QUORA: What is currently known about the Tărtăria tablets and the Vinča symbols?

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Answered Oct 27, 2017 · Upvoted by Thomas Wier, Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the Free University of Tbilisi. and Nick Pharris, Ph.D. Linguistics, University of Michigan (2006)

"As I’ve mentioned in earlier answers, writing was invented independently four times, three if you consider Egyptian hieroglyphs as being from Cuneiform. All modern writing systems, and every writing system to have ever existed, comes from one of those four.

Well, almost every. Maybe.

https://qphl2.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-17a830e4598016378251f97ac44564a4.webp

The Tărtăria tablets, containing the Vinča inscriptions in question. They date to 5300 BC, millennia before the first concrete evidence of true writing in Mesopotamia.

Assorted Vinča characters. The earliest use of the swastika - which was a positive religious symbol before WWII, and still is in Hinduism and Buddhism - is found among the Vinča inscriptions. From Wikipedia.

First, to get a strange idea out of the way, this is not the ancestor of any modern writing systems, especially not any alphabetic ones. (See also here.)

Second, we’re not completely sure it’s a script, or even proto-writing. It’s complex enough that it may have represented things in more detailed ways than just drawing would, but it’s probably not a “true script”, i.e., one that can represent a full language. Mathematical notation, for example, is not a true script, because it can’t represent anything beyond, well, math.

If the Vinča symbols do represent a language, we’ve got some issues. The first problem is that they might be a clever hoax, which is always an issue in script-deciphering.

But let’s say they are authentic and do represent a language. Just this knowledge - not even which language it was, but whether it was a script - would be incredible: we would have physical evidence of a script from Neolithic, pre-Indo-European civilization, which is also named Vinča.

Let’s say it is a true script - and to be clear again, it likely isn’t; this is just for an example. We’re met immediately with a rather glaring issue: most of the inscriptions, which are scattered across eastern Europe and span centuries, are very short. The issue of having primarily or solely short inscriptions also plagues the decipherment of the Indus script, but the quest for Vinča has it worse, with many of the inscriptions only one or two characters long.

Approximate location of the Vinča culture. From Wikipedia.

But let’s pretend we do have a long text in Vinča, something that unfortunately eludes its crypto-archaeo-linguistic pursuers. There are three levels of difficulty in deciphering languages:

1. The language is known, the script is not: You have a vocabulary you can work from, provided the script is long enough and has enough context. Find some proper nouns and you’re set.
2. The script is known, the language is not: You can read the language and likely pronounce it and maybe recognize some loanwords if there are any.
3. Neither the script nor the language are known: Well now you have a problem to the scale of hieroglyphs, Linear B, the Indus script, and the Voynich manuscript. Proper nouns and bilingual inscriptions will be your holy grails, if you can find any.

Vinča sits at about a 4. Not only is the language not known and the script wholly undeciphered (if it is a script at all), but their proper nouns would be nothing like those in any languages we know of.

Worse than that, Vinča’s contemporary languages are all reconstructed, because, well, we have no way of knowing exactly what they’d be like. To reconstruct a language, you need surviving descendants; the only surviving pre-Indo-European languages in Europe are the Uralic languages and Basque, and chances are the Vinča language is related to neither.

• We don’t know what the script says; we don’t know if it’s a script.
• We don’t know what the language is; we effectively can’t know.
• If we could read it, we would push history back by thousands of years.

I leave it as a virtually impossible task to the reader, if they’d be up to it: it’s only virtually impossible, after all. Until then, to answer your question, we know little about the language it encodes, if that.

Thanks for asking!"

5.5k Views · View Upvoters · Answer requested by Slava Korshunov