A lot of loonies make this claim, but Tom's work is credible enough that it's being reviewed by linguistics experts at Rutgers and Cambridge. Additional validation: his approach produces results. He's translated over 300 words, and that's never been done before, and his solution actually solves some problems in Linear B. Tom is an AI engineer, and Claude Code was key to his work. Disclosures: I know Tom socially, and I wrote the post at the link.
I think it is an open question: can an unknown language be cracked -- without any dictionary or grammar or understanding of the language? Just lots and lots of texts, maybe some of it bilingual.
It's a common misconception that is what happened with Ancient Egyptian with the Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta Stone was just one of the big pieces of the puzzle. The decoding came when people realized that Coptic (a language written alphabetically and still in use in the Coptic Church today) is actually descended from Ancient Egyptian; as Spanish is to Latin, Coptic is to Ancient Egyptian.
Similarly the attempts to decode classical Maya were all dead ends. Until Yuri Knorozov realized that it encoded the ancestor of the Maya languages which are still spoken to this day. (Knorozov's Wikipedia article is worth checking out just for his photo with his cat. [0] IMHO.)
I have written before about the La Mojarra 1 stele in Mexico [1]. It looks a lot like Maya. [2] But it isn't Maya. Maybe the difference like between Russian and Latin writing?
No one can read it. It's undecipherable. There are some attempts to identify it with a proposed ancient language that would have been related to the modern Mixe-Zoque languages: some of the glyphs that are shared with Maya, when read phonetically, start sounding like a Mixe-Zoque language. But no one has proposed a confident decipherment. There probably isn't enough text. La Mojarra 1 is the only long example of the Isthmian script.
Deciphering Akkadian was very difficult, at first. The process started with Persian; old Persian was written in a simplified adapted form of the Mesopotamian cuneiform (wedges on clay). It was a kind of alphabet. And Old Persian was already understood. And there was a bilingual text on a monument carved by Darius I. But even then -- decoding relies so heavily on the fact that Akkadian is a Semitic language distantly related to Hebrew, more distantly, also Ancient Egyptian. So again, we sort of knew what we were looking for.
That is all to say: even if the Voynich manuscript (for example) contains real text in an otherwise completely lost language, I'm not sure it is possible even theoretically to translate it.
Sorry but I don’t recognize this as being an achievement by an amateur. This dude had no chance in hell until we trained a model to use his time to suss it out.
As an amateur who's been fascinated by this puzzle himself, I will add some context that might be relevant in assessing the plausibility of this claim:
- The "Libation Formula", which the author used as the base for his translations, is the most studied piece of writing in Linear A, because it's the only recurring phrase (with grammatical variation) that we have. The corpus is extremely fragmentary, with just a handful of instances of longer text (and even then, the texts are the length of an average sentence in English). The majority of documents available to us are lists (of inventory, personnel, offerings or something of this sort). The longer texts make use of punctuation marks, likely put in between words. This gives us a non-trivial vocabulary, which still does not match that of any known language.
- With such fragmentary remaining material, we cannot be sure that a) all the texts we call "Linear A" are written in the same language, and b) the recognizable words are not abbreviations, for example.
- The author made an assumption that Linear A symbols which have counterparts in Linear B should have the same phonetic values. This gives us an already known glyph that represented "NA". "Duplicate" glyphs are only found in the P-series, and are assumed to represent syllables which were distinguished by the Linear A language, but not by Greek - such as aspirated/unaspirated P. There is a glyph that stands for "NWA" in Linear B, but instances of it have been found in Linear A as well.
- There are countless words with no known etymology in Ancient Greek, assumed to originate from a substrate language or languages spoken in the area at the time Greeks migrated to their present-day homeland. The language of Linear A would be a likely candidate for such substrate. If Linear A were a Semitic language, then we should already be able to establish Semitic etymologies for those words as they were in Greek. Of course it could also be the case that these words came from an another language which did not adopt writing or its writing did not survive to our times.
Alot of the comments in this thread are disappointing. Rather that celebrating an achievement (whether or it is validated yet), many of you seem to want to put him down, or make it seem like claude did all the work.
Claiming that claude did all the work is patently ridiculous. Claude is a tool, like any other. The corpus of linear A is ~7500 characters across ~1500 inscriptions and claude, no matter how smart, doesn't just solve that on its own.
