How to pronounce “decipherer” in English

internal clues. It's the decipherer's job to know how and where to find them.If you are that decipherer and you are staring down an unknown inscription, you need to begin by subjecting it to avery particular series of diagnostic tests.

An unknown script used to write an unknown language is a locked room mystery.Somehow, the decipherer must finesse his way into a tightly closed system that offers few external clues.If he is very lucky, he will have the help of a bilingual inscription, like the Rosetta Stone, which furnished the key

any Linear B character.What she did that was so radical-- for no decipherer of any script in history had done this-- was to treat the symbols of Linear B as abstract objectsof pure form. Rather than speculating on what words the inscriptions held or on how to pronounce any of those words, she looked

Linear B. Now the extraordinary thing about Ventris is that he was neither an archaeologist, like Arthur Evans, nor a classicist, like Alice Kober, nor a scholar in any otherfield that might have made him a likely decipherer.He was, in fact, an architect.

where an unknown language is written by means of an unknown script.This is the most fiendishly difficult of our four cases for it thrusts the decipherer into a linguistic terra incognita without so much as a map or a compass at hand.And that is precisely the situation that the investigators of Linear B found themselves in for five decades after Arthur Evans unearthed those

Or is there? Even in our toughest case, where both language and script are unknown, the script itself turns out to be filled withinternal clues. It's the decipherer's job to know how and where to find them.If you are that decipherer and you are staring down an unknown inscription, you need to begin by subjecting it to a

Each test is a little forensic exercise designed to coax the script, bit by bit, to yield up its identity.Now, the first test is so obvious that decipherers sometimes forget to do it.You have to establish at the very beginning whether the tangle of symbols in front of you actually is writing.

ceaselessly for patterns glimmering within the script itself.Now, Kober knew that to solve the riddle of Linear B, a decipherer would have to inhabit a world that was, asshe evocatively described it, a world of form without meaning.