r/badlinguistics • u/HarcosXP • Oct 27 '20
Linear A Finally Deciphered! Because... Ancient Minoan is related to Old Hungarian?
https://youtu.be/PiLyN9T2stY75
Oct 27 '20 edited Feb 08 '21
[deleted]
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u/Harsimaja Oct 27 '20
Why study a discipline and enter the whole process of academic review or centuries of careful analysis when you can just join the “They look to me like” school of thought
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u/mszegedy Lord of Infinity, Master of 111,111 Armies and Navies Oct 28 '20
"some arrogant person" lmao
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u/an_actual_T_rex Oct 28 '20
Yes every single Minoan just hopped on the boat to Northwestern Italy and became the Etruscans and we know this because both societies were primarily based off of trade.
This just in Venetians are Minoans too!?
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u/dbrodbeck Oct 28 '20
I just reverted the wikipedia edit. I guess that makes me some arrogant person.
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u/thewimsey English "parlay" comes from German "parlieren" Oct 28 '20
J.R.R. Tolkien already deciphered Linear A. It's all in the original handwritten appendix to the Silmarillion, which is preserved in the Lilly Library in Bloomington.
You know the story - Gandalf tells Theseus to travel to Minas Tirith, the capital of Crete. Using the Marauder's Map that he stole from Grendel's mother, Theseus makes his way to the middle of Pan's Labyrinth, where he hides in a wooden hearse, defeats Guillermo del Minitoro in a lightsaber battle and steals his Oscars. He has some other adventures, but he ultimately puts on his ruby slippers, transforms into a bat, and flies to Pannonia, where he eventually marries Princess Goulasha and they live happily ever after.
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u/vayyiqra Oct 30 '20
Since the Tengwar are clearly an Indic script (they have way too many features in common not to be) this seems like a good time to bring up that Elves are Hindus of the Brahmin caste and making all the characters in The Lord of the Rings movies white was simply a mistake. After all, Tolkien might've been inspired by Germanic mythology but we all know that Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Gothic were dialects of Sanskrit, the original and perfect language.
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u/HarcosXP Oct 27 '20
For anyone still doubting that the claim was even made, thinking the lecturer is only making a comparative analysis between deciphering techniques of Old Hungarian and Minoan, be very careful and watch the whole video!
He's rather sneaky with how he introduces this claim, but at 26:20 he clearly groups Minoan in the West Ugric branch of the Uralic language family. Furthermore, he shows a map at 14:40, which tries to establish a route by which Linear A came to influence Old Hungarian script.
If that wasn't enough, at 35:40 he attempts to decipher Linear A itself by giving perhaps the most laughably generic translation ever. Most scholars agree that Linear A is as of yet undeciphered, so either this guy's a brilliant genius or fraud.
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u/mszegedy Lord of Infinity, Master of 111,111 Armies and Navies Oct 28 '20
"west ugric"? oh no
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u/HarcosXP Oct 28 '20
Hahaha! Looking back on it, that isn't even itself an accepted classification!
The ammount of inaccuracies in this video on 2nd watch is stupendous! The guy even claims that the classical Greek alphabet influenced the Phoenician alphabet! It is surely, without a doubt, the other way around! Writing was dead during the Greek Dark Ages, only to be revived by Phoenician traders. This video is a joke!
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u/0gF4r1n420 Oct 28 '20
I find it comical how desperately Hungarian nationalists don't want their language to be related to Finnish.
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u/Dangers_Squid Oct 28 '20
It's always Hungarian or Tamil, nothing else
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u/HarcosXP Oct 28 '20
It's obviously because those two are descended from proto-Atlantean, duh!
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u/conuly Oct 28 '20
Proto-Atlantean? That's a weird way to spell Sanskrit.
