[petjuh]

From what I know, the main issue is that the Linear A script corpus is rather small. Another commenter here said it's only 7500 symbols in total, spread around 1500 inscriptions (so on average 5 symbols per inscription).

The other thing I find odd, however, is that it's found to be a Semitic language. If it's a Semitic language, I would have expected it to already have been deciphered. And certainly linguists would have already looked at Semitic languages, and looked hard.

Also if it were a Semitic language, why wasn't it consonantal but had vowels? Usually Semitic languages (and Egyptian maybe) write only the consonants because their stems are made three consonants and vowels are interweaved to make words.

Example semitic root K-T-B and how vowels are added in-between to form words:

kataba – He wrote yaktubu – He writes / is writing kitāb – A book kutub – Books kātib – A writer / scribe / clerk maktūb – Written / fate maktab – An office / desk maktabah – A library / bookstore

And another such root - D-R-S which means "studying" or "learning."

darasa – He studied yadrusu – He studies / is studying dirāsah – A study / school course dāris – A student / learner madrūs – Studied / carefully planned madrasah – A school

This system of triliteral roots is the reason why usually Semitic languages don't use vowels. Why would Linear A have consonant+vowel syllabary if it were semitic?

[mcswell]

Your post shows exactly why it would be useful to write vowels in Semitic languages: to distinguish among the different tenses, passive/active, nominalizations etc.---in other words, to distinguish the various words that happen to be based on a single root.

[peterfirefly]

True, but Arabic and Hebrew use a large number of implicit vowels. Only some of the vowels are actually written (except in school books in the early grades).

I don't really understand how they can leave out so many vowels and still figure out that "this is past tense", "this is a noun", etc.

[gus_massa]

But the idea that you only learn and write the consonants (that are like 20) istead of learning and writing all the sylabes deiferently (that are like 5×20) appeared much later. (It was a brillant idea, by the way.)