Every Child Is a Language Prodigy
Established in 2012, Ventris Learning was named after Michael Ventris (1922-1956), an English architect and amateur philologist.1 In 1952, Ventris was credited with solving Linear B, an ancient syllabic Greek script (1400 to 1200 BC). Discovered in 1900 on clay tablets at the Palace of Minos in Crete, Linear B was one of the great unsolved mysteries in academia for half a century. Ventris proved that the script symbols represented an early dialect of Greek, not an unknown language. Cambridge linguist (and WW ll codebreaker) John Chadwick was the first scholar to confirm Ventris’ breakthrough and the two collaborated on its first scholarly publication.2
Ventris’ decipherment was made possible by the prior work of classicist Dr. Alice Kober (1906-1950)3 who authored three published papers on the script. Determined to learn its meaning, Kober spent a decade cataloging every Linear B character and word on tens of thousands of index cards made by hand from whatever material she could find (including during World War II when paper was scarce).
Dr. Kober studied the frequency of the characters at the beginnings and ends of words along with their relation to each other. These phonetic relationships and patterns made it possible for Ventris to establish the script’s fundamental orthography. Together, Ventris’ and Kober’s remarkable achievements unlocked the earliest Greek writing system (Linear B predates the Greek alphabet by several centuries), pushing back understandings of Greek history to the Late Bronze Age.
As a child, Ventris was fluent in Polish (his mother’s first language) and during his lifetime he studied Swiss German, Greek, Latin, Swedish, and (during WW II as a RAF flight navigator) Russian. He bought a German book on Egyptian hieroglyphs when he was seven and he began studying Linear B as a hobby at age 14. Michael Ventris was considered a language prodigy – which every child is.
- Robinson, Andrew. The Man Who Deciphered Linear B. Thames and Hudson Ltd, 2012. Web. 14 Oct. 2022.
- Ventris, Michael and John Chadwick (1953), ‘Evidence for Greek dialect in the Mycenaean archives’, Journal of Hellenic Studies 73, 84–103
- From this article which appeared in print on May 12, 2013, Section SR, Page 9 of the New York edition with the headline: Alice E. Kober, 43; Lost to History No More.