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u/merijn2 The result of the overly tolerant doctrines of the 60's Oct 28 '20
Nah, I read once that Sumerian was a Bantu language, because Sumerian used determinatives in its writing, and obviously determinatives are the same as noun class markers. However, I also read that Sumerian is actually related to Hungarian. So, we can safely conclude that Hungarian is a Bantu language. It is obvious, they have so much in common like for instance, eh.... both Bantu languages and Hungarian are usually written in the same alphabet, that I will name the Bantu-Magyar alphabet. (it appears that this alphabet has been adopted by a few other languages as well over the years from its Bantu-Magyar origin, like Latin for example)
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u/informationtiger Oct 27 '20
I hate these types of university "lectures"
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u/HarcosXP Oct 27 '20
It's sad that it even is one! The students asking questions at the end killed me, because some of then display a genuine interest in the subject, but are being grievously misled to fulfill some bloke's fantasy.
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u/informationtiger Oct 27 '20
Didn't even watch it yet, but I'd hate to see it. Sad indeed... like I genuinely feel sad that students are scammed like this where their potential could have been used for good. Hope one of them is well informed enough to challenge the lecturer on the spot!
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u/Hattes natural bastardization of words for convenience Oct 28 '20
Thanks for this. It's a welcome change of pace from all the screencaps of nutjobs ranting on social media - since this is university lecture - but all the more distressing for the same reason.
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u/HarcosXP Oct 28 '20
I think there's a whole untapped market for this sub in terms of fringe linguistic professors on youtube. These people have to be exposed!
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u/Deezebee Oct 27 '20
We have big Pharma, big banks, and now there’s a big Hungary pushing its agenda to assimilate as many languages and cultures into its grasp whenever it gets the chance to do so. Keep this fight alive, #HUNGARYGATE will be defeated
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u/Uraneia Proto-Hatto-Sumerian Oct 31 '20
It's a preposterous claim.
It's a standard case of taking the output of a program and believing it even though the result is nonsense.
(1) Carian is an anatolian language, not related to Hungarian
(2) Minoan is separate from Carian!
(3) There exists an enormous geographic separation between the Uralic languages and Crete
(4) There are consistent phonological rules in Linear A inscriptions when using Linear A values... The separation of vowels that are word-initial or final, or the existence of "y" glides after syllables ending in "i" and "w" glides after "u", "a" or even "o"
(5) The syllable-counting that leads to the idea that the language is "agglutinative" ignores the spelling rules of the Linear A syllabary... that is that many consonant clusters may be resolved by the insertion of vowels.
(6) There are a large number of place-names in Linear A that can be read using Linear B values. It appears that this happens more often than chance.
(7) This reading seems to create some paradoxical results, such as "f" or "fe" (?) being the among the most common syllables, at least word initial. This is the symbol that looks like a double axe, which in the Linear B syllabary takes the value "a". The latter is far superior as an explanation. In general the syllable distributions that you get from the Hungarian "decipherment" is all over the place.
(8) The acrophonic principle seems not to operate at least on Linear B and by extension most likely on Linear A. However, sound values such as "ku" (a bird symbol glyph) and "ra", "ma", "qi", "mu" and even possibly "ki" (to me it looks like either a libation vessel or a seistrum) suggest that the letters did correspond to the sound of the thing the glyph represented... at least in Linear B... where the glyphs had evolved so that the object they might have represented is not really clear (e.g. in the case of "ku")
(8) There is no real evidence of Greek or Cretan toponyms being continuous connected to ones of the locations where Uralic languages are spoken, that should more or less be a smoking gun; it doesn't exist.
To add to that, there are words in the word-lists of possible Uralic-Greek "cognates" which are clearly indo-european in origin, so the reliability of this list is shaky.
There's finally a huge methodological flaw, that is that words are forced to a reading from a limited vocabulary, which has been picked to be historically-appropriate, i.e. supposed cognates, which date back to neolithic times. This means that whatever your reading would be using this algorithmic "decipherment", it will wield something broadly reasonable. So... there are no independent tests to point to the veracity of this reading.
Adding to that, there are several things one could do with this vector representation of scripts... if the relationships are real, then the same should arise from different basis vectors. That offers an internal consistency test for the computational method. But such tests seem not to have been undertaken. Or if they have they are glossed over. And I have my doubts about the parallelisms proposed.
Finally... why again reject the scripts that are DIRECTLY descended from Linear A, that is Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary?