This is very exciting. Congrats to Tom on the accomplishment.
To be clear, this is an attempt at a decipherment. This is not proven, and we shouldn't consider Linear A to be "solved" until experts in the field have reviewed the work. In fact, it probably shouldn't be considered "proof" unless some more Linear A writings are uncovered and these are congruent with the method proposed. All that can be said for certain at this point is that this is an interesting conjecture.
But this is a story worth following. This could be the real deal. More research and validation should follow and we should have a better idea in the next few weeks or months whether Linear A has really been solved. At the very least, this is an interesting attempt, and optimistically, it could yield real insight into Minoan culture. Kudos.
If confirmed this is really cool and impressive work.
Honestly curious how many years before it can be one shotted in a coding harness with Fable.next by someone who’s not a linguistics expert.
Develop, test, and rank hypotheses about the phonetic values, morphology, grammar, and possible language family of Linear A using the full available corpus. Do not assume any decipherment is correct. Treat all candidate readings as hypotheses to be scored…”
Isn't a big problem with Linear A that there are so few symbols you can "solve" it relatively straightforwardly with no way to tell if you it's correct or not?
> Di Mino used Claude Code to build a suite of Python scripts that query, cross-reference, and organize the digitized Linear A corpus (drawn from the GORILA and SigLA databases), enabling systematic hypothesis testing at a scale that would have been impractical to do manually.
That's exactly the kind of thing I'd hope Claude would be used for in these kinds of projects - building tools, not black-box "solving" the problem.
If it turns out to be true, it would open the door a bit for connecting Indo-European languages with Semitic languages. In the beginning of the last century it was believed that these were related. Later this came out of vogue. How could they have been so wrong initially? Because both languages families were entangled, as now there is genetic evidence that both languages spread from very close to the Caucasus. It's probably old news for most but in the last 15 years it became clear that Europe was completely resettled, once by Anatolians and then partly by Indo-Europeans. The language of the Anatolians is still unknown.
42 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 35.1 ms ] threadCynical read would be you’re stealing his thunder a bit by prematurely announcing this before it’s fully confirmed
What does this mean? Like he e-mailed it to some people at Rutgers and Cambridge? Or it's under some kind of non-anonymous peer review?
It's a common misconception that is what happened with Ancient Egyptian with the Rosetta Stone. The Rosetta Stone was just one of the big pieces of the puzzle. The decoding came when people realized that Coptic (a language written alphabetically and still in use in the Coptic Church today) is actually descended from Ancient Egyptian; as Spanish is to Latin, Coptic is to Ancient Egyptian.
Similarly the attempts to decode classical Maya were all dead ends. Until Yuri Knorozov realized that it encoded the ancestor of the Maya languages which are still spoken to this day. (Knorozov's Wikipedia article is worth checking out just for his photo with his cat. [0] IMHO.)
I have written before about the La Mojarra 1 stele in Mexico [1]. It looks a lot like Maya. [2] But it isn't Maya. Maybe the difference like between Russian and Latin writing?
No one can read it. It's undecipherable. There are some attempts to identify it with a proposed ancient language that would have been related to the modern Mixe-Zoque languages: some of the glyphs that are shared with Maya, when read phonetically, start sounding like a Mixe-Zoque language. But no one has proposed a confident decipherment. There probably isn't enough text. La Mojarra 1 is the only long example of the Isthmian script.
Deciphering Akkadian was very difficult, at first. The process started with Persian; old Persian was written in a simplified adapted form of the Mesopotamian cuneiform (wedges on clay). It was a kind of alphabet. And Old Persian was already understood. And there was a bilingual text on a monument carved by Darius I. But even then -- decoding relies so heavily on the fact that Akkadian is a Semitic language distantly related to Hebrew, more distantly, also Ancient Egyptian. So again, we sort of knew what we were looking for.
That is all to say: even if the Voynich manuscript (for example) contains real text in an otherwise completely lost language, I'm not sure it is possible even theoretically to translate it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Knorozov
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Mojarra_Stela_1
[2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:La_Mojarra_Stela_1_S...
