Ciao. I'm Tom di Mino, and I'm on vacation in Bellingham, Washington right now. I'll get back to you later with a formal response.
replyI've also reached out to Dr. Ester Salgarella, so I'm familiar with attempts to apply computational analysis to the corpus, and where previous efforts erred.
Thanks for the context; how do you think this impacts plausibility? Presumably the fact that he made progress in a well studied passage is cause for skepticism? What's your take?
replyWell, the reasoning in the article is that if you take A-TA-I-*301-WA-JA, keep only W-J and assume *301 starts with N, then you get a claimed Semitic root N-W-Y related to dwelling, except I wonder whether that shouldn't be N-W-H instead https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D7%A0%D7%95%D7%95%D7%94 (Semitic isn't my area) so at best one fifth of one word matches two thirds of another therefore iT mUsT bE sEmItIc. A serious attempt at decipherment should at least try to explain the A-TA-I, or any of the other words in the sentence, for that matter.
reply