Talk:Linear A

The use of Palestine instead of Israel

In the corpus section, the term Israel was replaced with Palestine, which appears to be a politically motivated change. When I attempted to revert this edit, my correction was undone. I request that the article be restored to its original wording, or that an explanation be provided as to why the alteration should remain and how it does not conflict with Wikipedia’s policies on politically motivated edits. 2A0D:6FC2:53A0:8A00:21C8:32F1:6FF1:CEEA (talk) 20:38, 17 August 2025 (UTC)

"Palestine" is normally used in the scholarship, and covers the geographic region rather than the modern political unit. UndercoverClassicist ^T·C 21:00, 17 August 2025 (UTC)

Certainty in Some Symbol Values?

I know there's controversy over the sounds of LinA. But, isn't there also "reasonable" certainty on some values? For example, doesn't onomatopoeia give us safe-enough sounds for /KI/, /MU/, and /RA/, therefore giving us a reasonable assumption for the K, M, and R consonants, and the vowels I, U, and A? Washi (talk) 17:17, 7 November 2025 (UTC)

My only contribution here would be to note that the article says "The underlying language of Linear A has not been determined, and it is not clear that the same language was used for its entire period of use." so would then assuming symbol values be inherently assuming that only a single underlying language was used? Ploversegg (talk) 17:25, 7 November 2025 (UTC)

That's a good point; if multiple languages used LinA, then the sounds might be all over the map. And at some point it becomes purely academic. ~2025-32604-05 (talk) 15:07, 11 November 2025 (UTC)

I think the text I added summarizes the main widely accepted arguments for particular sound values. I have seen arguments based on onomatopoeia/acrophony, but even the people who make them don't seem as sure of them as with the evidence from Cypriot and from toponyms. Regarding voicing, Steele's book has some discussion starting on page 14 and also in this article of hers which is unfortunately paywalled. I will expand the text with some of this stuff at some point if someone else doesn't beat me to it! Botterweg (talk) 15:59, 11 November 2025 (UTC)

"Kober's triplets" needs to be defined

The article uses this term, wikilinked to Alice Kober, but neither this article nor that article explains what these "triplets" are (my understanding is that they are sets of words with different roots but sharing the same suffix, where the morpheme boundary between root and suffix is internal to a syllable, allowing sets of syllabic symbols sharing a vowel value to be identified). I found this article that might serve as a source for a better explanation, but its paywalled and I can't access it easily. -- LWG ^{talk (VOPOV)} 16:00, 11 February 2026 (UTC)

 Done I reworded it for less confusion. -- LWG ^{talk (VOPOV)} 21:19, 24 July 2026 (UTC)

Fringe views

An editor has recently added the following statement about Linear A to the article: "Some scholars even considered it to be Japanese, Hattic, Hungarian or Hurrian languages". I am going to remove this, for the following reasons. (1) It is sourced only to a self-published source which shows no evidence of being reliable. (2) In several respects the cited source does not in fact say what the statement added to the article claims it says; for example, saying that someone "sees similarities between Linear A characters and characters in Japanese" falls a very long way short of saying that they think Linear A is Japanese, and saying that "Linear A with Hattic and Hungarian ... form a ... language family" is not at all the same as saying that Linear A is Hattic or Hungarian. (2) Some scholars? Well, three of the four "scholars" listed in the cited source have published their "research" on academia.edu, and the other one is widely regarded as "producing pseudoscience". At least two of them are not professional or recognised scholars of languages, and for a third one I cannot find any evidence that they are. JBW (talk) 20:49, 7 April 2026 (UTC)

Well, it turns out that while I was investigating the sources, writing the message above, and so on, Botterweg removed the dubious content, for the same reasons that I intended to, so I don't need to do it. JBW (talk) 20:53, 7 April 2026 (UTC)