Liang En was quite satisfied with the number of attendees today. After all, this could be considered a very specialized lecture, and gathering so many people to attend was already quite good.
At this moment, he was immensely grateful that his academic achievements were not in mathematics, otherwise, the number of attendees might have been drastically lower.
Soon, Professor Hunter walked up to the stage to briefly introduce Liang En. As Liang En's mentor, his introduction was naturally very realistic and grabbed everyone's attention.
"——Now, please welcome Mr. Liang for an exciting speech!" After the brief introduction, Professor Hunter led the applause, immediately stirring up a wave of clapping.
Although having over a hundred people didn't seem like a lot, when everyone was gathered in a relatively small room, the applause sounded very enthusiastic.
"Hello everyone, I am Liang En, a student like you a few years ago. Now, I am here to share my experiences with you——" After stepping onto the stage, Liang En quickly got into his rhythm.
"In fact, Linear B was discovered and partially translated by many before my extensive discovery and translation. However, the records at that time were very fragmented, so there weren't enough samples for comprehensive analysis."
"If you obtain enough samples, you will find that this language, which is considered the ancestor of the entire European language system, actually has a significant continuity with today's languages——"
Liang En explained this language, which could be called the ancestor of European languages, vividly and in simple terms, interspersed with interesting little archaeological stories, capturing everyone's attention and making the room increasingly silent.
"——Finally, thank you all for listening to me for so long, and I also thank Professor Hunter and the dean who invited me, thank you!" After an hour and a half, Liang En concluded as planned.
Such lectures should not be too short or too long. If too short, the key points wouldn't be conveyed, devaluing the lecture significantly, but if too long, people might get too tired and stop listening.
After the lecture ended, the students present were still eager for more, with some even raising their hands to ask questions. This was actually a recognition of Liang En's lecture, because if the lecture were terrible, everyone would have left directly.
Since everyone was from the same field, most of the questions raised were very specialized. After all, this university was a well-known local institution, so the questions naturally had a high degree of professionalism.
However, these questions were not difficult for Liang En, because he hadn't wasted his time over the past few years and could answer many questions related to ancient civilizations perfectly.
Professor Hunter, who was standing below the stage, was also somewhat astonished, as some questions posed by the students were perplexing even for him, but Liang En's answers enlightened him, pointing out key aspects.
Some questions required Hunter to refer to books to identify the relevant research, while Liang En could start answering after a brief recall.
Liang En's broad knowledge base, allowing him to answer these questions, clearly showcased his profound academic level, making the professor feel that Liang En must have devoted a lot of time and energy to studying after leaving the school.
This also made the professor very satisfied with Liang En, as he had seen too many young but successful individuals stop learning after achieving success, so he naturally appreciated Liang En's continuous learning attitude.
Although Cork University, primarily known for its science and business disciplines, had a mediocre level in archaeology and history, they could still stand at the forefront of research.
However, compared to schools that excelled in these areas, they lacked sufficient personnel and equipment, hence their research scope was relatively narrow.
Therefore, students were not very interested in Liang En's most significant research on the deciphering of ancient Egyptian scripts in history, but focused more on the translation of Linear B.
This was mainly because today's European, especially Western European languages, are heavily influenced by ancient Greek, and Linear B is actually the earliest form of ancient Greek.
"——Yes, the deciphering of this language is also related to Greek. Similar to the previous deciphering of ancient Egyptian scripts, it also started with phonetics——" Under the students' inquiries, Liang En began to explain his deciphering methodology.
Although Liang En's translation was achieved through knowledge injection from skill cards, before publishing his paper, he still went through the process of the other world's significant decipherer Kober's methodology combined with his own discoveries.
This was a necessary process because to convince others with his paper, he needed a very reasonable explanation, rather than simply saying he knew the script, otherwise, the paper wouldn't pass at all.
When Liang En started writing his paper, he found that the research on this script in this world had only progressed to the point where they knew that Linear B was a syllabic script, but also had some logographic symbols.
Additionally, through archaeological site judgments, it was known that some tablets recorded lists of items, and some symbols represented numbers.
Almost all linguists studying this field were trying to guess which language this script corresponded to. The problem was that one language could correspond to several scripts, so there hadn't been any significant breakthroughs for decades.
However, Liang En faced fewer difficulties than others. On one hand, he knew the true nature of this language through the skill cards, and on the other hand, he remembered the methodology of another world's significant decipherer Kober.
So he mimicked that scholar by preparing three papers to thoroughly explain this matter.
In the first paper, Kober concluded that Linear B had inflections. Chinese doesn't have inflections, but many other languages do. Taking English as an example, inflections in English are divided into conjugation and declension.
Conjugation refers to the changes in verbs according to person, tense, number, etc. (e.g., work, works, working, worked).
Declension refers to the changes in nouns, pronouns, articles, etc., due to case, number, gender, etc. (e.g., he, him, and man, men).
This conclusion was drawn because many words in Linear B had the same prefixes but different suffixes. Based on this conclusion, Liang En published the second paper.
In the second paper, he guessed which syllables had the same consonants based on inflected words. Using Japanese as an example, although not very appropriate:
The Japanese pronunciation of "works" might be ヲクス [wo ku su], "working" might be ヲキン [wo ki n], and "worked" might be ヲケト [wo ke to].
Based on the conclusion from the first paper, if we believe these three words are derived from the same word, we can guess that the syllables ク, キ, ケ have the same consonant.
Of course, this is the simplest example, and if we choose longer words, the tendency would be even more obvious.
These two papers could be said to open a new chapter in the entire research, as they moved from many guesses to traceable studies.
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