Oh, yeah.

[camwyn]

Something that came up last night when I was looking up the Linear B alphabet- well, character set anyway, it's logograms as well as a syllabary and there's still some undeciphered chunks o' language. Those of y'all who're more widely fannish than most may recognise why this made me twitch and then snicker.

This is a chunk of the Odyssey rendered in Linear B. For those of you who're looking at me now as if my head fell off and was replaced with a small yellow chicken, Linear B is the writing system used by SERIOUSLY Ancient Greek civilisation. The Greek alphabet as we know it is the second or third or possibly fourth writing system used by the language; there was a dark age from about 1200 BCE to 800 BCE during which writing in general was lost throughout the Greek-speaking world. Linear B was originally derived from the writing used in Crete, as nearly as I can tell. It didn't get deciphered as a form of actual Greek until 1953 and the story thereof is absolutely fascinating- ANYWAY.

That's what writing would have looked like to the people who were alive at the time the events of the Odyssey supposedly took place. Each of those marks represents a syllable, unless it's one of the logograms where a single sign stands for an actual word- but I don't think any of the ones in that batch do. Each of the syllabary marks stands for a consonant sound paired with one of the five basic vowels, with the consonants used being d, j, k, m, n, p, q, r, s, t, w and z. A few of the consonants had to substitute for other sounds because the original system was meant for a language that didn't have the same sounds as Mycenean Greek.

If you've read Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising books, you're already casting suspicious looks at one of those recurring characters. Now, have you read Stephen King's The Dark Tower books? Because the one that's giving the Dark is Rising fans the twitchies? That would be the sign for 'ka'.

I'm just gonna be over here now.

(The rest of y'all can have a gander at this page on Linear B if you want more details; it's a neat place to start.)

Comments

[darthrami.livejournal.com]

That's. uh.




yeah.

[camwyn]

Could be worse. Modern Greek letters have numeric values assigned to them for whatever reason- I guess 'cos they were used as numerals before the Hindu-Arabic system propagated westward. (Not sure. Haven't studied Greek since college.) Thankfully, Linear B had its own damn numerals separate from the letters, because if the value of ka had been 19 I would have had to find a way to travel back in time and punch a Minoan in the face.

[genarti]

...Oh, lord, I didn't even think of that.

I am suddenly very glad for that numeral system there.

[drharper.livejournal.com]

OMFG!

Suddenly I'm very glad there's an apple tree growing in my back yard.

*wibbles*

[camwyn]

I sort of sat there going "this is a joke, right? This is some messed-up piece of modern typography trying to render a lumpier or off-centered marking into a consistent, pretty form, right?" when I saw the Sign of the Light repeatedly- but no, if you pull up pictures of actual Linear B on clay tablets, there it is, just like that. And yes, indeedy, it does translate as the sound 'ka', although without the Y HALO THAR PAWN O DESTINY meaning behind it.

[hangingfire.livejournal.com]

Huh. I haven't thought much about Linear B since I got hooked on that "In Search of the Trojan War" thing on TV when I was a kid. Guess I know what I'll be reading at lunch today.

[camwyn]

I've been reading The King Must Die and The Bull From The Sea, so I've been doing some supplemental digging. I get fascinated easily by material related to my reading material.

[hangingfire.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I know what you mean. I've been on a Georgian/Regency kick for about three months now.

I read The Persian Boy many, many years ago, and now I'm wondering why I never read any of Renault's other books -- I really liked it. Shall have to remedy that someday.

[camwyn]

I've only read three of hers. Those two, and The Mask of Apollo. I found The Bull From The Sea first, when I was in high school, and oh man did I ever just get sucked in.

I'm moderately tempted to rent a copy of Troy from the video store and sit there screaming the whole time. It can't be worse than Beowulf and Grendel. Nothing can be worse than Beowulf and Grendel.

[mephron]

That sounds like a fun afternoon thing.

[camwyn]

Ya, srsly. You doing anything Saturday?

[adiva_calandia]

TL had to point that out to me last night; otherwise I was just going "Ooooh, pretty lanuage system!" *sigh* I lose at 19 spotting.

[kelathefinn.livejournal.com]

I teach Linear B - and the origins of writing - as part of the Origins and Development of the English Language, AND as part of the Introductory Linguistics course. Glad to see Linear B makes other people twitch. I'm going to gank the example of the Odyssey in Linear B for those courses, thanks.

I have an aversion to Stephen King. I love Susan Cooper's works, and I think The Dark Is Rising books should be recommended reading for young readers (10-15). I don't think I'm going to read The Dark Tower now or ever, if it will give me *that* kind of twitches... I'm not 'widely fannish' - but I'd love to know what or who you are a fan of that made you connect Linear B to snickers and twitches...

