Linear A

Linear A

Linear A is fully wired as a script plugin. The bundled corpus is 1,721 inscriptions with an 84-sign inventory and a sign→sound map (the syllabic values Linear A shares with the deciphered Linear B).

Linear A is undeciphered. The phonetic transcription uses Linear B sound values as a working convention, and every analytical method here is exploratory — evidence to weigh, not translation. See Analysis.

Loading & filtering

import aegean

corpus = aegean.load("lineara")
len(corpus)                       # 1721

doc = corpus.get("HT13")                    # one Document by id
ht = corpus.filter(site="Haghia Triada")    # AND-combine any DocumentMeta fields
ht_lmib = corpus.filter(site="Haghia Triada", period="LM IB")

meta.site holds the full site name ("Haghia Triada", "Khania", …); the familiar two-letter site codes (HT, ZA, KH) are the prefix of each document's id. To select "all HT tablets", query the id (see the query engine):

from aegean.analysis import FilterRow, run_query
res = run_query(corpus, [FilterRow("id-contains", "HT")], output="inscriptions")
len(res.inscriptions)

Words, tokens, DataFrames

corpus.word_frequencies()[:5]     # [(word, count), ...] desc by count

corpus.to_dataframe()                      # one row per document
corpus.to_dataframe(level="word")          # one row per WORD token
corpus.to_dataframe(level="token")         # every token (words, numerals, …)

A document's tokens carry their role:

doc = corpus.get("HT13")
[t.text for t in doc.words]        # multi-sign lexical words
[t.text for t in doc.numerals]     # numerals / metrological fractions
[t.text for t in doc.logograms]    # commodity / ideogram signs
doc.line_tokens                    # tokens regrouped by physical line

The sign inventory

inv = aegean.get_script("lineara").sign_inventory
len(inv)                           # 84
sign = inv.by_label("KU")
sign.phonetic                      # 'ku'
inv.to_dataframe()                 # pandas view of the inventory

Transliteration (sign → sound)

from aegean.scripts.lineara.phonetic import word_to_phonetic
word_to_phonetic("KU-RO")          # 'kuro'
word_to_phonetic("PA-I-TO")        # 'paito'
word_to_phonetic("KU-RO", {"KU": "gu"})   # 'guro'  (hypothesis override)

Accounting reconciliation (KU-RO / PO-TO-KU-RO)

KU-RO ("total") and PO-TO-KU-RO ("grand total") let you check a tablet's arithmetic against its line items. Exploratory: section boundaries are heuristic and the metrology is contested.

from aegean.analysis import balance_check
for chk in balance_check(corpus.get("HT13")):
    print(chk)        # each total line vs the summed items it governs

Sign-pattern search

Dash-separated sign labels with wildcards: * = exactly one sign, ** = zero or more. Case-insensitive after subscript folding (RA₂ ≡ RA2).

from aegean.analysis import word_matches_sign_pattern
word_matches_sign_pattern("KU-NE-RO", "KU-*-RO")    # True
word_matches_sign_pattern("KU-RO", "KU-*-RO")        # False
[w for w, _ in corpus.word_frequencies()
 if word_matches_sign_pattern(w, "KU-*-RO")]

More

The full analytical toolkit — phonetic distance, alignment, morphology clustering, collocation statistics, the query engine, and tablet-structure classification — is on the Analysis page.

Provenance

print(corpus.provenance.cite())
# Godart, L. & Olivier, J.-P. (1976–1985). Recueil des inscriptions en linéaire A. — https://github.com/mwenge/lineara.xyz