Mycenaean (Standardization)

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

>X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

>However they do obviously contain plenty of what some on the list would call
>"everyday language."

-- not unless your definition of "everyday language" excludes complete
sentences.  They're all lists, or things of the order "X holds land on rent
of Y".  Highly stylized.

No poetry, no narrative, no laws, no stories, no legends or religious rituals
(apart from lists of offerings), no royal announcements -- just
record-keeping of a very elementary kind.

In fact, Linear B would be extremely unsuited for anything else _but_ this
sort of short, brusque note, because of the large numer of alternative
meanings for signs.  There are seventy different meanings for the
wheel-shaped sign generally rendered as "ka", for instance -- ga, kha, kas,
kan, and on and on.

If you tried to write anything extensive in Linear B, it would quickly become
hopelessly ambiguous because the words would have too many alternate
meanings.

It's as if we had only one way to write the words pot, peter, pyrite, perhaps
and puddle and then had to figure out which one was meant from context.  The
Mycenaean tablets are readable only because the context of the (short) lists
makes clear what's meant.  It's an abortion of a writing system.

>And they reflect the need to be PRECISE and  predictable.

-- all languages are precise and predictable at that level.  Or do you know
of any one that isn't?

Languages change, but generally so slowly (on a human scale) that nobody's
conscious of it in a time-span of less than generations.  Ordinary linguistic
change generally isn't going to make anything unintelligible in less than
centuries.