Soru

Passage:
When Sir Arthur Evans excavated the Bronze Age palace complex at Knossos on Crete in 1900, he discovered thousands of inscribed clay tablets exhibiting three distinct writing systems: Cretan Hieroglyphic, Linear A, and Linear B. Evans maintained until his death that Linear B recorded an indigenous Minoan language entirely unrelated to Greek, asserting that decipherment would remain impossible without a bilingual inscription comparable to the Rosetta Stone. Because Evans restricted scholarly access to the majority of the Knossos corpus during his lifetime, research on the script's internal mechanics was delayed for decades.

A foundational breakthrough occurred in the late 1940s through the structural analysis of American classicist Alice Kober. Rejecting premature phonetic speculation, Kober focused strictly on the internal relationships among the script's characters across available transcriptions. She isolated recurring sets of three-character variations—subsequently known as 'Kober’s triplets'—that shared identical root symbols but featured differing terminal signs depending on syntactic context. From this distribution, Kober deduced that Linear B represented an inflected language with case endings and noun declensions. She subsequently initiated a two-dimensional grid organizing phonetic signs by shared consonants and vowels, though she died in 1950 before assigning sound values to the coordinates.

Building on Kober’s structural grid, British architect Michael Ventris analyzed the geographical distribution of character clusters. Ventris observed that specific sign groups occurred frequently on Knossos tablets but were absent from Linear B tablets discovered at Pylos on the Greek mainland in 1939. He posited that these localized sign groups represented Cretan toponyms, such as Amnisos, Knossos, and Tylissos. By substituting provisional phonetic values derived from known ancient Cretan place names into the coordinate grid, Ventris revealed an underlying archaic dialect of Mycenaean Greek written in an open-syllabic script.

Following Ventris's announcement in 1952, Cambridge philologist John Chadwick collaborated with him to test the proposed phonetic values across the broader corpus. Chadwick applied historical Greek dialectology and comparative Indo-European grammar to the administrative tablets, demonstrating that their vocabulary and morphological structures consistently matched antecedent forms of Homeric Greek.

Based on the passage, match each researcher with their specific contribution to or assertion regarding the study of Linear B.