Pre-Greek languages

Sean Crist kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu
Mon Oct 4 03:13:20 UTC 1999


On Thu, 30 Sep 1999, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal wrote:

> Sean Crist <kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu> wrote:

>> First of all, the script appears to be designed for a language with a much
>> simpler syllable structure than that of the Indo-European languages.  The
>> best guess is that Linear A represents a language whose syllables were
>> something like the type of modern Japanese or Hawaiian, i.e. mostly
>> CV-type syllables, unlike IE which allows very complex onsets and codas
>> (e.g. English "splints", where one syllable has the structure CCCVCCC).

> Not necessarily.  While the language for which Linear A was
> invented is unlikely to have had complex consonant clusters, it
> doesn't follow that it had only CV-type sylables.

I know; that's why I said 'mostly', and also why I picked the example of
Japanese, which does have a limited set of syllable codas.

> The only
> options available at the time were complex logosyllabic systems
> like Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform or Egyptian and Anatolian
> hieroglyphics or simple open syllabaries (in their stripped down
> version, consonantal alphabets), as used in the Semitic Levant.
> The Cretans chose the latter system.

That's assuming that any of these systems had an effect on the development
of Linear A.  I don't think we know this; as far as we know, it developed
in isolation (but I could be mistaken, because I haven't looked thoroughly
into this.)  I think it's been suggested that Egyptian might have had an
indirect effect, but only as a kind of stimulus diffusion, not thru the
dirrect borrowing of specific symbols.

> Except, oddly enough, in the case of t ~ d (assuming this was
> taken over from Linear A: there's nothing special about Greek /d/
> (as opposed to /g/, for instance) which might have prompted
> this).  So we're looking for a language that had at least two
> kinds of dental stops (not necessarily /d/ and /t/), and maybe
> two kinds of velar stops too (Lin. B <kV> vs. <qV>), but could
> get by with single <p> for the labials.  Another characteristic
> is the lack of distinction between /l/ and /r/, and possibly two
> kinds of sibilants (Lin B. <s> and <z>).  (The other consonants
> of Lin B. are <j>, <w>, <m> and <n>).

Yes; I wasn't going into this much detail.  If I'm remembering right,
Linear B also occasionally represents kh- separately from k-.  Just a few
odd glitches in the system.

It's hard to know exactly what to make of this.  Possibly, some of these
symbols had quite different values in Linear A, and whoever worked out
Linear B made the best use of them he/she could, despite apparently being
unwilling to come up with wholly novel symbols.  There were apparently
enough extra symbols around to represent a some of the Greek contrasts,
but not all of them.

  \/ __ __    _\_     --Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
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