Pre-Greek languages

[Larry Trask]

On Sun, 26 Sep 1999, Nikos Sarantakos wrote:

[on a recent suggestion that Linear A conceals Greek]

> It is easy to dismiss all that as nationalistic or plain ravings,
> but I for one would want to hear more. In fact, my gut feeling
> (totally unscientific) is that Linear A is most probably Greek. With
> the (enormous) benefit of hindsight, it seems to me preposterously
> nearsighted that all the scientific community before Ventrys (and
> Ventrys himself, almost up to the end) refused to consider the
> hypothesis of Linear B being Greek.

True, but Ventris was eventually forced into this conclusion by his
data.  This is a striking case of the data forcing an investigator into
a conclusion he was never interested in reaching.  This fact alone sets
Ventris's work apart from the numerous cases of eager decipherers
"finding" what they always wanted to find.

Anyway, it is an overstatement to say that "all the scientific
community before Ventris" refused to consider the possibility that
Linear B was Greek.  There were always a number of archaeologists who
favored the view that Linear B was Greek.  Most prominent here was the
Briton A. J. B. Wace, who actively defended the idea.  And Carl Blegen's
discovery of Linear B tablets on the Greek mainland encouraged this view
in archaeological quarters.

Much of the trouble seems to have stemmed from the views of Sir Arthur
Evans, who, for his own reasons, didn't want to find Greeks in Bronze
Age Crete.  He was extremely hostile to the interpretation of Linear B
as Greek, and he used all of his considerable influence to oppose it.
I have read that Evans persecuted Wace to such a degree that Wace was
forced out of Greek archaeology altogether.  Evans also, I'm told, made
every effort to restrict access to the Linear B tablets to the circle of
those who agreed with him that Linear B could not be Greek.  Those with
a different view simply could not get access to the Cretan materials.
Accordingly, it was only after Evans's death in 1941 that it finally
became possible for other scholars to examine the tablets, leading to
Kober's work in the 1940s and then Ventris's in the early 1950s.

An aside.  All this is highly reminiscent of the story Michael Coe tells
about the decipherment of the Mayan inscriptions in his book Breaking
the Maya Code.  In Coe's account, Sir Eric Thompson, the dean of Mayan
studies, was implacably opposed to the view that the Mayan glyphs
represented a perfectly ordinary writing system designed for a Mayan
language, and he too used all of his enormous influence to oppose this
view, to persecute scholars who espoused it, and to deny such scholars
access to the material.  Accordingly, it was only after his death in
1975 that the linguists could gain real access to the texts, after which
the decipherment proceeded rapidly.

As for Linear A, my very scanty knowledge of it suggests that it lacks
the kind of sets identified in Linear B by Alice Kober before Ventris's
work, the sets which proved to represent different inflected forms of
single words or names.  Anybody know anything definite about this?
If this is correct, then it militates against any identification of
Linear A as Greek, or perhaps as any language inflected in the typical
IE fashion.

> But if we assume Linear B is Greek (and I believe this is considered
> proven),

That's certainly my impression!

> it becomes rather self-evident that Linear A is also Greek.

Why "self-evident"?  I'm afraid I don't follow.

Why should the Greeks use Linear A to write their language for a while,
and then abruptly replace it with the rather different Linear B, a
system of the same general kind?  Writing systems are notoriously
conservative, and users are typically reluctant to make even the most
obvious and necessary changes.

Surely the "self-evident" view is the one that seems to be most widely
accepted.  The Greeks reached the Aegean, found a people already there
speaking an alien language and writing it in Linear A.  They took over
this writing system, but found it excessively awkward for writing their
own language, so they modified it to make it more suitable, and the
result was Linear B.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk