Decipherment

Inphilology,deciphermentis the discovery of the meaning of texts written in ancient or obscure languages or scripts.^[1]

Ancient languages

In a few cases, a multilingual artifact has been necessary to facilitate decipherment, theRosetta Stonebeing the classic example. Statistical techniques provide another pathway to decipherment, as does the analysis of modern languages derived from ancient languages in which undeciphered texts are written. Archaeological and historical information is helpful in verifying hypothesized decipherments.

Decipherers

Name of scholar	Script deciphered	Date
Magnus Celsius	Staveless Runes	1674
Jón Ólafsson of Grunnavík	Cipher runes	1740s
Jean-Jacques Barthélemy	Palmyrene Alpha bet	1754
Jean-Jacques Barthélemy	Phoenician Alpha bet	1758
Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy	Pahlavi script	1791
Jean-François Champollion	Egyptian Hieroglyphs(Decipherment)	1822
Georg Friedrich Grotefend,Eugène Burnouf,andHenry Rawlinson	Old Persian Cuneiform(Decipherment)	1823
Thomas Young	Demotic script
Manuel Gómez-Moreno	Northeastern Iberian script
James Prinsep	Brahmi,Kharosthi
Edward Hincks	MesopotamianCuneiform
Bedřich Hrozný	Hittite Cuneiform
Vilhelm Thomsen	Old Turkic
George SmithandSamuel Birch,et al.^[2]	Cypriot syllabary
Hans BauerandÉdouard Paul Dhorme^[3]	Ugaritic Alpha bet
Wáng Yìróng,Liú È,Sūn Yíràng,et al.	Oracle Bone script
Aleksei Ivanovich Ivanov,Nikolai Aleksandrovich Nevsky,et al.	Tangut script
Michael Ventris,John Chadwick,andAlice Kober	Linear B
Yuri KnorozovandTatiana Proskouriakoff,et al.	Maya
Louis Félicien de Saulcy	Libyco-Berberscript (almost fully)
Jan-Olof Tjäder	"Enlarged opening script" ofRavenna(variant of theLatin Alpha bet)
Zaza Alexidze	Caucasian Albanian Alpha bet
François Desset^[4]	Linear Elamite

References

^Although the script,Libyco-Berber,has been almost fully deciphered, the language has not.

^Trask, R.L (2000).The Dictionary of Historical and Comparative Linguistics.Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, p. 82 ( "The process of determining the relation between an extinct and unknown writing system and the language it represents. Strictly, decipherment is the elucidation of thescript—that is, determining the values of the written characters ")
^"Cypro-Syllabic".
^"Anatomy of a Decipherment",http://images.library.wisc.edu/WI/EFacs/transactions/WT1966/reference/wi.wt1966.adcorre.pdf"
^"Breaking the Code (Francois Desset, Padua) - YouTube".youtube.Archivedfrom the original on 2021-12-11.Retrieved2021-01-04.

[5] Although the script,Libyco-Berber,has been almost fully deciphered, the language has not.

[1] Trask, R.L (2000).The Dictionary of Historical and Comparative Linguistics.Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, p. 82 ( "The process of determining the relation between an extinct and unknown writing system and the language it represents. Strictly, decipherment is the elucidation of thescript—that is, determining the values of the written characters ")

[2] "Cypro-Syllabic".

[3] "Anatomy of a Decipherment",http://images.library.wisc.edu/WI/EFacs/transactions/WT1966/reference/wi.wt1966.adcorre.pdf"

[4] "Breaking the Code (Francois Desset, Padua) - YouTube".youtube.Archivedfrom the original on 2021-12-11.Retrieved2021-01-04.

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[2]

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[4]

[a]

Decipherment

Ancient languages

Decipherers

See also

Deciphered scripts

Undeciphered scripts

Undeciphered texts

References