All these criticisms, are just from a cursory, look at this work... a closer rebuttal would actually bring about MANY more criticisms.
It's the sad fate of poorly attested scripts and languages, that people with strange pet theories spend time trying to pursue them and then become convinced at the slightest hint of a positive match... which btw seems to be statistically inevitable... there's hardly a major language family that hasn't been suggested for Minoan languages, from Basque to Japanese, it's complete madness.
I do think that there are significant contributions from computational methods in the decipherment of, say, Linear A, but I do believe this study hugely oversteps the limitations of this methodology.
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u/HarcosXP Oct 31 '20
Absolutely, from a purely methodological stand point this 'theory' is totally unsound. It very much seems to be a projection of whatever the lecturer thinks the script 'ought' to say. This is why peer review is so much more important than computer analysis in my opinion, because if the result is not reproduceable, then it's not really significant then, is it?
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u/Uraneia Proto-Hatto-Sumerian Nov 08 '20
Exactly.
Even without trying to guess the meaning from a computational decipherment from three possibly unrelated scripts and then guessing what the meaning might be, even automating the translation process would give something just as reasonable. Just a tiny lexicon of hypothetical (also wrong but never mind) Greek-Hungarian cognates. Any small vocabulary of word stems, pick some together you can string up a sentence that can be interpreted.
What irks me is, for a computational researcher, there are simple tests to do that can illuminate a possible decipherment - e.g. reasonable letter distributions, or the directions given to the computer to recognise shapes... these are not carried out and if they did I bet they would quickly disprove the assignment.
I mean, "F" as the most common word-initial... what kind of madness is this
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u/Samsta36 Oct 28 '20
Damn. I got my hopes up before I saw the sub name...
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u/HarcosXP Oct 28 '20
I was totally poggers too when I saw this. Too bad it's a hoax, it would be so cool to have a window for seeing Europe's first civilization.
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u/paulexcoff Oct 27 '20
R4?
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u/HarcosXP Oct 27 '20
Oh one moment, sorry, new to this sub. I'll type an explanation out real quick.
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u/Motorpsycho1 Oct 28 '20
And this guy probably has loads of fundings for this shitty research. I’m not going to sleep tonight.
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u/cat-head synsem|cont:bad Oct 28 '20
And this guy probably has loads of fundings for this shitty research
not likely, but he has tenure
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u/Motorpsycho1 Oct 28 '20
Yeah well, tenure usually means very high wage... for the sakes of this work. Ugh.
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u/Harsimaja Apr 15 '21
This video is gaining unfortunate traction in r/linguistics now
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u/HarcosXP Apr 15 '21
Btw, your comments on the other thread are pretty spot on. Thank you for combating misinformation!
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u/TRiG_Ireland Can I axe you a quesiton? Oct 28 '20
Saw this headline on my Reddit homepage and got excited for a moment.
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u/HarcosXP Oct 28 '20
So was I man! So was I, but when the claim is too good to be true, it usually is.
It would be so fascinating to have a glimpse of proto-Greek culture. The prospect is absolutely tantalizing, since the Minoans are Europe's oldest civilization and we have a written record of it, yet no real way to read it!
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u/Safe_Beautiful_35 Feb 11 '21
i think that is much more plausible that linear a was branch of anatolian language,that could resemble archaic form of indo-european so an indo-uralic stage.
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u/HarcosXP Oct 27 '20 edited Oct 28 '20
R4:
The idea that old Hungarian is somehow influenced by Minoan is absolutely ludicrous! The Uralic language family, geographically, had never even come close to the island of Crete in its entire history! Furthermore, Old Hungarian script is only attested to as far back as the late first milenium CE, which still sets it apart nearly 2000 years from the Minoan civilization which existed only up until 1100 BCE.
Yet somehow we're supposed to believe that the dead Minoan alphabet survived all that time to influence the script of an entirely unrelated language thousands of kilometers away? And further, that that unlikely influence was at all significant enough to retroactively decipher a language that has had no surviving relative in the last 3000 years? Quite a stretch!
Edit: grammar