47 Highpoint, North Hill, Highgate, LONDON, N6. Good Friday 1948. 26 March Dear Miss Kober, Sir John Myres sent on your last letter to me, and I think the simplest will be to let you-have a copy of my answer direct. I was very interested in your comments, but I can't really take any responsibility for the text - I was copy- ing blindly from a specimen page. I've amended my conventional symbols, as you can see from the enclosed sheet, but there are lots of possibilities, and this may still not be the most work- able. I was grateful for the sign-list, because though I have Myres' printed list, _-_ a number of the signs there seem to be drawn in rather untypical shapes, and I can't find any dis- tinction, for example, between _ and _ .(Incidentally, are _,_ and _ all identical? If it comes to copying out all the inscriptions for publication, I shall have taken on a rather laborious job, but it may be the only way to get the whole material out in a form where it'll be of use. I should have thought your notes would be invaluable. Minoan is only a part-time job with me 7 and there is always the problem of getting enough material to work on: in fact, I don't feel like coming out publicly with any more theories until I've laid my hands on all the available material. Incidental- ly, you refer to the Pylos inscriptions in your letter: is there any prospect of their being published, or will you have any pri- vate access to them? To judge from the examples published in AJA they look in some ways more interesting than the Knossos ones. A point that interests me is: how often do words coming directly in front of the word _-_-_ begin in _ ? My own position is that I still stand by my 1940 AJA article in broad outline, but I've given up most of the phonetic values and word-identifications mentioned there. I'm more than ever inclined to believe in the existence of a common pre-hellenic language, which we might call Aegean if 'Pelasgian' is objectionable, and which has as dialects both Minoan and the later Etruscan. In fact possibly the nearest approach to the language of the Minoan texts might be that of the Lemnos inscrip- tion. However, it takes one all one's time to find out what is known of Etruscan, before one ever gets on to Minoan. I was very interested to read your articles, but I must admit that I feel the "paradigms" you mention are in the main less likely to be grammatical inflexions than alter- native name-endings applied to the same radicals. I should be very interested to hear how far you have got at present, and particularly if you have any ideas on phonetic values, or have identified any words, as opposed to names. _-_ looks interesting: any idea what it means? In think- ing how one might publish the Knossos material, it seemed to me that we should have to add critical appendices to the text, per- haps even a series as time went on. Then I began to day-dream that one might fit into this scheme a symposium from everyone at present working on Minoan language and writing, explaining the position they had reached, and suggesting the next lines of approach,- possibly developing into a series of mutual bul- letins routed through someone with a duplicator.