Ciao. I'm Tom di Mino, and I'm on vacation in Bellingham, Washington right now. I'll get back to you later with a formal response.

I've also reached out to Dr. Ester Salgarella, so I'm familiar with attempts to apply computational analysis to the corpus, and where previous efforts erred.

Always glad to exchange! I'm a software engineer and a hobby linguist only myself, so don't expect wonders from me. But this is a fun topic to research for sure.

Tom has entered the chat!

Thanks for the context; how do you think this impacts plausibility? Presumably the fact that he made progress in a well studied passage is cause for skepticism? What's your take?

Well, the reasoning in the article is that if you take A-TA-I-*301-WA-JA, keep only W-J and assume *301 starts with N, then you get a claimed Semitic root N-W-Y related to dwelling, except I wonder whether that shouldn't be N-W-H instead https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D7%A0%D7%95%D7%95%D7%94 (Semitic isn't my area) so at best one fifth of one word matches two thirds of another therefore iT mUsT bE sEmItIc. A serious attempt at decipherment should at least try to explain the A-TA-I, or any of the other words in the sentence, for that matter.

I'm not saying that this is implausible, but this is one guess in a sea of many. We were shown a single word substitution with a claim that 300 others match, but no documentation of this person's research. We don't know this person's methodology beyond this single sentence. A naive approach would be to collect a thesaurus of Semitic roots and use automation such as an LLM to match those against instances of words. Sounds plausible in the beginning, but words do not exist independently.

To illustrate how things can go wrong, let's try to prove that English is a Semitic language. Suppose that the source material we have is this sentence:

"A baker brought a bushel of wheat to the mill."

Now let's match it to Semitic roots as found on this list: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Proto-Semitic_stems. Let's look for plausible substitutions now:

- "Baker" matches "bVkVr-", "first-born son". We have our anchor now. (V means any vowel).

- "Brought" looks plausibly close to "burāṯ-", "juniper" on our list. So far so good.

- "Bushel" is a good match with "b-š-l", "to be cooked"!

- "Wheat" does not have an exact match. It could be a loanword, for example.

- "Mill" looks like "m-r-r", "bitterness" if we assume lack of written L/R distinction. Again, juniper + cook + bitter is plausible, because juniper can be bitter.

- The meaning of particles will be inferred from the sentence structure.

Okay, let's take a look at our translation! We have "first-born son", "juniper", "cook", (wheat), "bitter". Pretty clear that (wheat) must be the name of a dish here. Therefore, the sentence can be translated as "A bitter juniper dish is being cooked for a first-born son". This even matches the context: the sentence was found in a granary, and it refers to food.

My point here is that with such a small sample size, we can extrapolate the data to mean absolutely anything. With no reference material, we cannot assess the correctness of any translation.

Thank you for the truly excellent reply.

There's actually at least one Greek word of Semitic derivation attested in Linear B https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kupirijo_in_museum.j... namely the island of Cyprus https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%9A%CF%8D%CF%80%CF%81%CE%B... , whence also "copper." If the pre-Greek population of Crete was Semitic, there should be a lot more such loans, especially toponyms.

Speaking of Greek, Linear B and Semitic, the related Cypriot syllabary was deciphered thanks to a bilingual inscription in Phoenician and Greek: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idalion_bilingual And just as in Crete, there is an undeciphered pre-Greek language written in the same script: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eteocypriot_language

The name of Cyprus being of semitic origin is probably easy to hand-wave away as the result of trade.

I'd like to offer some evidence that the people of Crete were of Greek origin and therefore Indo-European rather than semitic, unfortunately all the scholarship I can find on the subject is from Greek scholars and since it confirms that the Minoans are genetically related to modern Greeks, the more I hear of that evidence the less I am convinced by it. Because it's exactly consistent with confirmation bias. So I would not be surprised if the Minoans turned out to be one of the lost tribes of Israel.

Except of course we know those turned up in the America so they can't be the Minoans.

Yeah it's a joke. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Indian_theory

I'm not an expert on linguistics, but I will say that Crete at that time was polylingual. No one is saying that everyone on the island spoke this Minoan semitic language; only the semitic people on the island, and it was a diverse population.

But Greek did distinguish aspirated and unaspirated P, just not in Linear B.

"...syllables which were distinguished by the Linear A language, but not by Greek - such as aspirated/unaspirated P." Given that aspirated and unaspirated voiceless stops were almost certainly distinguished in spoken Greek of the time (as they were in proto-IndoEuropean and in later classical Greek), why would the Greeks not have carried over such a distinction if it existed in the Linear A language? It seems much more likely that the distinction did not exist in the Linear A language or script, and that's why it didn't show up in Linear B.

True, I did not think of the pi/phi distinction when writing this. There are other quirks exclusive to Linear B that don't occur in Linear A though, such as three different ways to write the phoneme "A" with no clear pattern on when is which one used.

With regard to the origin of the script, Linear A documents have been dated to earlier times than Linear B. And then, there is also an even earlier hieroglyphic script, but its relation to Linear A has not been established.