But for three thousand intervening years, this sentence was meaningless?
It was not meaningless within the model that you describe (see one-place vs two-place functions): Linear A is a language which supports sentences equivalent to English “Crete is rocky and dry”. Whether this model is a good one will be determined when the translation key is found.
It was not meaningless within the model that you describe (see one-place vs two-place functions): Linear A is a language which supports sentences equivalent to English “Crete is rocky and dry”. Whether this model is a good one will be determined when the translation key is found.
A translation key is only possible if it is a good model (though I also think all languages are necessarily inter-translatable).