Talk:Linear A

message: Are there bones synchronic with the Minoan ruins and Linear A? In which case, the DNA of such bones may show us where the Minoans came from, and thus indicate a language or parent language for Linear A.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 121.223.187.157 (talk) 10:21, 26 August 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  DNA could help? 

message: This article lists the dates for Linear A from 2500 BCE to 1450 BCE. However, the source used (Haarmann, H. The Danube Script and Other Ancient Writing Systems:A Typology of Distinctive Features. J. of Archaeomythology 4,1:12-46) uses the term "Cretan Linear A" conflating both, the Cretan hieroglyphs and Linear A.
All other sources date Linear A from 1850 BCE or 1800 BCE. For example:
"Linear A is attested in Crete and on some Aegean islands from approximately 1850 bc to 1400 bc."
"The first linear script, Linear A, dates from about 1700 B.C. and was also partly pictorial in nature. It appears on clay tablets written between 1750 B.C. and 1400 B.C. and has been classified as a West Semitic script."|ref=2}
"Linear A was in use in Phaistos as early as 1850 B.C., long before the disappearance of the first script [Cretan hieroglyphs]; but the bulk of the surviving texts date from the destruction of the palaces at the end of LM Ib (around 1450 B.C.) with a smaller number assignable to MM III and none securely dated after 1400 B.C.
Even the Wikipedia article on Cretan hieroglyphs states:
"Cretan hieroglyphs are undeciphered hieroglyphs found on artefacts[sic] of early Bronze Age Crete, during the Minoan era. It predates Linear A by about a century, but the two writing systems continued to be used in parallel for most of their history."
However, the date range for the Cretan hieroglyphs is given as 2100-1700 BC. This error causes both chronologies of Linear A and Linear B on Wikipedia to be completely out of range when compared to the scholarly versions. 
Also note in the Linear B article, the chronology has Cretan hieroglyphs comprising the period only from 1625 BCE(?) to 1500 BCE. No scholarly source places the Cretan hieroglyphs that late, and no scholarly source places Linear A as early as 2500 BCE. Both articles, Linear A and Linear B, are in sore need of correction. 96.50.8.92 (talk) 22:29, 12 January 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Yeah, and now the article even claims that Linear A was used from 2500 BCE. This seems wholly idiosyncratic and cannot be sustained. I'll change the early dates to 1800 BCE. —Pinnerup (talk) 09:44, 1 April 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Problem with the dates 

message: I really hope I'm doing this right. I am a college sophomore in no way an expert on anything to do with Wikipedia or Linear A. But, upon review of the article these are the improvements that I can see can be made with the page. 
At first read through, I am impressed by the detail and thoroughness of the wikipedia page. If I were first researching Greek early writing styles, and wanted to familiarize myself with Linear A, I would trust the accuracy of the information presented to me. The article is setup in an organized way that is easy to follow. It is helpful in that it starts with a brief interdiction, using language that is easy to follow, before starts with an overview before diverging into subsections. I feel that everything in the article is relevant to Linear A. The one suggestion of improvement I would make is the inclusion of random “fun-facts” throughout, such as including in the script section that “an interesting feature is that of how numbers are included in the script. The highest number that has been recorded is 3000…”. There are a few of these details that seem unnecessary to the main point.
 While the article was well organized, however one point of distraction was the variety of different sub-organization tools under the “Theories of deciperment section”. Here, information was organized in summaries, by quoting chunks of text, or in bullet points. The different methods of organizing text weren't visually pleasing and was confusing to follow. My other suggestion in organization is to bring the Discovery section to before the Corpus section. To me, it makes more sense to talk about the original discovery of Linear A before then proceeding to talk about other places the language has been found. 
As far as I can tell all of the claims seemed neutral. In my read through certain subtopics received far more attention than others. The discovery of Linear A was a total of three sentances, while theories of theories of decipherment was eight paragraphs. If I were to edit this page I would add more detail to the discovery section and summarize the different theories of decipherment into a few paragraphs, rather than give each theory their own paragraph. Another section that seemed to be missing was a history on Linear A. While it is not deciphered, and we don’t know its use, it would have been helpful to place Linear A within its historical context. This information could be placed in the beginning with the general overview of Linear A. Linear A is a topic discussed alot within my class so I came in with prior knowledge. However to someone not knowing anything about Ancient Greece from c. 2500-1400 B.C.E, then they wouldn’t know where to pinpoint what society looked like when Linear A was being used. 
The links to the citations I clicked on work. Overall, the citations seem to come from reputable sources including books and academic journals. There are also a multitude of sources used, so we know information collected is from a variety of viewpoints. The one imporvement the article could make are there are a few spots were a distinct fact was placed with no citation. Such as with the highest number being 3000 quote in the Script section. 
Looking at the talk page I saw discussion on what sections were being underrepresented (which agreed with my perspective). There was also a lot of talk trying to confirm is certain facts were 100% accurate. A lot of this had to do with Theories of Decipherment, and which theories were still being considered and which ones proven wrong.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by Char flower (talk • contribs) 23:26, 17 September 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Greek Archeology & Art Homework  

