Establishing the West Ugric Language Family with Minoan, Hattic and Hungarian by a Decipherment of Linear A (WSEAS Transactions 14)

This paper develops a feature-based similarity measure to visually compare script symbols from different alphabets and syllabaries and then uses that similarity measure within a novel algorithm to develop a new phonetic grid for Linear A. The phonetic grid is then used to develop an English-Minoan-Uralic dictionary of basic words and grammatical suffixes and prefixes. The dictionary is then used in translating twenty-eight Linear A and one Eteocretan inscription. The proposed algorithm could likely be modified to decipher other unknown languages and could become a widely used tool in computational linguistics.
In spite of numerous attempts, Linear A (see Godart and Olivier for a collection of documents), the main Minoan script, remained undeciphered for over a century since its discovery in Knossos by Evans. In contrast, Linear B,
one of its descendant scripts, was solved in 1953 when Michael Ventris and John Chadwick showed it to be an early form of Greek.
The breakthrough in deciphering Linear B was in matching Linear B symbols with corresponding Cypriot syllabograms and their phonetic values.
The substitution of Cypriot phonetic values into Linear B yielded ancient city names [5]. Therefore, we also considered the similarities between Linear A and other alphabets besides Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary. In particular, in a previous study on alphabet evolution we identified the Old Hungarian alphabet to be distantly related to Linear A (although closer related to Cretan Hieroglyphs). The spatial and temporal gaps between the
Linear A and Old Hungarian scripts prompted a search for an intermediary alphabet, which we found in the Carian alphabet.