[camwyn]

In the Dark Tower books, 'ka' is the word for destiny and fate, only a little more implacable than the old Greek concept of moira. The DT books (so far as I know) feature a world-view in which weird coincidences are almost never actually coincidences, but nearly inevitably mean something. Seeing the Sign of the Light stand for ka, even if it was just the sound rather than the Kingian meaning, threw me for a loop.

[kelathefinn.livejournal.com]

Oh, OK. Nothing to do with Childe Roland's Dark Tower (Browning) or that of Louis MacNiece...

And what does '19' have to do with anything?

This Kingian tower - that's not the one where the Devil has conceived a child on a woman who doesn't know she's carrying the anti-christ - and all these people 'conincidentally connected to her ultimately converge on this corporate tower where the devil is, and when the woman finds out she's going to be the anti-virgin, she throws herself off the balcony? There was some tv series or other with that story line. I found it totally unbelievable, but some of the other family members watched it so I was exposed to it quite literally in passing. Sounds like something King would write.

[camwyn]

That's not it, no. I don't know if he had anything to do with that TV storyline, but that's definitely not the Dark Tower books so far as I know. As for 19, it's the number of 'canceled coincidence' in the Dark Tower books. You'd have to ask batyatoon or one of the other DT fans on my friendslist for a better explanation than that.

*threadhops*

[genarti]

Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came is actually a major influence on the book, and a major inspiration for it. Not the only influence, by any means -- King works in a lot of other texts, both classics and pop culture -- but a significant one, and one that actually shows up explicitly in the story at one point. Not sure about the Louis MacNiece; I wouldn't be surprised if King did allude to it at some point, but it's not a work I'm familiar with.

19 is a number that starts to recur in the DT books, and becomes progressively more pervasive in the characters' lives. So far as I know, the number itself doesn't mean anything outside of that context, and I'm not entirely sure why Stephen King picked that number specifically. But he did, and it starts to crop up everywhere in tiny things throughout the stories -- loose change adding up to 19, names 19 letters long, that kind of thing -- until it becomes both a symbol of and an illustration of the way "coincidence is cancelled," as the book says, in their lives.

I highly recommend the series, by the way; it's not at all stereotypical "horror." But if you don't like his writing style, you don't like it. :)

[campkilkare]

What you're talking about there is The Stand, although not immediately recognizable because you left out the most recognizable bit which is... err... most of the world's population dying of the flu.

But. Yeah, With allowances for vague remembrances, that's The Stand, Steve-O's other magnum opus.

The Stand

[kelathefinn.livejournal.com]

Thanks. :) Thought I recognised the style. As I said, I saw it literally in passing, getting only bits and pieces, and while I did notice the significant absence of population, I must've missed that bit about the 'flu. Good to know the name of the thing.

[campkilkare]

--oh, and what you saw glimpses of was probably the TV miniseries they made of it, which had some godawful production values. And while it does connect up to the Dark Tower, it's via the main villain crossing-over. Nothing to do with the building, which is just an ordinary Vegas high-rise.

[slarti.livejournal.com]

Sci-Fi showed the miniseries on Sunday, so I finally saw it for the first time in years and years, and damn. Not only does it have some laughable production values and occasionally acting style (Randall Flagg as The Devil With A Mullet? WTF?), the way the plot resolved, which I've read synopses before but had forgotten how it plays out on screen... I was terribly annoyed and confused, because not only does the McGuffin that solves the problem come in without any of the heroes having done anything to affect the plot, but the thing that activates the McGuffin just creates itself out of nowhere from something Flagg does to someone else five minutes ago on an entirely unrelated matter. I'll admit that I've never read the book, but I hope that it's not handled in nearly so retarded a fashion there.

[campkilkare]

The book---is not my favorite resolution, but the solution is built up to make more sense.

The point is (in common with the Lord of the Rings) that the heroes don't have to, in fact cannot possibly, defeat evil on their own, because evil is vast and inhuman and powerful. But sometimes, if they're brave and true and do all they can to take their--title moment--stand, God or Fate or what have you closes the gap.

In the book, "the hand of God" sets off the nuke; the physical lightning hand thingy I am pretty sure is not in there. It's contendable that the fact that the nuke is old and uncared for and has been slung across the desert by a loonytune has something to do with it, especially since the guy who found it is dying of radiation poisoning by then.

Plus, Trashcan and Flagg have a more fleshed out story in the novel than in the movie. So overall, it's more satisfying, yes.

[slarti.livejournal.com]

Well, I hope that the book actually makes it so that the heroes' efforts do anything useful at all, regardless of whether or not they themselves Defeat the Evil. In the miniseries, as far as I could tell, Our Heroes could've stayed home in Boulder, sipping lemonade, and Trashcan would still have "MY LIFE FOR YOU! THE FIRE!"'d the nuke all the way to Flagg's doorstep, and the Hand of God would still set it off, assuming God wasn't being a bitch about making good people go to die for no good reason.