message: Hello,
After the reading of the books about minoan script written bij Peter G. van Soesbergen,
I am pretty sure he deciphered a Huge part of the minoan linear a.
The website about his books is http://www.minoanscript.nl
Kind regards,
Jodocus  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.167.198.196 (talk) 17:50, 2 October 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: Linear B is considered deciphered, even though there are some unknown characters. Linear A is considered undeciphered; some of it is, but much of it isn't. It might be a matter of the meanings of characters and words. Linear B is written in an ancient form of Greek, which is much more known about than the Minoan of Linear A. 64.124.38.140 (talk) 19:16, 9 May 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Actually, it is deciphered. 

message: The first question that occurred to me when I saw the section on Unicode was 'why??' I don't have an answer, and it isn't addressed in the text, but I thought I'd ask here if anyone has some idea why someone would add a long dead, undeciphered script to a modern character set standard. just for convenience among researchers??
Beergeekjoey (talk) 20:28, 17 May 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: The goal of Unicode is to provide a unique number for every character including historical characters. – Þjarkur (talk) 20:40, 17 May 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Unicode Linear A 

message: In the context of whether there was a voicing distinction in the language behind Linear A, the article reads "The distinction t / d reflected in the Linear A, Linear B and Cypriot is an example of speech stops" and cites an article.  I'm a linguist, and I can't figure out what is being said here.  I looked the article cited up in the Wayback machine, but I could not see that it spoke to this issue at all.  At any rate, it's *possible* that the text in this Wikipedia article is saying that /t/ and /d/ are stops, which is true (although whether the corresponding Linear A symbols represent these sounds is perhaps harder to determine, I assume this is relying on Linear A/ Greek).  But that doesn't seem terribly relevant, unless I'm missing s.t. Mcswell (talk) 04:58, 28 June 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Good observation, the passage was inserted here. Since it is a close-to-gibberish statement with a reference that does not back up whatever is meant by the statement, I'll delete it. The meaningful part of it (the partially defective coding of voice contrasts) is mentioned in the page Linear B anyway. Next time you find stuff like this, just be WP:BOLD and tag or remove it. Thanks for having a closer look at this page! –Austronesier (talk) 09:59, 28 June 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree, the removed fragment is close to incomprehensible.--Bob not snob (talk) 10:02, 28 June 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  t/d 

message: While we're at it, yesterday an edit-warring IP was unhappy with 's removal of the "Ugric" section, which is based on two non-RS published in predatory journals (cf page history). Such sources may be included (but even then only with caution) if they have been cited by scholars in peer-reviewed non-predatory journals (thus reliable sources), which may "heal" their default status as non-RS. I cannot see that this is the case with these two fringe papers. –Austronesier (talk) 10:13, 28 June 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Agree, removed, .--Bob not snob (talk) 10:53, 28 June 2020 (UTC)
thread_title: Ugric

