He knew that over centuries, place names tend to remain constant, and decided to compare Linear B to an ancient syllabary from the island of Cyprus.

他知道，即使历经数个世纪，地名也大多保持不变，于是他决定将线形文 B和塞浦路斯岛上的古代音节文进行对比。

When Ventris plugged some of the sounds of the Cypriot syllabary into the Linear B inscriptions, he came up with the word Knossos, the name of the city where Evans had discovered his tablets.

当文特里斯将塞浦路斯音节文的某些发音代入到线形文 B 中时，他得到了 “斯” 这个词，也就是伊文斯发现泥板的城市的名。

However, he did make two accurate observations: the tablets were administrative records, and the script was a syllabary, where each symbol represented both a consonant and a vowel, mixed with characters that each represented a whole word.

不过，他的确做出了两项准确的观察：这些泥板是行政记录；文是音节文，其中的每个符号都代表了一个辅音加元音，并融进了一些代表整词的符。