Geniuses of Avocation

Sometimes it is uncertain which is more amazing, the problem, the solution or the investigator.

 

Linear B is the oldest language so far found in Europe. It was discovered by Arthur Evans in 1900 as he excavated Knossos in Crete. An unknown writing of an unknown language, inscribed by stylus into clay, it was preserved in the clay by heat from a fire. (He also found an older language, Linear A, but there is not enough to decipher.) It is Bronze Age, from 3500 B.C. and was originally thought to be a variant of Sumerian or Etruscan.

Beginning in the 1930s, Alice Kober privately studied Linear B,  keeping huge, crude statistics on 180,000 hand-cut cards like note cards and tabulations in forty notebooks. She used a hand punch to create a kind of "database, with the punched holes marking the parameters on the data could be sorted." Her knowledge of languages was astonishing. She knew ancient and modern languages including Hittite, Old Irish, Akkadian, Tocharian, Sumerian, Old Persian, Basque and Chinese. From 1942 to 1945, while teaching full-time in Brooklyn, she took classes in advanced Sanskrit. She also studied field archeology in New Mexico and Greece. In 1946, Kober finally and mercifully received a one-year Guggenheim Fellowship to study Linear B full-time.
Her contribution was she found Linear B to be inflective, with changes in the endings of words to change meaning. (Latin, Spanish and German are highly inflective, English less so. Examples of inflection in English occur with number, cat-cats, and time, play-played.)
After her death at 43--she was a chain smoker--the architect Michael Ventris, another philological amateur, built on Kober's work and, with some inspired guesses, deciphered the script in 1952, showing that it is syllabic--symbols meaning syllable sounds--and that it was brought to the Minoans from mainland Greece, Mycenae.