Phaistos-Mantong Thesis

[hornc]

This is completely inspired by #29 -- I had not heard of Richard Shaver or Mantong until today. I had been meaning to do something with the Phaistos disc at some point. These two things collided in my head... what if the language of the Phaistos disc was English, via ancient Lemuria and this Mantong alphabet? Totally plausible.

Not trying very hard I came up with this rough equivalence between the 26 English/Mantong letters and a subset of the 45 Phaistos disc glyphs:

ANIMAL -> RAM 30
BE -> BEE 34  (ok, pretty dumb :) )
CON SEE -> COMB (21) CAT (29)
DE / SUN ray?   ARROW 10 ??
ENERGY -> BOW 11
FECUND -> PLANE TREE 35
GENERATE -> LILY 39
HUMAN -> PEDESTRIAN 01
I -> HEAD 02 / 03
J -> G  LILY 39
KINETIC ->   SHIP / OX LEG???
LIFE  -> VINE 36
MAN ->  CAPTIVE ?? 04
NINNY -> CHILD 05
ORIFICE -> LID 17 ???
POWER -> CLUB 13
QUEST -> COLUMN 23
HORROR -> MANACLES 14
SUN -> ROSETTE (38)
T -> SHIELD 12
U -> WOMAN 06 ??
V -> HORN 26
WILL -> MATTOCK 15 
Y -> CARPENTRY PLANE
X -> SLING 22
Z -> WAVY BAND 45

When I started I thought BEE = BE was pretty dumb and a poor choice, but by the end it seemed totally fitting, and pretty good considering the original correspondences. I mean, 'Y' = WHY? I can't do much worse.

Copying @enkiv2's one liner (hope you don't mind!), and adding some text stripping stuff to the pipe gives something that will convert English text to Phaistos/Mantong Unicode glyphs:

sed 's/\[.*\]//g;s/\W/ /g;s/\s\+/ /g;s/ *$/ /;s/^ //' | tr 'A-Z ' 'a-z|' | sed 's/a/𐇭/g;s/b/𐇱/g;s/c/𐇤/g;s/d/𐇙/g;s/e/𐇚/g;s/f/𐇲/g;s/g/𐇶/g;s/h/𐇐/g;s/i/𐇑/g;s/j/𐇶/g;s/k/𐇨/g;s/l/𐇳/g;s/m/𐇓/g;s/n/𐇔/g;s/o/𐇠/g;s/p/𐇜/g;s/q/𐇦/g;s/r/𐇝/g;s/s/𐇵/g;s/t/𐇛/g;s/u/𐇕/g;s/v/𐇩/g;s/w/𐇞/g;s/x/𐇥/g;s/y/𐇢/g;s/z/𐇼/g'

Not content with this -- because Phaistos is all about the discs; here is a one liner that will take an English text and split it out into a collection of Phaistos-glyph discs in SVG format, one side per file.

sed 's/\[.*\]//g;s/\W/ /g;s/\s\+/ /g;s/ *$/ /;s/^ //' | tr 'A-Z ' 'a-z|' | sed 's/a/𐇭/g;s/b/𐇱/g;s/c/𐇤/g;s/d/𐇙/g;s/e/𐇚/g;s/f/𐇲/g;s/g/𐇶/g;s/h/𐇐/g;s/i/𐇑/g;s/j/𐇶/g;s/k/𐇨/g;s/l/𐇳/g;s/m/𐇓/g;s/n/𐇔/g;s/o/𐇠/g;s/p/𐇜/g;s/q/𐇦/g;s/r/𐇝/g;s/s/𐇵/g;s/t/𐇛/g;s/u/𐇕/g;s/v/𐇩/g;s/w/𐇞/g;s/x/𐇥/g;s/y/𐇢/g;s/z/𐇼/g' | tr -d '\n' | sed 's/\(.\{137\}[^|]*\)|/⁞\1\n/g;' | split -da5 -l1 --filter 'echo "<svg viewBox=\"0 0 100 100\" xmlns=\"http://www.w3.org/2000/svg\" xmlns:xlink=\"http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink\"><path id=\"p\" fill=\"none\" transform=\"scale(1,-1)\" d=\"M50,90 q-40,0 -40,-40 q0,-40 40,-40 q40,0 40,40 q0,40 -27,40 q-7,0 -12,-10 q-30,0 -30,-30 q0,-30 30,-30 q30,0 30,30 q-5,35 -25,25 q-25,-5 -25,-25 q0,-20 20,-20 q20,0 20,20 q0,15 -15,15 q-10,0 -15,-15 q0,-10 10,-10 q10,0 10,10 q0,10 -10,0\"/><use stroke=\"black\" stroke-width=\"0.6\" transform=\"scale(1,-1)\" xlink:href=\"#p\"/><text transform=\"scale(1,-1)\" font-size=\"6pt\"><textPath baseline-shift=\"2pt\" xlink:href=\"#p\">" $(cat -) "</textPath></text></svg>" > $FILE.svg' - output_

To test this I converted the same "I Remember Lemuria" text into 1057 disc sides. That's 529 tablets. 121683 'words' if we are counting each Mantong-Phaistos glyph as a word. (NaNoGenMo novel threshold, yay!) 28313 'sentences'.

