Phaistos Disk Decipherment update
http://users.otenet.gr/~svoronan/phaistos.htm
here is a criticism of the methodology of Fischer
Times Higher Education - Phallus and fallacy
http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=163001§ioncode=38
Now let us see if Fischer's claim to have singlehandedly "broken" both the Phaistos and the Rongorongo scripts has any foundation.
Discounting two additional objects which may or may not have a few Phaistos-like signs on them, the PD is the only extant member of its class; with 122 signs on one side, and 119 on the other, this is not a very large database, to put it mildly. In contrast, the Linear B corpus, comprised of many hundreds of clay tablets, totals no fewer than 57,000 signs, yet it still gave Alice Kober, Ventris, and others considerable trouble to "break". I have said that the PD texts are laid out in spiral fashion, and are apparently to be read from right to left, from the outside to the centre, with vertical lines enclosing from one to seven signs within "fields" (Fischer differs from other scholars in not thinking that these "fields" define words). About half of the signary looks like pictures of real things: human heads and bodies, animals and parts thereof, a ship, a hafted axe, etc.
Fischer's first move was to convert these texts into the numbers assigned to the PD signs by Arthur Evans in his Scripta Minoa I (1909). Then he began to search for repeating structural patterns which might reflect actual grammatical patterns, a not-unreasonable procedure, for it was just such a methodology which led Kober to positing - always with commendable caution - that Linear B was recording an inflected language, a breakthrough which eventually resulted in Ventris's epochal decipherment. But let us keep in mind that Fischer has been working with a database that is less than 1 per cent of what Kober and Ventris had at their disposal. There are, it is true, a few such patterns discernible on the PD: for instance, a head with a "Mohican" hairdo (see red box on illustration), followed by a dotted disk, is often in an initial position on Side A, and once on Side B. Other repetitive sequences are less obvious.
Fischer is on surer ground in his assertion that the Phaistos script must be a syllabary. The size of the signaries of purely syllabic scripts vary between 40 (for Persian), and 87 (for Linear B); the upper limit for alphabetic systems is 36 (for Russian); while the lower limit for logographic and logo-syllabic scripts is around 500 (Maya, for example, has over 800 hieroglyphs). In the complete Phaistos system, there must have been more than the 45 discrete signs that appear on the PD, but probably not more than is normal for a syllabary of the consonant-vowel (CV) sort, which this in all likelihood was.
Now, if it is a syllabary, reasons Fischer, then it must be cognate to other early Aegean systems, such as Minoan Linear A, Mycenaean Linear B, and the Cypriote script (a written form of Greek, which he reasonably calls "Linear C"). Here he moves into high gear with several untested (or untestable) assumptions: * the known values of Linear B, which encodes an early Greek dialect, can be applied to "Minoan" Linear A, just as Linear C values were once successfully applied to Linear B (in fact, Ventris showed that this was far from the case)
* Linear A thus also encodes an early form of Greek
* 18 signs on the PD can be shown to be cognate with Linear A signs (to Fischer's satisfaction, at any rate, if not to this reviewer's), and thus these Linear A values can be applied to the PD cognates.
Ergo, the texts on the PD must also be in an early Greek dialect.
Further values for the PD signs can be derived on the acrophonic principle, that is, the sound values for some signs represent the initial sound of words for the objects they pictorially represent (assuming that these objects from the real world have been correctly identified).
Fischer's task was now to establish a syllabic grid based on these values, and see where it took him when he substituted his sound values for Evans's numbers.
And lo and behold! Fischer now has complete, readable texts in an ancient form of Greek. While I am certainly not a Hellenist, the translations resulting from his alleged decipherment of the PD strain credulity. There are passages that bring to mind the 17th-century polymath Athanasius Kircher's vain and usually ludicrous attempts to decipher the texts on Rome's Egyptian obelisks. Here is one such passage by Fischer:
"Safeguard me, Idaians: I am sore afraid. Loose me now. My night, my great: Ye loose me now. These afflictions so terrible and so great, verily so molestful: Ye loose me now. Down to the sea, everyone! Yea, deliver me of my great afflictions!" By piling one assumption on another, Fischer has, I am afraid, been led into the same morass as Kircher had stumbled into three centuries ago. His attempted decipherment of the Phaistos Disk has, by his own admission, failed to convince John Chadwick, the leading student of Aegean scripts, and it has left me with grave doubts whether he or anyone else will ever "break" this script. It simply meets none of the criteria for a successful decipherment. In his relentlessly self-celebratory Glyph-breaker, Fischer, like Kircher before him, has talked himself into believing in an illusory success.
There are any one of a number of theories
) and Turkish Coffee (Greeks decided anything "Turkish" cannot be good so it became "Greek Coffee" in Greek restaurants and bars 
What a flacking boring World indeed 
