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Re:Minoan language Linear A linked to Linear B in new research by luma on Sunday May 15, 2022 @11:56AM (#31388352)
Can we assume that any of those features would be part of this language?
Re:Minoan language Linear A linked to Linear B in new research by SemanticStrengh on Sunday May 15, 2022 @11:59AM (#31388382)
a language without thoses would be hella weird and primitive, like stereotypical robotic talking. To answer you question, I don't know, do linear B have them?
Re:Minoan language Linear A linked to Linear B in new research by jcranmer on Sunday May 15, 2022 @03:08PM (#31390094)
Weird, perhaps; primitive, no.

One of the historical issues with linguistics is that it analyzed every language as if it were Classical Latin or Classical Greek, and if that language had elements that didn't work out... well, that can't be proper then, can it? You still see some residuum of this in English prescriptivist poppycock, like the prohibition against ending sentences in prepositions.

As linguists actually started inventorying world languages, it became more and more clear that there is a very wide dichotomy of grammatical features that don't necessarily translate well to familiar languages. There are vanishingly few features that are actually universal to all languages--the noun may well be the only universal part of speech. That a language doesn't choose to mark a feature in a particular way doesn't make it more primitive than another language. English doesn't have a numerical classifier... is it more primitive than an Australian Aboriginal language? Or is it more primitive than Japanese for not having a way to mark register (~ politeness)?

(FWIW, Linear B is used to write Mycenaean Greek, and this has been known for ~70 years.)

Re:Minoan language Linear A linked to Linear B in new research by inglor_cz on Sunday May 15, 2022 @03:44PM (#31390393)
LOL, my native language (Czech) has no articles, but it is so flexive and permits so many subtle, meaning-carrying changes in sequence of words in a sentence that it is actually hard to carry over some of those subtleties into written English.

The only thing "robotic" about it is the fact that "robot" is a Czech word that was adopted worldwide.

Re:Minoan language Linear A linked to Linear B in new research by tgv on Sunday May 15, 2022 @12:38PM (#31388720)
Latin doesn't have articles (the/a), and frequently drops the verb. Aramaic encodes the article in a suffix. Arabic and Hebrew omit the vowels, leaving the interpretation depending on contextual clues. There are languages without auxiliary verbs. And there are tons of other constructions that English doesn't have.
Re:Minoan language Linear A linked to Linear B in new research by Keysh on Sunday May 15, 2022 @05:57PM (#31391546)
Written Arabic and Hebrew often omit vowels; the actual spoken languages do not, of course.
Re:Minoan language Linear A linked to Linear B in new research by bigbillheck on Sunday May 15, 2022 @07:10PM (#31392072)
The problem isn't in deciphering spoken Linear A.
Re:Minoan language Linear A linked to Linear B in new research by greenyoda on Sunday May 15, 2022 @01:14PM (#31389018)
There are languages used today that don't have a separate word for "the", such as Hebrew (which uses a prefix to denote "the"), or Chinese, which apparently doesn't use articles.[1]

Also, knowing what the most common words are wouldn't really help you much if you didn't know what the documents are about. For example, if they were trade records, they might contain a lot of text saying something like "X agrees to buy 20 pounds of olives from Y for $50 if delivered by next week". But if they were historical records of wars, other words may be more common.

[1] https://mylanguages.org/chinese_articles.php

Re:Minoan language Linear A linked to Linear B in new research by JadeNB on Sunday May 15, 2022 @01:54PM (#31389436)
> a language without thoses would be hella weird and primitive, like stereotypical robotic talking. To answer you question, I don't know, do linear B have them?

I think there are very few assumptions of the form "every reasonable language has […]" that hold up even for all current languages, let alone historical ones.

Re:Minoan language Linear A linked to Linear B in new research by jhgb on Sunday May 15, 2022 @03:27PM (#31390240)
Anyone claiming "surely every language needs X" had better look at Riau Indonesian (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riau#Language) first to check if that language has X. If it doesn't, then X is almost certainly not required for communication.
Re:Minoan language Linear A linked to Linear B in new research by jhgb on Sunday May 15, 2022 @02:19PM (#31389654)
Did you just call all Slavs "weird and primitive"?