert to Linear-A, how will be be able to verify counter-conversion is accurate?

      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by nostyle on Thursday February 18 2021, @12:36AM

        by nostyle (11497) on Thursday February 18 2021, @12:36AM (#1114233) Journal

        I was thinking of a variation of a rot-13 that mapped ascii into the Linear A unicode block [wikipedia.org].

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