Cathy Waldman wrote:

>
> "Peter T. Daniels" wrote:
>
> Sorry, no ... epigraphy and paleography are the study of
> inscriptions
> (things incised on hard objects like walls) and documents
> (things
> written with ink etc. on soft materials like paper,
> parchment, papyrus)
> respectively. Very few scripts remain undeciphered; you'd
> just have to
> be in the right place at the right time to come across a new
> one.
>
> I thought that they hadn't yet figured out Linear A yet. And that
> several scripts remain undeciphered b/c there isn't a big enough
> sample size of them. And that in spite of David Kelley's excellent
> work on the Maya code there is still more to be done. Did I get that
> wrong?

But your attempting to become "a decipherer" isn't going to increase the
corpus! Linear A is one of the handful of undeciphered scripts. If you
want to work on it, you will have to steep yourself in the languages and
cultures of the eastern Mediterranean in the late 3d and the 2d
millennia -- i.e., you need to try to master both Classical and Oriental
[in the old sense] philology.

On the other hand, if you want to work on Maya, you will need to master
modern and ancient Mayan languages as well as the archeology of the
region. I don't know why you single out David Kelley; he seems to have
given up the study of Maya inscriptions (to which he made respectable
contributions, though certainly not the most important) to promote
bizarre suggestions as to transoceanic contact.

There is no "Maya Code"; the Maya inscriptions are quite
straightforward. The decipherment was the work of four people,
principally: Yuri Knorosov, Tatiana Proskouriakoff, Heinrich Berlin, and
Floyd Lounsbury.

> The epigrapher is on the archeological expedition in order 
>   to interpret
>   and make copies of whatever inscriptions happen to turn up 
>   -- and the
>   rule seems to be that if you have an epigrapher, you don't 
>   find any
>   inscriptions but if you find some inscriptions you don't 
>   have an
>   epigrapher on hand to deal with them.
>
> Okay, so say I want to be an epigrapher/paleographer in spite of your
> Murphy's Law description of their work...  ;) What dept should I apply
> to to study for this goal? Keeping in mind that I have no language
> preference and actually am interested in all scripts.

It is flatly impossible for anyone to learn every language that might
ever have been discovered in ancient inscriptions. You will have to pick
an area to work in.

If a particular site attracts you, you will go to the university that
happens to be excavating there next season, and maybe you will be
allowed to go along (at your own expense, of course) as the lowest of
menial assistants!

> As an aside, I'm very much interested in comparative writing systems,
> across culture AND time. Perhaps this last is not the study of
> epigraphy. Then what is it and any suggestions on how I can study it?

There is, as yet, no academic field of the study of writing systems
(what I. J. Gelb called grammatology, what C. F. Hockett suggests
calling graphonomy). Gelb was professor of Assyriology; as for the other
authors of general texts, Geoffrey Sampson is now professor of cognitive
science; John DeFrancis is professor of Chinese; Florian Coulmas is
professor of sociolinguistics. I myself hold no academic position,
partly because grammatology is at home in no academic department.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...