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Tom Di Mino, a self-taught AI engineer and an amateur linguist, claims to have accomplished a feat that has eluded linguistics experts for over a century: deciphering a Bronze-age Minoan writing system known as Linear A.
His claims are currently being reviewed by linguistics experts at Rutgers and Cambridge. While I’m caveating, I will also mention that I know Tom socially.
Di Mino, who is based in the Hudson Valley, began to work on the problem in January this year, and says the major insight came to him on May 22.
If Tom Di Mino has deciphered Linear A, it would be an earthquake in the field of linguistics. When a related Minoan script, Linear B, was deciphered in 1952, it made the front page of the New York Times.
Linear A maps to an extinct Semitic language
Di Mino believes that Linear A belongs to an extinct Semitic language that was a precursor to biblical Hebrew, the way that Latin is a precursor to Italian.
Di Mino is not the first to argue that Linear A was Semitic. Prior attempts to prove it, however, including a 1957 article published by Cyrus Gordon in the journal Antiquity, did not unlock translations the way that Di Mino’s solution appears to, and Gordon’s work did not gain widespread acceptance in the field.
Some background on Linear A and Linear B
Linear A is a Minoan script that appeared sometime around 1800 BC and was used until 1450 BC, when Crete was conquered by Mycenaean Greeks. The Mycenaeans adopted the Minoan symbols as their own, with some minor revisions. The Mycenaean-Greek version of the symbols are known as Linear B. Both scripts were found on various tablets, vases, and other artifacts from the era.
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