Lost and Found

The last chapter looks at what happens when a script stops being read, how some were recovered, why others still resist, and what is happening to small scripts today. It ends with a recap of the whole course.

What Decipherment Needs

From Wikipedia's Decipherment article (whole answer as returned).

• Multilingual inscriptions. The Rosetta Stone enabled the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs. But the article notes that "multilingual text may be insufficient for a decipherment", since translation is not a reversible process.
• Known language and personal names. Leibniz proposed in 1714 that parallel content in bilingual inscriptions could be matched by correlating where personal names occur.
• Statistics and patterns. Analysts use symbol frequencies, positions within words, and recurring numeric formats, such as a small number at the end of a text possibly marking a date.
• Community effort. Decipherments "emerge from the incremental progress brought about by a broader community of researchers."

The classic cases

The article says Maurice Pope called the most famous three the decipherment of hieroglyphs, cuneiform and Linear B. Note the 1823 date here is the article's for Old Persian; Chapter 2 gave Wikipedia's Cuneiform article's dates for the wider cuneiform work (Grotefend from 1802, deciphered by 1857). The two articles count different stages, so I give both without merging them.

The Rosetta Stone

From Wikipedia's Rosetta Stone article (first 100,000 of 198,566 characters read).

• The stone. A granodiorite stele carrying three versions of a decree issued by a council of priests at Memphis for King Ptolemy V Epiphanes in 196 BC: hieroglyphs at the top, Demotic in the middle, Ancient Greek at the bottom.
• Found. In July 1799 by French soldiers near Rashid (Rosetta) in the Nile Delta, while strengthening Fort Julien during Napoleon's invasion of Egypt. After the French surrendered in 1801 it passed to the British; it has been displayed at the British Museum since 1802.
• Start with Greek. Because scholars could already read Greek, the Greek text was the starting point, and the first translations were published in 1803.
• Young. From 1814 to 1819 Thomas Young identified phonetic signs spelling the Greek name Ptolemaios and noted similarities between the hieroglyphic and Demotic texts, showing that Demotic was partly phonetic.
• Champollion. Built a phonetic hieroglyphic alphabet and announced it in a September 1822 lecture to the Académie. This fits Chapter 2's point that hieroglyphs mix sound signs with logograms and determinatives.

Still Unread

From Wikipedia's Undeciphered writing systems article (first 100,000 of 124,335 characters read). It defines such a system as one for which "no decipherment has achieved broad acceptance in the specialist literature".

• Why they resist. The article gives general causes: no bilingual texts or other external anchors such as securely identified names or dates; uncertain or unknown underlying languages; small corpora; loss of archaeological context; and, for some, uncertainty whether the signs are writing at all.
• The hardest case. The Decipherment article, citing Gelb and Whiting, says that when the writing is known but the language is not, decipherment is "extremely difficult to achieve on the basis of internal information only".
• Count. "At least a dozen languages remain undeciphered" (Decipherment article).

A Toy Decipherment (Mine)

A real decipherment is slow community work, but the statistics mentioned above can be seen in a toy. I made up ten symbols for ten English letters and "wrote" a sentence; the code finds the most common symbol and the most common whole word. I ran it and copied the output. This is an illustration of my own, not a real decipherment.

The most common whole word is the three-symbol group □▷○ (3 times), which a reader who knows English would guess is "the"; the next, △◇✦, is "and". That guess uses a known language, which a decipherer of an unknown language does not have, and it works on such a short sentence only because the sentence is built to repeat words. It shows why Type II cases in the article (known writing, unknown language) are so hard.

Scripts in Danger

Evidence here is thinner. Wikipedia had no page for the Endangered Alphabets Project at the addresses I tried (both returned errors), so this section rests on the project's own website, which is one source and is not neutral:

• The Endangered Alphabets Project publishes the Atlas of Endangered Alphabets, covering "Indigenous and minority writing systems, and the people who are trying to save them".
• It states that "85% of the world's writing systems are on the verge of vanishing". I could not check this figure against another source, so treat it as the project's claim. The site says that when a culture loses its traditional script, centuries of written material are lost too. Its page names no specific scripts, and it does not say who runs it.

Scripts also change by choice or policy, as earlier chapters showed: Vietnamese and Korean largely switched from Chinese characters to alphabets (Chapter 3), Kazakhstan moved from Cyrillic to Latin (Chapter 6), and Modern Greek simplified its accents (Chapter 9). Against that, Cherokee and Canadian syllabics (Chapters 4 and 8) show a small community adopting a script quickly when it fits.

Course Complete: The Whole Map

• The threads. Almost every system mixes meaning and sound (Chapters 1 to 3); the alphabet's family line runs from Proto-Sinaitic through Phoenician to Greek, Latin and Cyrillic (Chapters 5 and 6); a script's type depends on what fits its language (Chapter 4).
• The cautions. Type names describe tendencies; the featural class is disputed; dates and counts are the sources' and mostly from one encyclopedia.
• Where next. For related courses on the site, see Introduction to Linguistics and Historical Linguistics and Language Families on how languages relate, and Phonetics and the IPA on the sounds scripts record. The site's Hiragana, Katakana and Korean Alphabet 1 courses and kanji pages teach individual scripts in depth.

Try It Yourself