Hello, I am having a small argument with my sister about the Phaistos Disc. I say that it is written in Lenear B, while she says that we don't know the language uet and if we did, we would know its meaning too. I ve found online that they read it with the toning of Lenear B. But nothing about its language. Could you please help us? Thanks in advantage.
Ok, so before we get to the disc itself, I think it's worthwhile to take a step back and talk a little bit about scripts and languages. Nothing can be written in a language, per se.
The script a language is written in may describe to literate speakers of the language the sound (phonetic) and the meaning of the words written on the page. Some scripts do this with an alphabet, like English, which uses a modified version of the Latin alphabet. That alphabet is a modified version of the Classical Greek alphabet via the Etruscans, which itself is an evolution from the Phoenician alphabet, whose roots go back even further, to a Sinaitic proto alphabet.
All of these alphabets describe the sounds that a language makes, which readers of the script, assuming they are both literate and know the language in question, can then understand to be words that have meanings in the language.
Other scripts, like Chinese characters, are logographic, which means that they describe whole words, as opposed to just the constituent sounds the words are made up of. Some of the earliest writing systems are logographic, like cuneiform scripts, which were used to write Sumerian, Akkadian, and many other disparate languages. Some languages using this script style created new scripts that used some similar symbols, but were themselves alphabets or syllabaries.
All this is to say that nothing can be written in the language Linear B, nor Linear A, because they aren't languages, they are scripts.
The second, and equally important introduction here is one about how we go about deciphering scripts, and what types of data we need to be able to decipher a script.
First of all, when we decipher a script, we have two goals in mind.
Let's take an example. One of most illustrative of the interplay between the two goals/requirements in deciphering scripts is Etruscan. The Etruscan script is a modified Classical Greek script. We can read the letters, and despite the issue of the decipherment of Carian, in which Greek letters did not have the sounds of Greek letters, working backwards from the Latin suggests that Etruscan used those sounds generally.
So we know how it sounds. But unless we know the language those sounds are in, our ability to know the language is fairly limited, or at least glacially slow.
There are two main ways that we get at a script with an unknown language behind it, both of which are important: (1) bilingual texts, and (2) knowing what group the language is in and knowing languages in the same language group.
With Etruscan, there is really only one solid bilingual text, the Pyrgi tablets, and it provides a relatively narrow view of the language. As for the avenue through related languages, the issue for Etruscan is that it appears to be unrelated to languages that we have available like Latin, Greek, and other Mediterranean examples. There are a couple of similar languages, like Rhaetian, which we know just as little about, so provide no help.
At the end of the day, this means that work on the script is very slow, and often nearly impossible. While we have some understanding of grammar and vocabulary, we have nowhere near enough to get us to a fully translated language, and likely won't until we find more and longer texts, some of which are bilingual.
All this is to say that we need to have an idea of what kind of language a text represents, and how that language might work, for the decipherment to be worth anything.
As a small side note, with new scripts as part of decipherment we have to deal with the issue of whether or not the script is pictograms that do not have a phonetic components, or if they actually do have some phonetic meaning.