Minoan is an IE language?/Sound Equivalence

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

In a message dated 3/23/01 11:27:27 PM Mountain Standard Time,
X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

> If the situation in English can be attributed in any way to imported words,

-- it's not the imported words, it's the changing sounds.

First, one-to-one correspondences between sound and symbol have collapsed as
the language changed and the orthography didn't.  English has undergone an
extremely brusque series of changes over the past 500 years. (Second, English
now has a much greater stock of synonyms than it used to.)

In Caxton's time, "through" didn't rhyme with "you", but it did rhyme with
"bough".

It's much more probable that Linear A has presented problems simply because
the language it was designed to write was an isolate -- not related to any
other we know.

That would, insofar as I understand the matter, make it inherently very
difficult or impossible to decypher, unless we were lucky enough to find a
bilingual document.

Rather as if we had a few documents in a script originally designed to write
Basque, which was then adapted (badly) to write Latin... and had no
Latin-Basque translations at all, and no mention of Basque in the Latin texts.