Biology:Decipherment
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Short description: Concept in philology
In philology, decipherment is the discovery of the meaning of texts written in ancient or obscure languages or scripts.[1] Decipherment in cryptography refers to decryption.[2]
Ancient languages
In a few cases, a multilingual artifact has been necessary to facilitate decipherment, the Rosetta Stone being the classic example. Statistical techniques provide another pathway to decipherment, as does the analysis of modern languages derived from ancient languages in which undeciphered texts are written. Archaeological and historical information is helpful in verifying hypothesized decipherments.
Decipherers
| Name of scholar | Script deciphered | Date |
|---|---|---|
| Magnus Celsius | Staveless Runes | 1674 |
| Jón Ólafsson of Grunnavík | Cipher runes | 1740s |
| Jean-Jacques Barthélemy | Palmyrene alphabet | 1754 |
| Jean-Jacques Barthélemy | Phoenician alphabet | 1758 |
| Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy | Pahlavi script | 1791 |
| Jean-François Champollion | Egyptian Hieroglyphs (Decipherment) | 1822 |
| Georg Friedrich Grotefend, Eugène Burnouf, and Henry Rawlinson | Old Persian Cuneiform (Decipherment) | 1823 |
| Thomas Young | Demotic script | |
| Manuel Gómez-Moreno | Northeastern Iberian script | |
| James Prinsep | Brahmi, Kharosthi | |
| Edward Hincks | Mesopotamian Cuneiform | |
| Bedřich Hrozný | Hittite Cuneiform | |
| Vilhelm Thomsen | Old Turkic | |
| George Smith and Samuel Birch, et al.[3] | Cypriot syllabary | |
| Hans Bauer and Édouard Paul Dhorme[4] | Ugaritic alphabet | |
| Wáng Yìróng, Liú È, Sūn Yíràng, et al. | Oracle Bone script | |
| Aleksei Ivanovich Ivanov, Nikolai Aleksandrovich Nevsky, et al. | Tangut script | |
| Michael Ventris, John Chadwick, and Alice Kober | Linear B | |
| Yuri Knorozov and Tatiana Proskouriakoff, et al. | Maya | |
| Louis Félicien de Saulcy | Libyco-Berber script (almost fully) | |
| Jan-Olof Tjäder | "Enlarged opening script" of Ravenna (variant of the Latin alphabet) | |
| Zaza Alexidze | Caucasian Albanian alphabet | |
| François Desset[5] | Linear Elamite |
See also
Deciphered scripts
- Cuneiform
- Egyptian hieroglyphs
- Kharoshthi
- Linear B
- Mayan
- Staveless Runes
- Cypriot Syllabary
Undeciphered scripts
- Rongorongo (Decipherment of rongorongo)
- Indus script
- Cretan hieroglyphs
- Byblos syllabary
- Linear A
- Linear Elamite
- Cypro-Minoan syllabary
- Espanca
- Numidian language[lower-alpha 1]
Undeciphered texts
- Phaistos Disc
- Rohonc Codex
- Voynich Manuscript
References
- ↑ Although the script, Libyco-Berber, has been almost fully deciphered, the language has not.
- ↑ Trask, R.L (2000). The Dictionary of Historical and Comparative Linguistics. Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, p. 82 ("The process of determining the relation between an extinct and unknown writing system and the language it represents. Strictly, decipherment is the elucidation of the script—that is, determining the values of the written characters")
- ↑ Vaudenay, Serge (2006). A Classical Introduction to Cryptography. Springer, p.3. ("Action to transform a ciphertext into a plaintext by an authorized party [emphasis added]")
- ↑ "Cypro-Syllabic". http://lila.sns.it/mnamon/index.php?page=Scrittura&id=4&lang=en.
- ↑ "Anatomy of a Decipherment", http://images.library.wisc.edu/WI/EFacs/transactions/WT1966/reference/wi.wt1966.adcorre.pdf"
- ↑ "Breaking the Code (Francois Desset, Padua) - YouTube". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGrDXbPaYyE&fbclid=IwAR0LMJlnDhLIe0FqzbXsUHxyLq1YYwGNndqb8qfDFPoUHRxIe0uJ8qp5G0s.
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