Even Rongorongo may belong to this first category, since it almost certainly writes a Polynesian language related to the Tahitian-influenced Polynesian language spoken today on Easter Island. The Zapotec script may be, too, if it writes a language related to the modern Zapotec languages of Mexico. The Maya glyphs were, until the 1950s, an example of the first category, since the Maya languages are still spoken in Central America. They fall into three basic categories: an unknown script writing a known language a known script writing an unknown language and an unknown script writing an unknown language. This leaves a number of significant undeciphered languages/scripts. Linear B tablet from Knossos in the Ashmolean Museum recording bull‘s head rhyta and golden Vapheio cups. In the case of the Maya glyphs, for example, most scholars agree that a high proportion, as much as 85 per cent, of the inscriptions can be meaningfully read, and yet there remain large numbers of individual glyphs that are contentious or obscure. Between these extremes lies a vast spectrum of opinion. At the other extreme, almost everyone agrees that the scripts of the Indus Valley civilisation and Easter Island (Rongorongo) are undeciphered – because no scholar can make sense of their inscriptions to the satisfaction of the majority of other specialists.
At one extreme, everyone agrees that the Egyptian hieroglyphs have been deciphered – because every trained Egyptologist would make the same sense of virtually every word of a given hieroglyphic inscription (though their individual translations would still differ, as do all independent translations of the same work from one language into another). In its more technical sense, as applied to ancient scripts, ‘deciphered’ means different things to different scholars. In ordinary conversation, to decipher someone’s ‘indecipherable’ handwriting means to make sense of the meaning it does not imply that one can read every single word. It is this quality, the power of seeing order in apparent confusion, that has marked the work of all great men.
Ventris was able to discover among the bewildering variety of the mysterious signs, patterns and regularities which betrayed the underlying structure.
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