The reason linear A is so difficult is that the total remaining corpus of Linear A text is ~7500 characters, spread out over ~1500 inscriptions.

If you have a 4k screen, you can fit all remaining Linear A text on your screen at once, in 14pt high font.

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stratocumulus0 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

An in addition to that, a vast majority of documents are lists which consist of a "header" (1 to 3 words) and word-number pairs afterwards. An another common class are small clay seals with 1, 2 characters carved into them. It's likely that in both cases, we may be dealing with abbreviations.

Some of the lists end with "ku-ro" and a number that's the sum of all the previous numbers, oddly frequently off by one.

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humodz an hour ago | parent | next [-]

It would be amusing if archaeologists in the future also end up spending countless hours trying to decipher my shopping lists and poor math skills

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_kst_ an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

They hadn't yet decided whether to count from 0 or from 1.

	▲	cwmma an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Surprisingly this comes up more then you'd think, for instance in Ancient Rome, tomorrow is two days away so all the dates are off by one from what you'd think it was. They mainly count down and it goes, 5, 4, 3, day before, day.
	▲	kps 41 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		“Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration.” — Stan Kelly-Bootle (first person to obtain a postgraduate degree in computer science)

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dehrmann 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Very vaguely, it makes it like a one-time pad where it can be anything you want it to be. Not quite, but so little text leaves a lot of options open.

	▲	AaronAPU an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I wonder, is there a form of analysis which lets you quantify how ambiguous a set of symbols is? Maybe related to entropy? Obviously one symbol can mean literally anything, but you could also have very long strings of symbols with many different meanings.

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elbasti 39 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I would love to have this image available!

	▲	tclancy 35 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I’d send it to you but you probably wouldn’t understand it.

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WithinReason 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

As observed by archaeologist John Younger, the entire Linear A corpus takes up only 1.84 pages of letter paper when typeset in 12 point font and 1-inch margins.

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stringfood 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

when I first read the title thought he was talking about linear algebra and I was like damn it's not that hard