Pre-Greek languages

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

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

>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).

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.  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.

>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.

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>).

In principle neither an Indo-European language nor a Semitic
language seems to fit the bill (except that an IE language of the
Anatolian subgroup just might).

>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).

Except Portuguese of course.

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl