Marco.Cimarosti@... wrote:

> Did anyone read these two books and wish to comment on them?
>
> o S.R. Fischer, *Glyphbreaker*

> o J. Faucounau, *Le déchifferement du disque de Phaistos. Preuves et
> conséquences*

> I confess that I haven't read them myself. I tried with Glyphbreaker, but
> when I discovered that *two* decipherments were being described in the same
> book, I had an attack of hysterical skepticism, and I haven't been able to
> recover reading so far. The Déchiffrement is on my bookshelf, and on my
> to-do list, but I haven't gone past the introduction (I have apreciated,
> however, that Faucounnau does not tell me about the troubles and pains of
> his life).
>
> What blocks me reading is perhaps that I don't have the technical knowledge
> to really make up my opinion, so I feel as if I were reading a crime novel
> whose last few pages (where you discover whodunit) are missing...
>
> Moreover, does anyone have comments about the many other "decipherments"
> listed in, e.g:
>
> o http://users.otenet.gr/~svoronan/phaistos.htm
> o http://www.math.leidenuniv.nl/~lipi/archaeology/haistoslinks.html

Emmett Bennett said during the preparation of *The World's Writing
Systems* that if we added a picture of the Phaistos Disk, he'd withdraw
his article. (I had no intention of putting one in anyway.) His attitude
is that *every* decipherment of the Phaistos Disk (and he apparently
receives dozens every year -- so does the *Journal of Near Eastern
Studies) is correct -- because there is _absolutely no way_ of verifying
any interpretation. So, until further data turn up, you might as well
make the decipherers happy (and go away). A review article by him was in
*Lingua* in I think late 1998.

As for S. R. Fischer, his arrogance is unbearable. I haven't seen either
the Phaistos or the Rongorongo book, but the small amount of detail
given in *Glyphbreaker* makes it clear that he's no more likely to be
right about those two scripts(?) than anyone else has been. Martha
Macri's review of the Rongorongo book, which was in a recent issue of
*Written Language and Literacy* (I hope everyone getting this list has
subscribed to that journal!), doesn't even mention that it includes a
decipherment proposal (perhaps the ultimate damnation with faint
praise), but she does commend him for gathering and studying and
presenting the corpus carefully.

His latest book, *History of Language*, is unreadable. I had it from the
library (not worth US$30, certainly!) for almost three months, to no
avail.

Faucoun(n)au sounds cut from the same cloth.

For tips on evaluating decipherments, you could try Maurice Pope,
*Archaeological Decipherment* (1975; the 2000 "second edition," of which
my review will be in WLL, hardly deserves the name). Be warned that it's
not easy reading, and it's safe to skip the first chapter on
pre-Champollion approaches to Egyptian hieroglyphs, and the brief
treatment of the decipherment of Mesopotamian cuneiform is poor and was
not revised in the second edition even though the appropriate materials
have been added to the bibliography -- though the fact that two of the
titles are entered wrong there suggests that they weren't actually read.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...