Mycenaean Scribes

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

I wrote
<<And the term "designed for a language" assumes something about the skill
and purpose of scribes who were matching symbols to meanings>>

In a message dated 10/5/99 9:37:26 PM, JoatSimeon at aol.com replied:
<<Other scripts of the era match the sounds of the languages for which they
were developed very well.  Why should early Greeks be any dumber?>>

Dumbness has nothing to do with it, of course.  Our first evidence of
Egyptian and Phoenician script are apparently pictograms and only later
acquired phonological equivalencies.  (See also, 114064.1241 at Compuserve.com
just wrote in a very informative post: <<Linear A is autochtonous and cannot
be derived from cuneiform or hieroglyph, so it must have evolved from local
pictograms...>>)

There's also the matter of your statement that early scripts "matched sounds
very well."  MCV recently pointed out, the sound matches were not necessarily
complete matches:

<< 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.>>

Another possibly that I haven't seen mentioned - I don't know what it would
be called - is where scribes are primarily transcribing with descriptors from
a foreign language.  I remember reading about a case of Italian warehousemen
during WWII being given German glossaries so that they could keep inventories
that could be read in German (transcribing from I guess inventories in
Italian.)  These warehousers did not have grammars and did not know German.
So when they came to something not in the glossary, they improvised, often
with Italian additions - a kind of written pidgin, I guess.

If Mycenaean clerks were similarly required to keep track of the kinds of
matters we see later in Linear B, then they may well have been asked to use a
foreign script to write in and the script may have represented a mixture of
Mycenaean and, say, Minoan.

Regards,
Steve Long

PS - Just as a very small matter of civility, it really isn't necessary to
imply a slur like "dumber" where you may have guessed I intended no such
thing.  I hope you understand why neither you or I would want to have our
conclusions re-characterized in those kinds of terms.