[thaumasiotes]

It is not clear why his decipherment is accepted as meaningful. It has faced significant criticism: https://sci-hub.se/https://www.jstor.org/stable/20162981

> The Ventris system thus set forth has been widely accepted by Greek scholars, including many of the highest eminence, in many countries. It has also been widely rejected by scholars of eminence, in varying degrees.

> These Ventrisian rules enable bits of a curious sort of Greek to be got out of Lin[ear] B texts; but experiments have shown that bits of English or Latin or other tongues, when spelt out in syllables according to the Ventrisian system, are capable often of yielding bits of Greek just as plausible as anything in the Ventris-Chadwick Documents volume. One eminent Oxonian, dining at a high table, amused himself by taking the names of the Fellows of the College present and turning them into Ventrisian syllables, from which he made a new translation of them into Greek, in which they all turned out to be Greek gods.

> gentle reader, pray perpend the syllable-groups (reference number Dy 401), that run: a-ma wi-ru-qe ka-no to-ro-ja qi-pi-ri-mu a-po-ri. Here we have two specimens of the labio-velars, the syllables with q-, discovered by Ventris, to the astonishment of philologists who had not expected to find them in Bronze Age Greek. qe is, of course, equivalent to Latin -que, Greek te, while qi doubtless here shows the development to a voiced dental noted by Ventris and Chadwick in their "Mycenaean Vocabulary,"

> The Greek evaluation of the sentence would be, according to Ventris's spelling rules, halmai wiluite kainōs Tholoiai Diphilimus apolis: "With brine and slime in novel fashion at Tholoia (the place of tholoi, beehive tombs) Diphilimus (is) cityless." No doubt this is a record of a Bronze Age tidal wave.

> It is by coincidence that the acumen of Mr. Michael C. Stokes, the Edinburgh authority on ancient philosophy, has extracted the Virgilian hexameter, Arma virumque cano Troiae qui primus ab oris....

> Note that in this sentence one need assume only two of the six words to be names of persons or places, whereas, in the Lin B material as a whole, 75 per cent of the sign-groups have to be, on Ventris's system, evaluated as names

[OfSanguineFire]

You cite a 1965 article. That is practically ancient, and no, its criticism is not particularly significant. In the decades since, Ventris’s decipherment has overwhelmingly been accepted by scholars. That is not to say that all of Ventris’s readings are accepted – many are superseded. But the fact that Linear B records Mycenaean Greek along the general lines that he and Chadwick worked out, has long been beyond doubt in the field.

Mycenaean sources and their consensus readings will be discussed in any decent introduction to the history of the Greek language. I can recommend, for example, the relevant chapters in A Companion to the Ancient Greek Language ed. Bakker and in Colvin’s A Historical Greek Reader as fairly accessible to a general audience.

[thaumasiotes]

> You cite a 1965 article. That is practically ancient

> the fact that Linear B records Mycenaean Greek along the general lines that he and Chadwick worked out, has long been beyond doubt in the field.

What are the major developments since 1965 that strengthened the position of Ventris's decipherment?

[theoldlove]

Well, for one, a bunch of additional tablets discovered at Thebes in the 90s, which broadly match and hence confirm the decipherment. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thebes_tablets

[thaumasiotes]

When the criticism is that your paradigm for translating Linear B is so unprincipled that your translation will say whatever you want it to say (compare One eminent Oxonian, dining at a high table, amused himself by taking the names of the Fellows of the College present and turning them into Ventrisian syllables, from which he made a new translation of them into Greek, in which they all turned out to be Greek gods -- the destination is known before the journey begins), how can the confirmation of older Linear B tablets by newer Linear B tablets address that criticism?

[theoldlove]

Just take 10 minutes and skim the book chapters. The rules of the script are nowhere near as loose as you say. For example, Linear B doesn’t differentiate between k/g/kh like alphabetic Greek does (κ,γ,χ) — an important distinction, sure, but its loss doesn’t let you turn anything into anything else.

So with the Theban tablets, if the decipherment were false it should have yielded nonsense when applied to unknown texts.

[thaumasiotes]

> So with the Theban tablets, if the decipherment were false it should have yielded nonsense when applied to unknown texts.

How is this claim compatible with the observation that, when applied to a text written in Latin, the decipherment fails to yield nonsense?

[OfSanguineFire]

Most of the Chadwick part of the Chadwick–Ventris collaboration was published after 1965. And I just pointed you to two popular references that, in turn, cite a number of publications from recent decades. I suggest you follow up on that.

[thaumasiotes]

Oh, I certainly will.

But I was kind of hoping for some indication that developments of that kind actually occurred; it would be the least surprising thing in the world to see a selection effect in the study of Linear B inscriptions whereby students who couldn't reconcile themselves with the idea that decipherment will happily assign a meaning to any text, even where the actual meaning of the text is known to be different, left the field, while students who didn't mind that stayed in. Over time a strong consensus in favor of the position "no, I didn't waste the last 30 years of my life" is exactly what you'd expect to see.

There are no professions in which the professional consensus is "actually, none of this works". But there are many in which that is the truth.