Undeciphered Scripts
Undeciphered scripts are remnants of ancient languages that historians and archaeologists and linguists and paleolinguists and lexicographers have yet to crack.
The following pages illustrate glyphs—carved, pressed, painted, or knotted—that meant something both to the writer and reader; but the meaning of them has been lost. We need to start with the basics, though.
What is Writing, After All?
Writing is generally defined as a set of signs that are used to represent language units in a systematic way. Whether carved into stone blocks, impressed into pottery, or knotted into strings, repetitive signs that hold a meaning beyond the lines or knots or impressions represent (as far as I'm concerned) a written language.
Types of Writing
Scholars divide language into classes by the kind of meaning each sign or glyph holds. Each individual glyph could refer to an idea or complete word, such as when an image of cow means "cow" or "cows". Alternatively, a syllabary sign refers to a syllable—a sound in the language, such as when the sign of a cow refers to the sound of the word for cow. Finally, a set of glyphs can combine both methods.
- Logographic: each sign refers to a single word or part of a word
- Logophonetic: some signs refer to words, some refer to sounds
- Syllabic: signs mostly refer to the sounds they make
- Consonantal alphabetic: signs refer to sounds, but no vowels
- Syllabic alphabetic: signs refer to combined consonant and vowel
- C&V alphabetic: signs are combined to make sounds
There's no point in me going into detail; the Ancient Scripts site does a terrific job of discussing all these types of languages.
- Andrew Robinson. 2009. Decoding antiquity: Eight scripts that still can't be read. New Scientist 2710: 27 May 2009.
