[liliumregale]

This is a God (language)-of-the-gaps argument: we can't figure out this rarely language, but maybe we can figure out an entirely unattested language instead, and also learn the correspondence between it and Linear A.

Deep learning can predict plenty of phenomena in the world, sure, but it needs data, not aspirations.

[vjerancrnjak]

> figure out an entirely unattested language

I did not say that. Human languages evolve in similar ways, use similar vocabulary, grammar etc. Linguistics has already unraveled the structure of many languages and the structure of evolution of language through time.

I am not saying DL is THE approach to take, but given that there's only ~10k characters of Linear A, it is hard to tackle the problem without common representation of multiple languages that are close to it. That's the whole point of DL, how to build better and better representations, not how to accurately model uncertainty (which is what you get by doing statistics).

I would say XLM [0] builds a common representation of a collection of languages and then works better on machine translation for languages for which the data is scarce but that are related to the languages in the model. (what it also does is discover and represent the structure of part-of-speech, grammar, entities etc. without being told about those particular things)

Does there exist an abundance of data for languages close to Linear A? If not, then I admire the work of all that try to untangle this with their brains alone.

0: https://github.com/facebookresearch/XLM

[Contexti]

> Does there exist an abundance of data for languages close to Linear A? If not, then I admire the work of all that try to untangle this with their brains alone.

In the article, Dr. Ester Salgarella says: "we have not yet identified the linguistic family the Minoan language belongs to (unless it has to be taken as an ‘isolated’ language)"

If we knew that the Minoan language belonged to some extant language family and we had an abundance of data, the mystery of Linear A would already have been solved decades ago.

In general, there's very little data for any of the Palaeo-European languages that got replaced by Indo-European languages.

Linguistic relatives of the Minoan language could have gone extinct when their speakers shifted to Greek or some other Indo-European language. It is also possible that other Minoan languages died out centuries or millenia before the arrival of Indo-Europeans. I don't believe we will ever know.

[vjerancrnjak]

Yeah, I guess the conclusion is that humans are still much better than DL. :D