Minoan is an IE language?

Glenn McDavid gmcdavid at winternet.com
Thu Mar 8 15:46:14 UTC 2001


On Sat, 3 Mar 2001, David Sanchez wrote:

>> Could some of the Linear A inscriptions be different languages?

> A mathematical simple proof can answe the question.
> If one wish to know if two text are written in teh same language
> only it is necessary count the number of symbols in each text and
> make a simple statistical chi-2 test to obtain the answer!!!
> ( All, all text in a concrete languages present a very similar phonemic
> ocurrences. The same is true for non phonemic inscriptions).

This assumes you can separate the texts into two or more groups before
performing the test.  That might tell you something if you were comparing
collections of tables from two different locations.  Even there you
would have to be sure they dated from about the same time (the script
or language may have changed).  You would need to allow for variations
between scribes, and between local concerns which might lead to variations
in the vocabulary actually represented in the archives.

A far more serious problem would be if you had a situation like the
Hittite archives at Hattusas.  In that case there were several different
languages all together, all written in Akkadian cuneiform.  That problem
could be dealt with because the cuneiform script had already been
deciphered.  We do not have that advantage with Linear A.

Glenn McDavid
mailto:gmcdavid at winternet.com
mailto:Glenn.McDavid at alumni.carleton.edu
http://www.winternet.com/~gmcdavid



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