At 07:16 -0500 2001-11-10, Peter T. Daniels wrote:

>As I said in WWS, "No claim seems to have been put forward that any
>recurring sequences of signs have been identified, and the first step in
>any lingustic analysis is the identification of strings that are the
>same or partly the same." (p. 22)

Perhaps the Vinca culture didn't develop true writing, but it seems
from some votive tablets from Tartaria that there were certainly
strings of characters used for some purpose. There are archaeological
grounds for noticing that Gimbutas' "Old European" culture was very
widespread before the arrival of the Indo-Europeans, and there are
certainly some interesting similarities between Vinca glyphs and
Aegean ones. I suspect that, failing a Rosetta Stone for Linear A, it
will ever be possible to determine much about the Vinca materials.

>Hartmann's book is crammed with errors. (Unfortunately Dietz Otto Edzard
>mentioned this to me about two days after my special-ordered copy
>arrived and was paid for, and I never had the heart to read it. The
>illustrations are mostly copied from Jensen.)

I don't know if a "Hartmann" wrote a book called Die
Universalgeschichte der Schrift. I know that Harald Haarmann did, and
his discussion of Vinca is pp. 70-81.

So, Peter: the Phaistos disk. Document or board game?
--
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