message: I would like to seriously condense this section as it hinges exclusively on one scholar's unsupported, personal interpretation of the script, using Linear B values for Linear A -- a method referred to in this Wikipedia article as resulting in a text "[no] scholar can read." While I would like to remove the section entirely, as it's based on a claim of decipherment of the Linear A script (along with numerous fringe beliefs, e.g. PIE had already begun to disintegrate prior to 10,000BCE(1)(2)(3)), the theory is from a peer-reviewed source, and therefore presumably meets the criteria for inclusion on the page. The quote, however, does not; it is from a non-peer-reviewed newspaper(?) article, elementary in its description of Indo-European, and fraught with inconsistencies and/or flat-out contradictory assertions ("In the Minoan language (Linear A), there are no purely Greek words, as is the case in Mycenaean Linear B" (?!)). While the medium of a newspaper article is admittedly most conducive to elementary or introductory explanations of any material, there is a reason such sources do not quite meet WP requirements for inclusion. I would recommend at the very least removing the quote, and replacing it with something more appropriate from one of the author's peer-reviewed sources. The reason I believe that removing the entire section may still be warranted is that once all the aforementioned issues are dealt with, it leaves little of substance in the sub-section in question.
Also, both footnotes associated with the author's works: 33 and 34, are dead links, leading to pages with page not found errors. I would also suggest removing the entire Indo-Iranian section as it's also just based on bad science (which is thankfully explained), but that's a different story.
(1) Ringe, D. and Anthony, D., 2015. The Indo-European Homeland from Linguistic and Archaeological Perspectives.
(2) Gamkrelidze,T.V., & Ivanov, V., 1995. . Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans: A Reconstruction and Historical Analysis of a Proto-Language and a Proto-Culture.
(3)Renfrew, C., 1987. Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins. (hilariously, Owens actually cites this specific article, and then seemingly proceeds to completely disregard its contents even though the time-depth contained within is probably closest to his ridiculous one)
Vindafarna (talk) 06:05, 9 October 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: Agree 100%, go ahead and WP:boldly change what needs to be changed. –Austronesier (talk) 09:42, 9 October 2020 (UTC)
replies: text:  I disagree. Owens' work is legitimate and well-studied. It's quite common for authors to cite articles in on section approvingly and disagree with their other sections. CessnaMan1989 (talk) 21:40, 13 December 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  The "A distinct, otherwise unknown branch of Indo-European" Section  

message: I cannot see the Glyph column in "Proposed values of fraction glyphs". What character set should I use? Mazarin07 (talk) 07:49, 2 August 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: You'll need a Unicode Linear A font installed to see those characters properly. DRMcCreedy (talk) 15:48, 2 August 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Display problem! 

message: Does anyone know where that first image is from? I checked the cited source (which is available on IA) but it doesn't match. AtticEdit (talk) 13:12, 18 January 2022 (GMT+13)
* Check the online corpus (cannot add the link as the English Wikipedia blocks it, but you can check it in the references on the Russian version of the article). It is a golden ring from Mavro Spilio. Dmitri Lytov (talk) 21:33, 20 January 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Opening Image  

message: I tidied up and updated the article but it needs work on what the current Linear A inscriptions are (and what they are on). Seriously, I thought things were bad in the cuneiform world but given there are only a few hundred inscriptions and maybe a few thousand total glyphs in existance its amazing how underpublished and poorly published the Linear A corpus is. This is a long winded way of asking if someone more up to date on things Minoan than I am could fix this up. ThanksPloversegg (talk) 22:08, 16 March 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Corpus 

message: It would be cool if there were SVG files for the fraction glyphs like there are for the common glyphs. I looked at the unicode and they are VERY simple. Of course I have No Idea how to do this but maybe someone smarter than I am can do it.Ploversegg (talk) 22:17, 16 March 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Someone did this, which is cool.Ploversegg (talk) 22:17, 26 February 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Images for Fractions 

message: I see that someone did a draft article on Libation Formulas Draft:Libation Formula which was soundly rejected by the PTB. Maybe some of it could be incorporated into this article.Ploversegg (talk) 17:58, 5 May 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: It looks like the main intent of the draft was to promote a preprint article that was rejected for inclusion here in this article. But of course, quality content that can be supported with reliable sources is a welcome addition here. –Austronesier (talk) 19:31, 5 May 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  LIbation Formulas 

message: Hi,
There is a new method for translating based on Egyptian hieratics:
https://nantt44.wordpress.com/2022/08/10/chapter-xv-charmuthas-betius-minoan-theology-through-linear-a/
According to this method, PO-NI-ZA the last three symbols of the historical coin KO ZF2 would give the Immortal lord of Sky, Ba'al Shamin. We can also find the main gods and goddesses of the Minoans.
These hieroglyphs could thus be the key to decipher the Linear A of the Cretans. Lepoivre Bertrand (talk) 20:19, 30 August 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: This appears to just be someone's blog, not a reliable source. – Scyrme (talk) 21:15, 30 August 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Method of equivalent hieroglyphs 

