Pre-Greek languages

[Sean Crist]

Actually, we can say with pretty fair certainty that Linear A is not Greek
nor any other Indo-European language.

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).

It seems that what happened was something like this: when the pre-Greeks
invaded the areas where Linear A was used, they adapted the existing
script for their own use.  Linear B is actually a very bad script for
representing Greek; it doesn't represent the distinction between
voiceless, voiceless aspirated, and voiced stops. It also doesn't
represent syllable codas at all, and it has to break up complex syllable
onsets and represent them by inserting dummy vowels.  It's much as if you
wrote English using the katakana syllabary of Japanese; you can do it, but
the results are not ideal.

Based on a rigorous analysis of the small Linear A corpus, it appears that
Linear A doesn't inflect the way that the Indo-European languages do, i.e.
with complex inflectional suffixes (David Packard, 1974).  If the sound
values in Linear B are any indication, it appears that an extemely large
number of the Linear A words end in -u, whatever this means (in any case,
it isn't what you generally find in IE languages).

It's too bad that nationalist sentiment muddies the waters so badly.  I
hadn't heard before that some modern Greeks believe that Greek is
indigenous to Greece and is the ancestor of all the IE languages, but I'm
not surprised; similar claims have been made for Germanic, Lithuanian,
etc.

One other caution I'd make is that for any undeciphered script, you can
find any number claims that the writings have been deciphered, with each
interpetation more fanciful than the next.  You have to be very critical
of these claims, because they are rarely backed up with any solid
arguments.  Undeciphered texts attract crackpots like a flame attracts
moths.  This doesn't mean that we won't ever succeed in deciphering Linear
A, but it's just another thing to muddy the waters further.

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