Passage:
When Sir Arthur Evans excavated the Bronze Age palace complex at Knossos in 1900, he unearthed thousands of clay tablets inscribed with an unknown script he designated Linear B. Convinced that the civilization of Minoan Crete was culturally distinct from mainland Greece, Evans classified the underlying language as an indigenous, non-Hellenic tongue. For nearly four decades, scholarly decipherment efforts foundered because investigators relied on speculative comparisons between individual Linear B glyphs and external scripts such as Etruscan, Basque, or Cypriot syllabaries, attempting to assign phonetic values to isolated characters without understanding their systemic context.
In the late 1930s, classical scholar Alice Kober initiated a methodological shift by rejecting premature phonetic speculation in favor of rigorous internal structural analysis. Operating on the premise that an unknown script could be decoded only by mapping its internal relationships, Kober meticulously cataloged sign frequencies, contextual positions, and recurring sign sequences across the corpus. Her critical breakthrough came through the identification of what she termed "triplets"—groups of words that shared identical initial root signs but concluded with systematically alternating terminal signs. By demonstrating that these terminal variations corresponded to predictable syntactic shifts within tablet ledgers, Kober proved that Linear B encoded a synthetic, inflected language possessing distinct grammatical cases and genders.
Kober subsequently organized these relationships into a two-dimensional grid representing syllables defined by intersecting, unknown consonants and vowels. Although her death in 1950 prevented her from completing the decipherment, her structural grid established the indispensable morphological framework that enabled Michael Ventris in 1952 to substitute hypothetical phonetic values and demonstrate that Linear B was an archaic form of Greek.
Statement:
According to the passage, Alice Kober's analysis of "triplets" demonstrated that Linear B was an inflected language with grammatical cases before any specific phonetic values were assigned to the script's individual characters.
Cevap: Cevap