Word: linearities
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...Often it is difficult to determine which fit even these broad categories, as Rosenborg's work, neither non-objective nor allegorical, alludes mystically to nature as a vehicle alone. Brilliant bouquets of color, often straight from the tube, alternate with misty formations of warm, mellow light. Seldom is any linear element whatsoever introduced. Rosenborg's variations on a theme of color harmonies are as much the point as his eulogy of nature...
Last week Cyrus Gordon, professor of Near Eastern languages at Brandeis University, offered a solution to the mystery. Linear A, says he, does indeed use Minoan signs, but these parallel Akkadian (Assyro-Babylonian) syllables. Just as Ventris' discovery revealed that the Achaeans of the Greek mainland were not the illiterates that a reading of Homer suggests, but might well have been the civilized conquerors of Crete, so Gordon's thesis sheds a whole new light on the possible foundations of Greek civilization itself...
Just a Hunch. Since the Near East used cuneiform and the Greeks and Minoans a linear script, most scholars automatically assumed that there could be no connection between the two ways of writing. But Scholar Gordon, a Ph.D. in Semitic languages from the University of Pennsylvania, had a hunch there was. "When I started this research," he admits, "I was merely setting out to see whether my notion was correct. At first I was frustrated at every turn because I thought that Phoenician-or West Semitic-was the language root. But Phoenician only seemed to fit the puzzle in certain...
...Like the Linear B tablets, those in Linear A were obviously the ledgers of bookkeepers. Both used the same kind of numerals (e.g., a vertical line for 1, a horizontal line for 10, a circle for 100), and these would have to be combined with signs meaning "cumulative total," "subtotal," or "amount owed." Furthermore, certain signs in both scripts were similar. In the Linear A word ĵŦ∋+, for instance, Gordon knew (from Linear B) that the sign ‡ could be pronounced to, the sign '4, lo or ro. That still left two unknowns, which Gordon called...
...Many Men. Last month Gordon accidentally fell upon the key he needed. On one of the Linear A tablets he came across the entry gaba, followed by the sign for MAN and the numerals 62. This was a striking equivalent to the Linear B formula to-so MAN 17, meaning so many men: 17. But gaba was also similar to the Akkadian word gabba, meaning all. "From that moment on," says Gordon, "I approached Linear A with Akkadian in mind...