This is a fascinating topic because it deals with the paradox of studying something we cannot read. When we talk about the "linguistic evolution" of an undeciphered script, we are not tracing the changes in meaning (semantics) or pronunciation (phonology) directly, because those are unknown.

Instead, linguists and cryptographers study the evolution of the writing system itself, its structural properties, its relationship to known languages, and the methods used to attempt decipherment.

Here is a detailed explanation of the linguistic evolution and analysis of two of history's most famous undeciphered scripts: Linear A and the Voynich Manuscript.

Part 1: Linear A (The Minoan Enigma)

Context: Linear A was used by the Minoan civilization on Crete from approximately 1800 to 1450 BCE. It is the ancestor of Linear B (which was deciphered in the 1950s and found to be Mycenaean Greek).

1. Evolutionary Origins: The Cretan Script Family

Linear A did not appear in a vacuum. It represents a specific stage in the evolution of writing in the Aegean: * Cretan Hieroglyphs (c. 2100–1700 BCE): The earliest form of writing on Crete. These were pictographic but likely functioned similarly to Egyptian hieroglyphs (representing sounds and concepts). * Linear A (c. 1800–1450 BCE): The system evolved into a more abstract, "linear" form (lines cut into clay) for efficiency. It co-existed with Hieroglyphs for a time but eventually replaced them. * Linear B (c. 1450–1200 BCE): When Mycenaean Greeks conquered Crete, they adapted the Linear A script to write their own Greek language.

2. Structural Analysis (What we know without reading it)

Even though we cannot translate Linear A, linguistic analysis has revealed its structure: * Syllabary: Like Linear B, it is a syllabary. Each symbol represents a syllable (e.g., ka, te, ro) rather than a single letter. * Logograms: It uses ideograms for commodities (grain, wine, olives, figs), which are identical to those in Linear B. This allows us to understand the context of the tablets (mostly accounting/inventory) without knowing the words. * Decimal System: We perfectly understand their numerical system, which is base-10.

3. The "Minoan" Language Hypothesis

The biggest barrier to evolution is that we do not know what language Linear A encodes. The underlying language is referred to as "Minoan." * Not Greek: When Linear B was deciphered, the phonetic values were applied to Linear A. The result was gibberish. This proved Minoan was not Greek. * The Agglutinative Theory: The word structure suggests the language is agglutinative (adding prefixes/suffixes to a root word) rather than fusional like Greek. * Candidate Languages: Linguists have attempted to link Minoan to Luwian (Anatolian), Semitic languages, or Tyrrhenian (related to Etruscan). Currently, the consensus is that it may be a language isolate—a language with no surviving relatives, making decipherment nearly impossible without a bilingual text (a "Rosetta Stone").

Part 2: The Voynich Manuscript (The Medieval Mystery)

Context: The Voynich Manuscript is an illustrated codex hand-written in an unknown script. Carbon dating places the vellum in the early 15th century (1404–1438). It is named after Wilfrid Voynich, the book dealer who purchased it in 1912.

Unlike Linear A, which was a standard bureaucratic tool for a whole civilization, the Voynich script appears in only one known document.

1. Linguistic Metrics and "Voynichese"

Despite being unreadable, the text exhibits highly sophisticated linguistic patterns that differentiate it from random gibberish. * Zipf’s Law: This is a statistical rule stating that in any natural language, the most frequent word will occur approximately twice as often as the second most frequent word, three times as often as the third, etc. The Voynich text follows Zipf’s Law perfectly. This is the strongest evidence that it represents a real language or a sophisticated cipher of one. * Entropy: The text has lower entropy (randomness) than most European languages. The character combinations are very predictable, suggesting a highly structured (or very repetitive) underlying system.

2. Theories of Script Evolution

Because the script has no clear ancestors, theories focus on what it is rather than where it came from:

• A Natural Language: Some linguists argue it is a written version of an exotic natural language (e.g., a lost dialect of Nahuatl or a Sino-Tibetan language) rendered in a unique alphabet to capture sounds foreign to the Latin alphabet.
• A Constructed Script (Cipher): The script might be a substitution cipher. However, simple substitution ciphers (A=1, B=2) usually fail Zipf's law or reveal themselves quickly to computer analysis. If it is a cipher, it is a polyalphabetic or nomenclator cipher far more complex than was standard for the 15th century.
• Micrography/Steganography: A recent theory suggests the visible letters are meaningless, and the real message is hidden in tiny markings within the brushstrokes.

3. Morphology and Syntax

The "words" in the Voynich Manuscript behave strangely compared to European languages: * Rigid Structure: Words often follow a rigid structure of [Prefix] + [Root] + [Suffix]. * The "Line Effect": Curiously, certain characters appear almost exclusively at the beginnings or ends of lines, suggesting the writing system is aware of the physical page space—a trait usually found in poetry or lists, not prose.

Comparison of Evolution and Stagnation

The study of these two scripts highlights two different kinds of "undeciphered" status:

Conclusion

The "evolution" of these scripts is currently an evolution of methodology. 1. Early Era: Relied on visual similarity to known alphabets (e.g., assuming Linear A signs meant the same as Egyptian ones). 2. Mid-20th Century: Relied on combinatorial analysis and grid-building (how Alice Kober laid the groundwork for the Linear B decipherment). 3. Modern Era: Relies on Computational Linguistics and AI. Researchers are now using machine learning to analyze the statistical clusters of the Voynich Manuscript and to simulate "mother languages" for Linear A.

Until a new archaeological discovery provides a key, the evolution of these scripts remains a story of statistical probability rather than historical certainty.