Mycenaean Greek language

language
name=Mycenaean Greek
nativename=Native Name Unknown
region=southern Balkans/Crete
extinct=12th century BC
familycolor=Indo-European
fam2=Graeco-Armenian
fam3=Greek
fam4=Ancient Greek
iso2=ine
iso3=gmy
script=Linear B

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 BC, before the Dorian invasion. It is preserved in inscriptions in Linear B, a script invented on Crete before the 14th century BC. 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: [Ventris and Chadwick (1973) pages 42-48.]
* There is no disambiguation for the Greek phonological categories of voice and aspiration, excepting dentals "d", "t". E-ko may be either egō or ekhō.
* 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 hāniai.
* Length of vowels is not marked.
* Z is used for *dy, initial *y, *ky, *gy.Ventris and Chadwick (1973) page 389.]
* q- is a labio-velar k^w or g^w and in some names gh^w. Qo-u-ko-ro is g^woukoloi, classical boukoloi.
* Initial s before a consonant is not written. Ta-to-mo is stathmos.
* Double consonants are not represented. Ko-no-so is Knōsos, 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." [Ventris & Chadwick (1973) page 390.] 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 IPA| [kʲ] , IPA| [gʲ] and IPA| [dʲ] sounds which later became Greek ζ).

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. [Andrew Garrett, "Convergence in the formation of Indo-European subgroups: Phylogeny and chronology", in "Phylogenetic methods and the prehistory of languages", ed. Peter Forster and Colin Renfrew (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research), 2006, p. 140, citing Ivo Hajnal, "Studien zum mykenischen Kasussystem". Berlin, 1995, with the proviso that "the Mycenaean case system is still controversial in part".]

Greek features

Mycenaean has already undergone the following sound changes that created the Greek language and therefore is considered to be Greek. [Ventris & Chadwick (1973) page 68.]

Phonological changes

* Initial and intervocalic *s have been lost
* Initial *j has been lost or replaced by ζ (exact value unknown, possibly [dz] )
* Voiced aspirates have been devoiced
* *kj and *tj have become s before a vowel
* *gj and *dj have become ζ
* 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 BC, would be the oldest known Mycenean inscription, and hence the earliest preserved testimony of the Greek language.

Notes

References

External links

* [http://projectsx.dartmouth.edu/classics/history/bronze_age/lessons/bib/25bib.html Jeremy B. Rutter, "Bibliography: The Linear B Tablets and Mycenaean Social, Political, and Economic Organization"]
* [http://www.geocities.com/yongmax/linb_eng.htm The writing of the Mycenaeans] (contains an image of the Kafkania pebble)
* [http://www.utexas.edu/research/pasp/ Program in Aegean Scripts and Prehistory (PASP)]
* [http://www.explorecrete.com/archaeology/linearB.pdf Markos Gavalas, MYCENAEAN (Linear B) - ENGLISH Dictionary] (explorecrete.com)

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