[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?

[theoldlove]

In your very article the decipherment does yield nonsense when applied to Latin. Your article converts the first line of Vergil to Linear B and then tries to understand it as Greek, offering “With brine and slime in novel fashion at Tholoia Diphilimus (is) cityless.” But that’s nearly totally meaningless.

And even this sentence requires cheating — most prominently, Greek (both in Linear B and later) doesn’t use the -us ending like Latin does, so its use here in a “Greek” sentence is very suspicious.

[thaumasiotes]

> Your article converts the first line of Vergil to Linear B and then tries to understand it as Greek, offering “With brine and slime in novel fashion at Tholoia Diphilimus (is) cityless.” But that’s nearly totally meaningless.

This is a pretty odd claim. The sentence is grammatically coherent and the semantics are... there. They're hard to understand, but that's true of essentially all ancient writing; this problem becomes obvious when we try to date historical events by reference to astronomical phenomena that contemporary texts mention. It's easy for us to calculate the precise dates of interesting astronomical phenomena more than a thousand years in the past... but it's difficult to determine exactly what the texts of that period mean when they describe astronomical anomalies.

(For something similar and much more recent, here's part of the introduction to The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties:

dragons were spotted seven times in the seventeen years from 1351 through 1367. In that final year, the Yuan dynasty's last, there were two spottings. The first, on July 9, was in Beijing. A dragon emerged in a flash of light from a well in the palace of the former crown prince and flew off.

What happened there?)

Why is "Diphilimus is cityless" more meaningless than a standard Linear B inscription such as "small jar, no handles: 1 handleless jar"? By most accounts there is more meaning in the sentence about Diphilimus.

> Greek (both in Linear B and later) doesn’t use the -us ending like Latin does, so its use here in a “Greek” sentence is very suspicious.

Reasonable. But there are many Greek names that do end in -eus, such as Theseus, Perseus, Odysses, Achilles, and Zeus; the reader cited above specifically suggests that the Ventrisian sequence ai-ke-u might be interpreted as the personal name Aἰγεύς. Diphilimos does not appear to be a classical Greek name, so we don't seem to be committed to any particular such form.

Lacking syllable-final -n and -s, how would we represent the name of Tiryns in Linear B?

[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.