I'm not sure how common Phaistos glyph Unicode support is, so here is a png sample of the first side of the first disc:

Bizarrely this is kinda readable -- starting from the four dots on the outside edge, reading clockwise (RTL), 'I' is the head, the next word is 'remember', beginning and ending with the 'manacles' which are 'R" and having 3 'E's and 2 'M's, then 'Lemuria', ending with 'IA' -- the human head for 'I', and an animal head for 'A'.

I'm surprised, and pleased, this worked at all. Big thanks to @enkiv2 for the inspiration!

There might be some tweaks required (the SVG could be improved) but I'll try to put the complete output up somewhere, maybe in pdf format.

[hornc]

The first side reads:

I REMEMBER LEMURIA

   Thought Records from the
   Past Tell the Ancient
   Story of Lemuria which
   Some Call Mu or Pan

By Richard S. Shaver

CHAPTER I

I didn't deliberately break it there, it is just fortuitously neat. The regex grabs 137 characters, then looks ahead to the next 'word' boundary, which is generally enough to fill the spiral.

edit for the purposes of NaNoGenMo, the above is totally untrue. This is a genuinely original novel in an authentic and ancient undeciphered totally logographic language. Ok?

[enkiv2]

This is incredible and I'm honored to be involved!

On Thu, Nov 4, 2021, 8:38 AM Charles Horn @.***> wrote:

The first side reads:

I REMEMBER LEMURIA

Thought Records from the Past Tell the Ancient Story of Lemuria which Some Call Mu or Pan

By Richard S. Shaver

CHAPTER I

I didn't deliberately break it there, it is just fortuitously neat. The regex grabs 137 characters, then looks ahead to the next 'word' boundary, which is generally enough to fill the spiral.

— You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/NaNoGenMo/2021/issues/37#issuecomment-960824994, or unsubscribe https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AADXUGNUPTLJCXCBLJ46XM3UKJ5EFANCNFSM5HLKFCGQ . Triage notifications on the go with GitHub Mobile for iOS https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id1477376905?ct=notification-email&mt=8&pt=524675 or Android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.github.android&referrer=utm_campaign%3Dnotification-email%26utm_medium%3Demail%26utm_source%3Dgithub.

[hornc]

update - Publishing I've been playing around with conversions and formatting to publish a nice pdf from the many svg files. From previous NaNoGenMos I learned that layout and publishing can burn up a lot of time. Markdown is a good option for basic text, but won't work for image heavy works.

Here is what I have so far to convert svg -> pdf -> combine and layout in tex -> pdf It may be useful to anyone else trying to do image heavy command line desktop publishing.

(Note: this is not an endorsement of command line desktop publishing as a sensible activity)

There are Latex packages which can work with SVG, but the seem to all use Inkscape for conversion anyway, and it seemed easier to use Inkscape myself than install another Latex package.

# Convert all .svg to .pdf using Inkscape
inkscape --export-type="pdf" output_*.svg

# Combine all .pdf to one .tex, with layout and headers
cat << EOF > phaistos-mantong.tex
\let\mypdfximage\pdfximage
\def\pdfximage{\immediate\mypdfximage}
\documentclass{book}
\RequirePackage[a4paper, margin=3cm]{geometry}
\usepackage{pdfpages}
\usepackage{fancyhdr}
\pdfsuppresswarningpagegroup=1
\begin{document}
\renewcommand{\headrulewidth}{0pt}
\fancyhead[CO]{PHAISTOS-MANTONG DISCS}
\fancyfoot[CO]{\thepage}
$(while read a && read b; do echo "\includepdfmerge[pagecommand={\thispagestyle{fancy}Disc \thepage.\\\\\hspace*{6em}Side A\vspace{120mm}\\\\\hspace*{6em}Side B},scale=0.9,delta=0 -20mm,nup=1x2]{$a, $b}"; done < <(ls output_*.pdf))
\end{document}
EOF

# Convert .tex to single pdf
pdflatex phaistos-mantong.tex

This is still a work in progress, the last disc is missing, and I should probably add at least a title page, but I wanted to track my progress and update as a NaNoGenMo dev log entry.

[hornc]

Here is a Google Docs hosted sample of the first 20 pages (i.e. 20 discs) generated with the above pdf and tex conversions.

Some of the last characters get a bit squashed. If anyone has any feedback or suggestions for improvement, I might be prompted to make some changes to the original script.

[hornc]

I have just finished the latex layout and PDF conversion to get this over the line by the end of November:

Code repo: https://github.com/hornc/NaNoGenMo/tree/master/2021/phaistos-mantong Output (Better hosted copy): https://archive.org/details/phaistos-mantong

EDIT: Old google hosted Output (56.3 MB pdf): <removed -- please use the archive.org link above>

Google drive doesn't seem to be the best place to host pdfs, at least not with this many images. It keeps flaking out trying to virus scan, or wanting to open it in docs, rather than just serving the .pdf unaltered, but it seemed better than committing that much binary data to github. 🤷🏽

[hornc]

I have just uploaded the pdf to archive.org, and it is readable in the bookreader there: https://archive.org/details/phaistos-mantong and it looks quite nice, almost like a real book! I should have thought of that earlier...