New language uncovered in Bronze age Georgia

[Imperial Dave]

https://www.labrujulaverde.com/en/2024/11/an-ancient-inscription-from-the-late-bronze-age-in-an-unknown-language-found-in-georgia-in-the-caucasus/

Nice piece.

[Ian61]

How can we be sure this is a new language and not an alternative alphabet? The point of the alphabetical system is to render the sounds of speech as symbols so that 'ideally' any language can be represented.

[Imperial Dave]

I was more impressed with the tablet itself...beautiful

[Andreas Johansson]

Hm. 39 different graphemes among 60 tokens ought suggest it's logographic (since alphabetic or syllabic writing would be expected to have more repeats), but then the individual signs are surprisingly simple. So I think some skepticism is warranted that it's a fully fledged writing system - the articles suggestion of "proto-writing" might be nearer the mark.

Some signs being reminicent of Aramaic and what not is probably not very indicative of anything: when signs are this simple chance resemblances are almost inevitable. It has to be significant however that it looks nothing like LBA cuneiform.

I also wonder how they determined that 34 is one sign rather than three instances of the same sign as 39.


The original article is available in pdf if you click the DOI link at the bottom. I should read it sometime.

[Andreas Johansson]

Read the original article now. It doesn't really say terribly much that wasn't in the LBV piece.

The most important thing is perhaps that the dating is really uncertain; they think it's likely late bronze or early iron age based on pottery of such age being found near the lake the tablet was found in, and because some of the signs resemble ones that are found on seals of that period in the region.

The authors do believe the tablet represents alphabetic writing, but do not address the surprisingly low incidence of repeated signs. In fact, they make it worse by assuming the most frequent sign (four occurrences) represents punctuation!

While various signs look like Latin, Greek, Iberian, Aramaic, etc letters, as well as hieratic signs etc, what their comparisons really show is that the sign inventory isn't closely related to any script they're comparing with.