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To: SunkenCiv
Wow this is so cool. I just got through with a book on code breaking and how they used some ancient languages to code military traffic to keep it from the enemies. I just ordered Rosetta Stone Hebrew. I found it fascinating how the letters can represent numbers as well as letters and how the letters work together to form words as well as represent ideas and how just changing a letter can change the meaning of the word. It is just so different from English. I am also looking into Greek and Latin.

Thanks for the link.

18 posted on 10/01/2010 10:40:41 PM PDT by Captain Beyond (The Hammer of the gods! (Just a cool line from a Led Zep song))
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To: Captain Beyond
I highly recommend this one, which remains up-to-date, despite coming from the 1990s.
Lost Languages: The Enigma Of The Worlds Undeciphered Scripts Lost Languages:
The Enigma Of The World's
Undeciphered Scripts

by Andrew Robinson
Uncracked Ancient Codes
(Lost Languages reviewed)
by William C. West
Decipherment of the Mayan glyphs proceeded from logical reconstruction. Recognition of the signs for numbers permitted equating them with dates of the Mayan calendar. A sign list compiled as a sort of "alphabet" in the 16th century by Fray Diego de Landa, a Franciscan friar who served as bishop of Yucatán, was incorrect in some of its interpretations but offered a number of useful clues. In 1952, Yuri Knorozov was the first to suggest that the glyphs were phonetic symbols. Later in the decade, Tatiana Proskouriakoff hypothesized that a set of sculpted inscriptions from Guatemala depicted rulers of Piedras Negras, along with the ruler's birth date and date of accession, and it became obvious that Mayan monuments recorded history. Eventually it was recognized that Maya scribes mixed phonetics with logograms (whole-word semantic symbols such as "+" or "&") in unpredictable ways... Robinson's descriptions of such analysis, and his accounts of both successful and unsuccessful decoding attempts, are clear, provocative and stimulating.

28 posted on 10/02/2010 7:23:34 AM PDT by SunkenCiv (Democratic Underground... matters are worse, as their latest fund drive has come up short...)
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