Minoan is an IE language?

Ernest P. Moyer epmoyer at netrax.net
Sat Mar 3 08:06:20 UTC 2001


Anthony:

Thanks for your comments.

Now we are making some sense of this linguistic muddle in the Mediterranean.

I have a neighbor who came from Crete as a young man.  Several years ago he
returned to visit his relatives, and was impressed by the very difficult task
of reaching them in the mountainous terrain.  He forgot what it was like.

We tend to rigidly classify languages, when the rigidity is only in our minds.

Ernest

"anthony.appleyard at umist.ac.uk" wrote:

[ moderator snip ]

> Could some of the Linear A inscriptions be different languages? Homer said
> that in Crete there were many languages. It could be that for a time
> some or all of pre-IE speakers, non-IE descendants of the Sea Peoples
> migrants, Anatolian speakers. Semitic Phoenicians who had sailed in, and
> Greeks, lived there together. Communication in much of Crete was difficult
> (ignoring the modern motor roads), and the biggest possible freight load was
> what can be carried by the biggest possible mule; Crete for superhighways
> merely had "kalderimia", which are paved mule tracks, very liable on steep
> ground to turn into flights of steps, impassible to wheels. Linear B records
> go into chariots at great length, but what were they used for? Not likely
> for routine war and travel within Crete. And even if I did manage to
> mule-pack the chariots and lead their horses to a flat battleground such as
> the Lassithi Plain, I would find it full of strongly built stone field walls
> and no use for chariots. And the people in the next valley could speak
> another language and hold onto it due to lack of long-range communication.



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