Talk:List of undeciphered writing systems

What's the idea of having a subsection "deciphered languages" in an "list of undeciphered languages"? -- Pjacobi 20:10, 12 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Probably because they were once considered undeciphered. Bogdan | Talk 11:58, 13 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Change of Name required

Apart from needing an extensive revision, I believe that this List article needs a title change. "Decipherment" refers to scripts or writing systems, not languages per se, and hence the title should be changed to "List of undeciphered scripts" or "List of undeciphered writing systems". I have replaced "language" with "script" in the article, and shall look to rename the article, if no-one has any objection. --cjllw | TALK 01:09, 2005 Jun 9 (UTC)

The page has now been moved to the more accurate List of undeciphered writing systems.--cjllw | TALK 06:43, 2005 Jun 21 (UTC)

There are still some problems with the language/writing system distinction, though. Pictish language and Guanche language aren't undeciphered scripts; they're not even written in undeciphered scripts. They're just languages about which very little is known. Also Etruscan language isn't a partially deciphered script, and its script was AFAIK never undeciphered. It's a Greek/Phoenician script of a very well-known type. It's the language (not the script) that's largely unknown. --Angr/_{tɔk tə mi} 08:26, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I don't know about Guanche. It's hardly an authoritative reference, but it says here [1] that "Any attempt to decipher in Canarian inscriptions has since failed.". As for your other concerns, you'll find that the list of writing systems has a few of the same problems.EmilioSilva 01:53, 14 August 2005 (UTC)

Since they're undeciphered, we don't know that the Canarian inscriptions are Guanche. kwami 06:02, 2005 August 14 (UTC)

Acknowledged, this listing as it stands and as previously noted could use some thorough revision, and includes entries which are not actually scripts or writing systems (but they were there before the name change from "languages" to "writing systems", and hence probably the confusion). With the name change, they more properly belong on some other list, perhaps of languages poorly documented, or some such. Your point about the Etruscan script is also valid; probably since there is a large corpus of Etruscan texts it is perhaps mistakenly associated or described as undeciphered, unlike the other little-unknown languages which were not written, or have few or no existing texts. --cjllw | TALK 09:55, 2005 Jun 21 (UTC)

Merge?

Should we just merge this article with List of writing systems? It's pretty much a duplicate of the last section in that article. kwami 20:06, 2005 August 13 (UTC)

I agree. Only Guanche language is in here but not there. But there is not enough information in its article to decide where to put it. EmilioSilva 01:24, 14 August 2005 (UTC)

I have put Guanche language there, and redirected. I checked and there seems to be little or no loss. EmilioSilva 01:48, 14 August 2005 (UTC)