Where the bilingual inscription was discovered in Tajikistan.Credit: Bobomullo Bobomulloev
Posted on 07/15/2023 6:27:50 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
...A team of early career researchers at the University of Cologne has succeeded in decoding a script that has been puzzling scholars for more than 70 years: the so-called "unknown Kushan script." ...Svenja Bonmann, Jakob Halfmann and Natalie Korobzow examined photographs of inscriptions found in caves as well as characters on bowls and clay pots from various Central Asian countries in order to put the pieces of the puzzle together.
On 1 March 2023, they first announced their partial decipherment of the unknown Kushan script at an online conference of the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Tajikistan. Currently, about 60% of the characters can be read, and the group is working to decipher the remaining characters...
So far, several dozen mostly short inscriptions are known, most of them originating from the territory of the present-day states of Tajikistan, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan. There is also a longer trilingual that was found by French archaeologists in the 1960s at Dašt-i Nāwur in Afghanistan: on a boulder at 4,320 m altitude on Mount Qarabayu, approximately 100 km southwest of Kabul.
The writing system was has been known since the 1950s, but had never been successfully deciphered. In 2022, a short bilingual was found carved into a rock face in the Almosi Gorge in northwestern Tajikistan, approximately 30 km from the capital Dushanbe. In addition to the unknown Kushan script, it also contains a section in the already known Bactrian language.
This discovery led to renewed attempts by several researchers to decode the script—independently of one another. In the end, the linguists at the University of Cologne succeeded in partially deciphering the writing system in collaboration with the Tajik archaeologist Dr. Bobomullo Bobomulloev, who was instrumental in the discovery and documentation of the bilingual.
(Excerpt) Read more at phys.org ...
Where the bilingual inscription was discovered in Tajikistan.Credit: Bobomullo Bobomulloev
BTTT
The Tocharian/s keywords, sorted, duplicates out:
July 13th, 2023 Edition
There once was a lady of Iraq....who was known for her magnificent ...
(ironically, I don't see Tocharian on this)OpenCulture: The Tree of Languages Illustrated in a Big, Beautiful Infographic
Eat more Ovaltine.
That was fast!
I don’t see Latin on the tree..
Worth reading in its entirety for nerds like me that are interested in this stuff. Thanks for the post, SunkenCiv.
Yeah, it’s not as nice as I remember. The others that have been posted by Cronos in the past, along with others are found in this search:
https://search.brave.com/search?q=indoeuropean+language+tree&source=desktop
https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=indoeuropean%20language%20tree&tbs=imgo:1
This one shows Tocharian:
https://anthropologynet.wordpress.com/2008/02/05/the-indo-european-language-tree/
This one isn’t as fancy but is easier to follow:
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Indo-European-language-tree-16_fig1_338989490
Same goes here:
https://www.slideshare.net/eduncan/indoeuropean-language-tree
The word for “hundred” in various IE languages:
https://jakubmarian.com/evolution-of-hundred-in-indo-european-languages/
The word for “mother” in various IE languages:
https://twitter.com/incunabula/status/1568865356160315395/photo/1
My pleasure!
Very informative, thanks.
Clicked only to see how fast this line would appear.
I especially like that the original working name for it was "Unknown Kushan Script".
Thanks for that.. now i understand.
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