[campkilkare]

...well, basically, God was. The point was that the good guys had to make a stand against Flagg, for better or worse. The plague in general is taken as a pass/fail for the human race.

[slarti.livejournal.com]

...Wow. That... actually makes me kind of want to root for Flagg, instead, if only because I'm not down with the idea of a God who pulls that kind of crap. If you're going to demand a sacrifice, make it a meaningful one. But that's just me.

[campkilkare]

Well, it's a long-standing theological construct, both in the book and historically; look at Sodom and Gomorrah.

The basic premise is that the plague wiped out most of humanity, because humanity had reached an apex of arrogance and destructiveness by... making the plague, among other things. A small fraction were spared, for the final acid test, aligning along good and evil. But the good guys began to fall into the same patterns of nattering, arrogant materialistic complacency, until you can't tell the good guys from the bad except that the bad guys have crucifixions. (Uh.)

So having already botched that, Our Heroes are given one last shot, a commandment to go up against Flagg with no hope of success. And they do, and in return they get the deus ex machina.

God is not particularly pleasant, in this, but he's pretty much in line with the "find me one righteous man" Old Testament God, and it makes more sense if you consider it from the perspective that humanity has failed to be humane and been spared not once but repeatedly in the narrative.

[campkilkare]

Also--the heroes aren't facing off with Flagg because God said, "Hey, go throw your lives away and I'll nuke him." They're facing off with Flagg because Flagg's evil, and somebody ought to do it. The nuke is just a bonus, which saves the story from the maximumally depressing ending. It's what ought to happen when the little guy breaks himself to try and stop the big bad, but never really does.

Which is a stronger and clearer theme in Needful Things, where God doesn't explicitly order the hero to march into a hopeless situation, to be fair.

[slarti.livejournal.com]

Well, yeah, no, what God says instead is, "Hey, go throw your lives away," period. There isn't even the hint of the beneficial deal of "...and I'll nuke him." I'd have actually felt better about it if they'd been told that their sacrifice formed a deal for salvation, or, alternately, if circumstances inspired them to take their stand for themselves, rather than because God explicitly told them to. God should not be such a whiny attention-seeking bitch as that.

[slarti.livejournal.com]

Actually, come to think of it, aside from how the Hand of God is presented in the miniseries, I know an utterly simple tweak to things that would quell all my objections: If I'd gotten any sense that the mass gathering only happened because there were these guys from Boulder who needed executing, rather than the executions being a nice bonus on a gathering that would've been going on anyway, that would've been sufficient "Our Heroes have an impact on the plot" to have satisfied me.

[just-the-ash.livejournal.com]

Um, which one is "ka"?

[camwyn]

The one that looks like a circle quartered by a cross. That image is fairly important in the Susan Cooper books.

[dancing-moon.livejournal.com]

oh, it's the same one! I recognized that one and then I kept wondering why I can't remember King's symbol for ka (and blamed myself for being a bad Dark Tower fan)

I start to wonder if King knew about Linear B or researched it before writing? Though in a way, I hope he didn't and it just entered his mind ^^

[mattador.livejournal.com]

I'm having a geekgasm.

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

I was, in fact, twitching at the Linear B samples last night.

Now I am twitching more. Whee.

[zwol.livejournal.com]

Is it you, then, playing Hektor? I have been squeeing over every last thread.

[camwyn]

Yeah. I've been keeping that quiet just to see who plays with him without knowing it's me- sometimes I have trouble attracting new players.

[sleightofhand]

I started reading this post and my first thought was, "The Odyssey? Linear B? Cam's playin' my song!"

(Someday I'll have to read those DT books to actually understand the context of all these references you guys keep making.)

[camwyn]

*bows* I do my best. I got severely distracted last night by pawing through the related links from the Linear B article on Wikipedia, which is why I didn't link to there- it's too easy to run off going 'oooooh' over articles about things like the Phaistos disc.

And I haven't actually read the Dark Tower books. I just absorb stuff about 'em from the other players.

[dragonwhishes.livejournal.com]

(I suggest it! I'm not all that big a fan of Stephen King, but those books? Are my favourite ever. They're not like, HORROR HORROR HORROR, but they're subtly creepy, and can be heartwrenching.)

[rajrr.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's what's been holding me back so far. I've read some of his other books and just flat-out disliked them. So I'm thinking I'll get these from the library, or borrow them from someone or something, so I'm not caught potentially buying seven books for nothing, heh.

[dragonwhishes.livejournal.com]

The first one is good, and the ones following it are fricking amazing. My favourites are the last three. But that may be because of the pretty pictures.

They're books you can really lose yourself in. Mid-World and etc. are fleshed out, and you almost think that they're real, and the characters are vastly different in personality, regrets, background, and the times they come from.

Another thing about the books that I love is- everything happens for a reason.

[dragonwhishes.livejournal.com]

Don't know too much about The Dark Is Rising, but dammit, I have the twitchies.