Passage:
In the early twentieth century, British archaeologist Arthur Evans unearthed thousands of inscribed clay tablets at the palace complex of Knossos on Crete, documenting an administrative script he designated Linear B. Because no bilingual inscriptions existed to provide a translation key—such as the Rosetta Stone had provided for Egyptian hieroglyphics—scholars initially struggled to discern even the basic linguistic family to which the script belonged. In the 1940s, classical scholar Alice Kober initiated a rigorously empirical, structural analysis of the Knossos corpus. Operating under severe wartime paper shortages, Kober manually compiled and cross-referenced over 180,000 index cards cut from marginal paper scraps, cataloging character frequencies, recurring sequences, and positional variations.
Kober's breakthrough began with the identification of specific three-word groupings, subsequently known in philological literature as 'Kober's Triplets.' Within these groupings, the initial phonetic characters remained constant across all three variations, whereas the terminal characters shifted in predictable patterns. Rejecting prevailing assumptions that Linear B represented a purely ideographic or pictographic writing system, Kober demonstrated that these terminal shifts reflected inflectional morphology—specifically, the grammatical declension of nouns across different grammatical cases.
Crucially, Kober deduced that Linear B functioned primarily as an open-syllabic script, in which each standard phonogram represented a consonant-vowel pair. This structural insight enabled her to discern two intersecting phonetic constraints: inflected forms of the same root word shared a common consonant but featured differing vowels in their terminal syllables, whereas distinct words in the same grammatical case shared identical inflectional vowels across differing consonantal stems. Without possessing a bilingual key or assigning arbitrary phonetic values to individual symbols, Kober mapped these abstract relationships into a tentative two-dimensional phonetic grid, in which characters sharing a consonant were aligned along one axis and those sharing a vowel along the other.
Furthermore, by correlating inflectional variations with ideographic adjuncts in livestock inventories, Kober established that the language possessed at least two distinct grammatical genders. Although Kober died in 1950 before completing the phonetic assignments, her abstract relational grid provided the foundational mathematical framework that allowed architect Michael Ventris to substitute phonetic values in 1952, definitively demonstrating that Linear B recorded an archaic Mycenaean dialect of Greek.
Statement:
According to the passage, Alice Kober constructed a tentative two-dimensional phonetic grid by mapping abstract algebraic relationships between syllabic characters before assigning specific phonetic values to those symbols.
Answer: Answer