Tuesday, July 17, 2007

How I Waste My Time

There are, of course, many ways, but one of them is online quizzes, which I find quite amusing. Here's one that's been going around the 'biblioblogs' (as they call themselves):

http://www.okcupid.com/tests/13609056050722629996/Which-Ancient-Language-Are-You

I tested as Linear A, the more mysterious of the two systems of writing which preceded the Greek alphabet in the Bronze Age Aegean . Linear A's younger brother, Linear B, which seems to have been current in mainland Greece and parts of the Aegean such as Crete in the 13th century BC, has been deciphered, but Linear A, which appears to have been in use on Crete from roughly 1800-1450 BC, remains unknown. Linear B was used to write a very ancient dialect of Greek using a mix of ideograms (idea-pictures) or logograms (word-pictures), which, according to the Oxford Classical Dictionary ("pre-alphabetic scripts (Greece)") were "in origin pictorial, but often [developed] into unrecognizable patterns," and syllabic symbols. From what we can tell, Linear A seems to have operated in a similar fashion, but, as we do not know that language that matches the script, it is impossible to do more that conjecture.

1 comment:

beaujac said...

Akkadian...yay? I really don't know what to say to that result.