If you have a 4k screen, you can fit all remaining Linear A text on your screen at once, in 14pt high font.
however, nawaya or what ever examples around it are not part of the Hebrew language.
- The "Libation Formula", which the author used as the base for his translations, is the most studied piece of writing in Linear A, because it's the only recurring phrase (with grammatical variation) that we have. The corpus is extremely fragmentary, with just a handful of instances of longer text (and even then, the texts are the length of an average sentence in English). The majority of documents available to us are lists (of inventory, personnel, offerings or something of this sort). The longer texts make use of punctuation marks, likely put in between words. This gives us a non-trivial vocabulary, which still does not match that of any known language.
- With such fragmentary remaining material, we cannot be sure that a) all the texts we call "Linear A" are written in the same language, and b) the recognizable words are not abbreviations, for example.
- The author made an assumption that Linear A symbols which have counterparts in Linear B should have the same phonetic values. This gives us an already known glyph that represented "NA". "Duplicate" glyphs are only found in the P-series, and are assumed to represent syllables which were distinguished by the Linear A language, but not by Greek - such as aspirated/unaspirated P. There is a glyph that stands for "NWA" in Linear B, but instances of it have been found in Linear A as well.
- There are countless words with no known etymology in Ancient Greek, assumed to originate from a substrate language or languages spoken in the area at the time Greeks migrated to their present-day homeland. The language of Linear A would be a likely candidate for such substrate. If Linear A were a Semitic language, then we should already be able to establish Semitic etymologies for those words as they were in Greek. Of course it could also be the case that these words came from an another language which did not adopt writing or its writing did not survive to our times.
Claiming that claude did all the work is patently ridiculous. Claude is a tool, like any other. The corpus of linear A is ~7500 characters across ~1500 inscriptions and claude, no matter how smart, doesn't just solve that on its own.
What a shame.
To be clear, this is an attempt at a decipherment. This is not proven, and we shouldn't consider Linear A to be "solved" until experts in the field have reviewed the work. In fact, it probably shouldn't be considered "proof" unless some more Linear A writings are uncovered and these are congruent with the method proposed. All that can be said for certain at this point is that this is an interesting conjecture.
But this is a story worth following. This could be the real deal. More research and validation should follow and we should have a better idea in the next few weeks or months whether Linear A has really been solved. At the very least, this is an interesting attempt, and optimistically, it could yield real insight into Minoan culture. Kudos.
Honestly curious how many years before it can be one shotted in a coding harness with Fable.next by someone who’s not a linguistics expert.
Develop, test, and rank hypotheses about the phonetic values, morphology, grammar, and possible language family of Linear A using the full available corpus. Do not assume any decipherment is correct. Treat all candidate readings as hypotheses to be scored…”
I know I'm simplifying a lot, but all this deciphering isn't it just some kind of pattern matching?
That's exactly the kind of thing I'd hope Claude would be used for in these kinds of projects - building tools, not black-box "solving" the problem.
𐇑 𐇘 𐇪 𐇐 | 𐇬 𐇳 𐇖 𐇗𐇽 | 𐇬 𐇗 𐇜 | 𐇬 𐇼 𐇖𐇽 | 𐇥 𐇬 𐇳 𐇖 𐇗𐇽 | 𐇪 𐇱 𐇦 𐇨 | 𐇖 𐇡 𐇲 | 𐇖 𐇼 𐇖𐇽 | 𐇖 𐇡 𐇲 | 𐇥 𐇬 𐇳 𐇖 𐇗𐇽 i-𐇘-wi-jeʳ | ʰau-ni-ti-noʳ au-no-pa au-ndi-tiʳ 𐇥-au-ni-ti-noʳ wa-pi-naᵐwa ti-ru-te ti-nd-tri ti-na-ru-he ʰau-ni-ti-noʳ i-301-wa-ja/e | ʰau-... jaᵘ-di-ki-to i-pi-na-ma si-ru-te ta-na-ra te-ti-u ta-na-te i-da 𐘚 ᴴI 𐘮 WA 𐘱 JA 𐘱 JA 𐘆 DI 𐘸 KI 𐘹 TU 𐘚 ᴴI 𐘢 PI 𐘅 NA 𐙁 MA ()
I believe the phonetic values for Phaistos here were based on similarity.
"Thag is a smarty-pants"