Linear B is Minoan, and knowing Greek helps in understanding what things decipher to, but it predates the Greek alphabet by several centuries so even if you knew Homer personally you would have had trouble reading it.

Well, I know the writing system is different, and knowing the greek alphabet is no help at all, but that in itself is of no significance. What is of significance is that the syllabic writing system forces the words into somewhat peculiar forms (exactly as in Japanese transliterations of English words). Furthermore the language is several centuries older than Homer, so you have to deal with assorted archaisms. Then again, if you know even a little of ancient greek linguistics, it gets easier. My greek is all high school level and yet I can figure out some of the Minoan stuff.

ObCrypto: Unlike Egyptian hieroglyphics, we have yet to find a Rosetta Stone equivalent for Linear B (or Linear A, it's predecessor, although I seem to remember Linear A being more akin to ideograms) Most of what is known about Linear B was inferred using a sort of linguistic cryptanalysis, in fact there was a paper in one of the Crypto proceedings from the mid-80s which described some of the methods employed.

There's a book on the subject: Chadwick, "The decypherment of Linear B". Neat. The particularly fascinating part about it is that no Rosetta stone was needed -- and indeed if one were found now it would merely serve to confirm the decypherment, not really to add anything to it. Linear A looks a whole lot like Linear B but as far as I know has not yet been decyphered and is believed to be a completely different language (I think the guess is some Semitic language but absent a decypherment that remains speculation). I don't think it is any more ideographic. There is a third writing system from the same area that has a hieroglyphic look to it (pictures) and is also undecyphered as far as I know. I think Chadwick has details, if not look in the recently published "The world's writing systems" by Daniels & Bright, Oxford U. Press, 1995, ISBN 0-19-507993-0. Great book!

ObMoreDeadLanguages: Does anyone know if there are Unicode character sets for Sanskrit or hieroglyphics? How exactly does one get a proposed character set approved/ratified if not?

Well, Sanskrit is usually written with Devanagiri, same as Hindi, so that's all covered. If you want to write it with Siddham characters, there are proposals for that but I don't think they have gone all that far. I have also seen discussions about hieroglyphics, again not beyond the proposal stage as far as I can recall. Talk to Rick McGowan (Rick_McGowan @ NeXT.Com), he's the driving force behind efforts to put all the obscure, obsolete, and archaic scripts into Unicode. I know he has a proposal for Linear B, complete with encodings of each character... paul !----------------------------------------------------------------------- ! Paul Koning, NI1D, C-24183 ! 3Com Corporation, 1-3A, 118 Turnpike Road, Southborough MA 01772 USA ! phone: +1 508 229 1695, fax: +1 508 490 5873 ! email: paul_koning@isd.3com.com or paul_koning@3mail.3com.com ! Pgp: 27 81 A9 73 A6 0B B3 BE 18 A3 BF DD 1A 59 51 75 !----------------------------------------------------------------------- ! "Be wary of strong drink. It can make you shoot at tax collectors ! -- and miss!" ! -- Robert A. Heinlein, "The Notebooks of Lazarus Long" ! in "Time Enough for Love"