Alice Kober and the Decipherment of Linear B
In the years preceding Michael Ventris’s 1952 decipherment of Linear B, Alice Kober quietly laid the necessary structural foundation. Working from her home in Brooklyn, Kober cataloged the mysterious Cretan inscriptions on thousands of makeshift index cards cut from church programs. She noticed that certain word endings changed systematically depending on the context, a phenomenon indicating that Linear B was an inflected language. Kober constructed a grid mapping these grammatical relationships, demonstrating that different signs shared vowels or consonants without actually assigning phonetic values to the symbols. Her meticulous sorting did not yield a translation in her lifetime, and her early death in 1950 left the final breakthrough to others. Ventris, who later received global acclaim, utilized Kober's grid as the starting point for his own successful phonetic assignments. While Ventris's correspondence acknowledges Kober's groundwork, subsequent popular accounts of the decipherment frequently cast Kober as a mere compiler of data rather than the architect of the logical framework that made the solution possible.
Based on the passage, the relationship between Alice Kober’s grammatical grid and Michael Ventris’s subsequent decipherment of Linear B is best described by which of the following statements?
- Kober’s grid mapped out structural relationships among signs that Ventris later used to assign phonetic values.Answer
- BKober constructed her grid to verify the phonetic values that Ventris had already proposed in his early correspondence.
- CVentris’s decipherment proved that Kober’s grammatical grid was based on an incorrect assumption about Cretan inscriptions.
- DKober’s grid served as a competitor to Ventris’s phonetic assignments, sparking a debate that was only resolved after Kober’s death.