At 1:35:10 PM on Thursday, November 27, 2003, Piotr
Gasiorowski wrote:
> 27-11-03 17:00, Dr Dan Waniek, MD wrote:
>> There is an interesting theory in France about
>> proto-ionians (PION). I kindly submit my proposal for a
>> discussion of older etyma here, starting from some
>> interesting points made by Jean Faucouneau (concerning
>> pre-mycenaean Greek.) Despite his pathological self-
>> effacing habits, Jean, inter alia, helped decypher the
>> famous Pahistos disk.
> This of course starts the kook alarm. Who is Jean
> Faucouneau, and why should we believe he, or anyone, has
> successfully deciphered the Phaistos Disk inscription?
(I believe that it's actually 'Faucounau'.) His
'decipherment' has been vehemently championed on sci.lang by
someone posting as 'grapheus'. A search of Google's Usenet
archives will doubtless turn up more a great superfluity of
postings by grapheus, including some in which he mentions a
book by Faucounau and a web page or two. A Google search on
'Faucounau Phaistos' will turn up bibliographic references.
> I've seen many a claimed "decipherment", but not a single
> plausible one.
Nor is this one. It appears to have been carried out by
unspecified 'statistical methods' that are not actually
detailed in his book. They are buttressed (according to
grapheus) by some 30 external 'proofs', most of which 'have
nothing to do with the Phaistos Disk'. There used to be a
brief summary by Faucounau himself on the web, but it seems
to have disappeared. Thanks to the Way-Back Machine at
<web.archive.org>, however, it can still be found by the
curious at
<
http://web.archive.org/web/20030212084506/http://users.hol.gr/~ianlos/v002.htm>.
Brian