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Mycenaean language
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Mycenaean is the most ancient attested form of the Greek language, spoken on the Greek mainland and on Crete in the 16th to 11th centuries BCE, before the Dorian invasion. It is preserved in inscriptions in Linear B, a script first attested on Crete before the 14th century BCE. Most instances of these inscriptions are on clay tablets found in Knossos in central Crete, and in Pylos in the southwest of the Peloponnese. The language is named after Mycenae, the first of the palaces to be excavated.
The tablets remained long undeciphered, and every conceivable language was suggested for them, until Michael Ventris deciphered the script in 1952 and by a preponderance of evidence proved the language to be an early form of Greek.
The texts on the tablets are mostly lists and inventories.
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Encyclopedia
Mycenaean is the most ancient attested form of the Greek language, spoken on the Greek mainland and on Crete in the 16th to 11th centuries BCE, before the Dorian invasion. It is preserved in inscriptions in Linear B, a script first attested on Crete before the 14th century BCE. Most instances of these inscriptions are on clay tablets found in Knossos in central Crete, and in Pylos in the southwest of the Peloponnese. The language is named after Mycenae, the first of the palaces to be excavated.
The tablets remained long undeciphered, and every conceivable language was suggested for them, until Michael Ventris deciphered the script in 1952 and by a preponderance of evidence proved the language to be an early form of Greek.
The texts on the tablets are mostly lists and inventories. No prose narrative survives, much less myth or poetry. Still, much may be glimpsed from these records about the people who produced them, and about the Mycenaean period at the eve of the so-called Greek Dark Ages.
Orthography
The Mycenaean language is preserved in Linear B writing, which consists of about 200 syllabic signs and logograms. Since Linear B was derived from Linear A, the script of an undeciphered Minoan language probably unrelated to Greek, it does not reflect fully the phonetics of Mycenaean. In essence, a limited number of syllabic signs must represent a much greater number of produced syllables, better represented phonetically by the letters of an alphabet. Orthographic simplifications therefore had to be made. The main ones are:
- There is no disambiguation for the Greek phonological categories of voice and aspiration, excepting dentals d, t. E-ko may be either ego or ekho.
- Any M and n before a consonant and any incidence of syllable-final l, m, n, r, s are omitted. Pa-ta is panta; ka-ko is khalkos.
- Consonant clusters must be dissolved orthographically, creating apparent vowels. Po-to-li-ne is ptolin.
- R and l are not disambiguated. Pa-si-re-u is basileus.
- Initial aspiration is not indicated. A-ni-ja is haniai.
- Length of vowels is not marked.
- Z is used for *dy, initial *y, *ky, *gy.
- q- is a labio-velar kw or gw and in some names ghw. Qo-u-ko-ro is gwoukoloi, classical boukoloi.
- Initial s before a consonant is not written. Ta-to-mo is stathmos.
- Double consonants are not represented. Ko-no-so is Knosos, classical Knossos.
In addition to these spelling rules, signs are not polyphonic (more than one sound) but sometimes they are homophonic (a sound can be represented by more than one sign), which are not "true homophones" but are "overlapping values." Long words may omit a middle or final sign.
Phonology
The script differentiates five vowel qualities, a, e, i, o, u, the semivowels w and j (also transcribed as y), three sonorants, m, n, r (standing in for l as well), one sibilant s and six occlusives, p, t, d, k, q (the usual transcription for all labiovelars) and z (which includes , and sounds which later became Greek ?).
Mycenaean also preserves /w/, which survived in some Greek dialects as the alphabetic digamma or F until it was altogether lost later, and the intervocalic /h/.
The Mycenaean form of Greek preserves a number of archaic features of its Indo-European heritage, such as the labiovelar consonants that underwent context-dependent sound changes by the time alphabetic Greek writing began a few hundred years later.
Morphology
Unlike later varieties of Greek, Mycenaean Greek probably had seven grammatical cases, the nominative, the genitive, the accusative, the dative, the instrumental, the locative, and the vocative. The instrumental and the locative had fallen out of use by Classical Greek, and in modern Greek, only the nominative, accusative, genitive and vocative remain.
Greek features
Mycenaean has already undergone the following sound changes that created the Greek language and therefore is considered to be Greek.
Phonological changes
- Initial and intervocalic *s have been lost
- Initial *j has been lost or replaced by ? (exact value unknown, possibly [dz])
- Voiced aspirates have been devoiced
- *kj and *tj have become s before a vowel
- *gj and *dj have become ?
- Syllabic liquids and nasals have become a or o.
Morphological changes
- The use of -eus to produce agent nouns
- The third person singular ending -ei
- The infinitive ending -ein
Lexical items
- Uniquely Greek words; e.g., anax, basileus, elaion
- Greek forms of words known in other languages; e.g., theos, tripos, khalkos.
Corpus
- Main article: Linear B#Corpus
The corpus of Mycenaean-era Greek writing consists of some 6000 tablets and potsherds in Linear B, from LMII to LHIIIB. No Linear B monuments nor non-Linear B transliterations have yet been found.
If it is genuine, the Kafkania pebble, dated to the 17th century BCE, would be the oldest known Mycenean inscription, and hence the earliest preserved testimony of the Greek language.
External links
- (contains an image of the Kafkania pebble)
- (explorecrete.com)
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