Soru

During the mid-twentieth century decipherment of Linear B, the Bronze Age Aegean script discovered at Knossos, classical scholar Alice Kober introduced an analytical technique known as Kober’s Grid. Prior to Kober’s work, decipherment efforts were hampered by the unproven assumption that Linear B represented an indigenous, non-Indo-European language unrelated to early Greek. Kober eschewed phonetic guesswork, focusing instead on internal structural relationships within the clay tablet inscriptions. By systematically tabulating recurring character sequences and observing structural alterations at the endings of words—a pattern she recognized as inflectional variation characteristic of an inflected language—Kober demonstrated that Linear B possessed grammatical suffixes without needing to assign phonetic values to individual signs.

Crucially, Kober developed a matrix of two-dimensional grids that mapped consonant-vowel relationships among syllabic signs. While she did not live to see the complete decipherment, her structural grid established that certain distinct signs shared identical consonants while differing in vowels, and vice versa. Michael Ventris subsequently built upon this structural foundation. By pairing Kober’s grammatical grid with geographic place names identified on the tablets, Ventris deduced the phonetic values of the syllabary, ultimately revealing that Linear B was an early archaic dialect of Greek. Although Ventris receives primary credit for the final decipherment in 1952, contemporary historiography emphasizes that Kober’s empirical methodology—specifically her isolation of inflectional paradigms independent of phonetic assumptions—was the indispensable precursor that made Ventris��s phonetic decipherment mathematically viable.

According to the passage, Alice Kober’s structural analysis of Linear B enabled her to accomplish which of the following prior to assigning phonetic values to the signs?