Typology before decipherment?

[Gordon Selway]

I'd been thinking about the example Lloyd gives, though it predates both
Ventris and Chadwick.  The work mentioned was done by Alice Kober (based in
New York I think, and in the 30s).  There was work done about classifying
the script as well, but I do not recall when or by whom, though it was
certainly refined by
Ventris and/or Chadwick.  If there is sufficient material, and the typology
can be established by means such as this, then you can probably propose
specific known candidates, refer to the (limited range of) inflections &c
which you can see changing, and try out the likely letter(-group)s to see
if they fit.  As usual, my textbooks are packed away, and I am writing from
memory, so am open to correction on detail.

Kober showed that there were words with similar beginnings but with two,
three or more sets of endings, iirc, and that there were some words with
rather more different endings.  These could well be from an inflected
language, though without an a priori guess which you could not argue for
them being nouns, adjectives or verbs.  Some forms were grouped as 'Kober's
triplets', though whether they were np nouns in each case form, adjectives
in cases where the genders show different desinences, or verbs I do not
recall.  Certainly, there were more case forms possible (as in Homer) than
in Attic, when it came to be accepted the tables were all Greek if they
were Linear B.

The number of cases though (not just Indus Valley, but Linear A, &c) where
a solution is claimed but not widely accepted, or apparently correct - I
suspect that the difficulty of solving gets in the way of the notion that
it is easy if you have the right key, so that probability you will
experience the ease of working with the right key is discounted as a test
of validity [I was introduced to the material when it was still disputed,
but the decipherment seemed obviously on the right lines when set out:
maybe being a schoolboy with a twelve year old's understanding of classical
Greek and having one of the classics masters explain the thing may have
influenced this.  It's also possible, though I am not sure, that I went
along to a kind of extramural lunch-time university lecture by Chadwick on
the subject].

So I guess our good and learned moderator may be thinking about the
question in prospect, not in hindsight, when he wrote as below

At 1:01 am 14/9/99, ECOLING at aol.com wrote:

[ moderator snip ]

>There are indeed situations in which typology is used before successful
>decipherment.  I suspect Chadwick used it for Linear B.
>But a case I am more recently aware of is Indus Valley,
>which is not generally regarded as deciphered
>(no disrespect intended towards anyone).

Gordon Selway
<gordonselway at gn.apc.org>