[hillsboroughman]

Very informative summary. A stupid question follows though, so request your patience. Did Michael Ventris really ask the question 'what if Linear B encoded some form of Greek'? Didn't Alice Kober already ask and answer this question, without seeming to do so. The fact that the underlying language was an inflected one and that it seemed to have singular, dual and plural forms for nouns etc - wasn't that enough? Was it academic carefulness that prevented Kober from proclaiming it was ancient Greek?

[light_hue_1]

Kober was very determined that systematic analysis of the text would eventually work. She rejected the idea that you could just hypothesize what language it was. Because so many people had tried and failed that way.

Maybe at some point she had this idea. But you really must understand how bad of a fit classical Greek, and even the early Greek dialects, really is. Like.. a few words work out here and there. What convinced Chadwick were the place names, some names of Gods, and one particularly long 13 symbol patronymic. But for anything more you had to start adding, removing, reinterpreting characters and assuming that the original text got them wrong.

Also Kobler was missing most of the text since it hadn't been published yet, in her small corpus this would have been ever worse.

Even after people saw the decoding the main sticking point for years was that you need to make so many changes for it to work out in Greek that you're just making up the text. It took decades of work to make the decoding work and many of the decodings Ventris put forward were found to be wrong.

Eventually Kober maybe would have worked with Chadwick or someone similar who knew a more archaic variant or maybe Chadwick himself would have noticed it.

[smallnamespace]

Most Indo-European languages are inflected and have singular, dual, and plural forms (if not in the modern language, then in a more archaic form).

Even Latin retains some dual forms for certain words even though it had otherwise lost it.

[hillsboroughman]

Homeric Greek had only sporadic use of the dual. It was apparently a matter of metrical convenience. Classical Greek had all but lost the use of dual. Dual ws lost in Latin. Whereas in Mycenaean Greek, the dual number was mandatory for both verbs and nouns. Like in Sanskrit. It is well known that Miss Kober traveled at considerable personal expense (?) and effort to travel from New York to New Haven to learn advanced Sanskrit. I feel there is every reason to believe that Miss Kober already guessed Linear B encoded a form of archaic Greek and her triplets more or less spoke to this informed guess. Just my 2c