message: Almost everything I've read had Linear A beginning c. 1800 BC. The Minoan civilization article (and another paper I saw) says 2500 BC based on one paper. I read that paper (Haarman 2008) and it quotes no source for that claim. What it does do is move Middle Minoan IIB back to 2500 BC. Odd. So I disbelieve and plan to change the Minoan article unless someone has a better idea.Ploversegg (talk) 04:31, 15 December 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Agree. ~1800 BCE is what you find most sources, including the ones cited in this article. And even if there is a source that explicitly pushes the date of the earliest attestations of Linear A back to 2500 BCE (and not just its cultural horizon), we should mention it only here as an outlier proposal, but not in Minoan civilization. –Austronesier (talk) 21:44, 15 December 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Chronology 

message: This point should be marked in the “Other languages” section and should not be deleted. The idea that the language of Linear A is related to Hattic is much more realistic than any other hypothesis about the language of Linear A. 
Alexander Akulov and Peter Schrijver have independently come to the conclusion that the language of Linear A is a quite close relative of Hattic. 
Akulov, A. 2021. The deciphering of the Linear A tablet Malia 10. Cultural Anthropology and Ethnosemiotics, Vol. 7, № 3; pp.: 8 - 18 
The Linear A tablet Malia 10 has inscriptions on four sides of six. Sides A and B have relatively well-preserved inscriptions containing syllabograms, logograms depicting different vessels, and numerals. Previously it was shown that Minoan and Hattic are rather close, so phrases from the tablet can be decoded through Hattic. The component tew from the phrase dupitewa from side B correlates with Hattic tepušne/tewušne "libation". The -a ending correlates with Hattic imperative -a. The component -u- in the syllable du correlates with Hattic marker of 2sgsb -u- / un-. The syllable pi correlates with Hattic marker of plural object -p-. The phrase ru from the side A correlates with Hattic verb lu "to be able".
https://www.academia.edu/53367491/The_deciphering_of_the_Linear_A_tablet_Malia_10
Schrijver, P. 2019. Talking Neolithic: the case for Hatto-Minoan and its relationship to Sumerian, Proceedings of the workshop on Indo-European origins held at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, December 2-3, 2013 
The word sarja, followed by a logogram/determinative depicting human being, on the Linear A tablet Haghia Triada 102 correlates with Hattic word zariu meaning “human being”. 
https://www.academia.edu/38376555/Talking_Neolithic_the_case_for_Hatto_Minoan_and_its_relationship_to_Sumerian Pepe mantani (talk) 22:47, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: For background Hattic language and Minoan language.  Ploversegg (talk) 23:25, 3 April 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: Is this Peter Schrijver the same as Peter Schrijver? Seems a bit out of his field if so. – Scyrme (talk) 02:31, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: Yep, Peter Schrijver Pepe mantani (talk) 02:38, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

text: It's looks like they already did "explain the source on the talk page" (above, posted before your revert). I don't know whether these sources are credible or whether mentioning them would be undue, but your edit summary seems unclear and possibly unfair. – Scyrme (talk) 01:56, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, I can see now. There wasn't any explanation on the edit tags, such as 'see talk' so I assumed it was a simple wp:BRD issue. All good now, thanks for reverting. Roger 8 Roger (talk) 03:00, 4 April 2023 (UTC)

text: As an aside, the 1st papers is at (wordpress)  and the 2nd paper is available at .Ploversegg (talk) 03:08, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
replies: text:  What on earth are you doing? Don't revert 's contributions without a proper explaination. –Austronesier (talk) 20:41, 4 April 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  The language of Linear A is a close relative of Hattic  

message: I reverted this edit today  and the IP who made it has left a polite message on my talk. I thought it best to open a discussion here. There were various problems with the edit as it was, but at the heart of it there is a paper by Dolkos, which may be interesting. . 
My reason for reverting it all, however, is that the paper is a primary source, and if Dolkos is worth a mention, it would be better if we took it from a secondary source. Nevertheless these types of articles often end up referring to such primary sources in places, so it would be a matter of deciding how. The paper is about attempts to interpret messages in two engravings. There is a question as to how due this is to the article as a whole. Additionally the edit contained external links in the body - we don't do that. There were some spelling errors, but we can fix those easily.  The links to a wordpress site were also self published sources - we can't use those for verifiability. 
So the question is whether there is anything we can say about Dolkos that does not lend undue weight to one primary source. Sirfurboy🏄 (talk) 18:15, 23 October 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dolkos