Alice Kober's Triplets

With the signs numbered (Numbering the Signs) and a grid in mind (How a Syllabary Works), you are ready for the first great step. It was taken in New York in the 1940s by Alice Kober, a classics professor at Brooklyn College, working in her spare time on a script nobody could read.

Kober's method

Kober (1906 to 1950) refused to guess what language the tablets were in. Others had tried to "read" Linear B as Etruscan, Hittite and other languages, and every guess had failed. She studied the signs as shapes instead, keeping thousands of hand-written index cards: which signs came together, which began or ended words, how often each appeared. In papers from 1945 to 1948 she showed that the language had endings that changed with grammar, as Latin and Greek do.

A triplet

Kober noticed sets of words that shared a beginning and differed at the end, in three forms. Here is a set of that kind, written with the values we know today (Kober had no values; she saw only the shapes):

Look at the shapes only. Forms 2 and 3 share three signs and then differ in the last one. Form 1 has the same first two signs but a different third sign. Kober reasoned: the stem ends in a consonant. In form 1 that consonant is written together with one vowel; in forms 2 and 3 with another. So the third sign of form 1 and the third sign of forms 2 and 3 share a consonant (today we know: so and si, both s). And the last signs of forms 2 and 3 share their own consonant (jo and ja, both j) while differing in vowel.

In 1948 Kober drew a small grid of ten signs showing which shared a consonant and which shared a vowel. She died in May 1950, at 43, two years before the decipherment. John Chadwick later judged her work the most valuable before Ventris's.