Linear A to Linear B

[Steven A. Gustafson]

petegray wrote:

> Much of Larry's posting appears to me reasonable and common sense, except
> that here I wish to add a quibble.   It seems to me more likely that the
> idea that a language could be written down did not develop in isolation in
> Crete, but was imported from somewhere.    We know that when this happened
> elsewhere, it was very common for the inspiring script to be adapted to the
> new language, rather than for a totally new script to be developed ex nihilo
> (although I grant there are one or two exceptions).    This adaptation often
> meant inadequacies or infelicities in the resultant script.

My impression would be that this is often a matter of cultural prestige;
the prestige of Chinese and Sumerian/Akkadian writing was so great,
that  the one was (badly) used for unrelated languages across Asia, and
the other made into an ill-fitting script for Hittite.  Closer to home,
it hardly seems that the Latin script works well for English, and it
never has; but English speakers learned their letters from people who
looked to Rome as the font of religious and political truth.  The Arabic
script was also adopted to languages that were ill suited to use it,
again as a matter of religious tradition.

On the other hand, the more original the script, the more thought seems
to have gone into its creation.  The Brahmi script may have borrowed the
idea of writing, and maybe a few letter shapes, from a Semitic alphabet;
but it seems to have been extensively remade by sophisticated
grammarians for the purpose of writing Indic languages.  Greek (and
Roman) alphabets were consulted by St. Cyril, but he realized he needed
more, and invented dozens of new letters to create Cyrillic.  The Korean
Hangul script seems to owe something to Chinese writing, at least in the
square shapes and calligraphic forms of the character combinations; but
it is equal to the task of writing Korean.  It has been said that
Sequoya did not quite grasp the notion of alphabetic writing, since his
Cherokee script contains oddly shaped signs reminiscent of Roman letters
used capriciously and without regard to their original values; but his
syllabary is well adapted to the task of writing Cherokee.

The Cretan scripts seem to follow this pattern.  Linear B seems to
resemble Linear A, at least in its general appearance and the shapes of
the characters.  When Greek was written using this script, it was
obvious that it enjoyed some prestige even if it didn't work very well.
But if Linear A is poorly matched to the language it was used for, what
language was it well-made for?

--
Steven A. Gustafson, attorney at law
Fox & Cotner:  PHONE (812) 945 9600   FAX (812) 945 9615
http://www.foxcotner.com

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