Mycenaean Greek

This article is about Achaean Greek. For the later dialectused in Achaea and the Peloponnese, see Achaean DoricGreek.

Mycenaean Greek is the most ancient attested form ofthe written Greek language, used on the Greek mainland,Crete and Cyprus in the 16th to 12th centuries BC, beforethe hypothesised Dorian invasion which was often citedas the terminus post quem for the coming of the Greeklanguage to Greece. The language is preserved in inscrip-tions in Linear B, a script first attested on Crete before the14th century BC. Most instances of these inscriptions areon clay tablets found in Knossos in central Crete, and inPylos in the southwest of the Peloponnese. Other tabletshave been found at Mycenae itself, Tiryns and Thebesand at Chania inWestern Crete.[2] The language is namedafter Mycenae, one of the major centres of MycenaeanGreece.The tablets remained long undeciphered, and many lan-guages were suggested for them, until Michael Ventris de-ciphered the script in 1952 and by a preponderance ofevidence demonstrated the language to be an early formof Greek.The texts on the tablets are mostly lists and inventories.No prose narrative survives, much less myth or poetry.Still, much may be glimpsed from these records aboutthe people who produced them and about MycenaeanGreece, the period before the so-called Greek Dark Ages.

1 Orthography

The Mycenaean language is preserved in Linear B writ-ing, which consists of about 200 syllabic signs and lo-gograms. Since Linear B was derived from Linear A, thescript of an undeciphered Minoan language probably un-related to Greek, it does not reflect fully the phoneticsof Mycenaean. In essence, a limited number of syllabicsigns must represent a much greater number of producedsyllables, better represented phonetically by the letters ofan alphabet. Orthographic simplifications therefore hadto be made. The main ones are:[3]

• There is no disambiguation for the Greek categoriesof voice and aspiration, excepting dentals d, t: ,e-ko may be either egō (“I”) or ekhō (“I have”).

• Any m and n before a consonant and any incidenceof syllable-final l, m, n, r, s are omitted. , pa-ta is

Inscription of Mycenaean Greek written in Linear B. Archaeo-logical Museum of Mycenae.

panta (“all”); , ka-ko is khalkos (“copper”).

• Consonant clusters must be dissolved orthographi-cally, creating apparent vowels: , po-to-ri-neis ptolin (classical polin, “city” ACC).

• R and L are not disambiguated: , qa-si-re-u isgʷasileus (classical basileus, “king”).

• Initial aspiration is not indicated: , a-ni-ja ishāniai (“reins”).

• Length of vowels is not marked.

• The consonant usually transcribed 'z' probably rep-resents *dy, initial *y, *ky, *gy.[4]

• q- is a labio-velar kʷ or gʷ and in some names ghʷ:[4], qo-u-ko-ro is gʷoukoloi (classical boukoloi,

“cowherds”).

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2 4 GREEK FEATURES

• Initial s before a consonant is not written: , ta-to-mo is stathmos (“station, outpost”).

• Double consonants are not represented: , ko-no-so is Knōsos (classical Knossos).

In addition to these spelling rules, signs are not poly-phonic (more than one sound) but sometimes they are ho-mophonic (a sound can be represented by more than onesign), which are not “true homophones” but are “overlap-ping values.”[5] Long words may omit a middle or finalsign.For more details on this topic, see Linear B.

2 Phonology

Mycenaean preserves some archaic Proto-Indo-Europeanand Proto-Greek features not present in later AncientGreek.One archaic feature is the set of labiovelar consonants [ɡʷ,kʷ, kʷʰ], written ⟨q⟩. They split into /b, p, pʰ/, /d, t, tʰ/,or /g k kʰ/ in Ancient Greek depending on context anddialect.Another set is the semivowels /j w/ and the glottal frica-tive /h/ between vowels. All of these were lost in stan-dard Attic Greek, but /w/ was preserved in some Greekdialects and written as digamma ⟨ϝ⟩ or beta ⟨β⟩.It is unclear how the sound transcribed as ⟨z⟩ was pro-nounced. It may have been a voiced or voiceless affricate/dz/ or /ts/ (marked with asterisks in the table above). Itderives from [kʲ], [ɡʲ], [dʲ] and some initial [j], and waswritten as ζ in the Greek alphabet. In Attic, it was pro-nounced [zd] in many cases, and as [z] in Modern Greek.There were at least five vowels /a e i o u/, which could beboth short and long.As noted above, the syllabic Linear B script used torecord Mycenaean is extremely defective, distinguishingonly the semivowels ⟨j w⟩; the sonorants ⟨m n r⟩; thesibilant ⟨s⟩; the stops ⟨p t d k q z⟩; and (marginally) ⟨h⟩.Voiced, voiceless and aspirate occlusives are all writtenwith the same symbols, except that ⟨d⟩ stands for /d/ and⟨t⟩ for both /t/ and /tʰ/). Both /r/ and /l/ are written ⟨r⟩.The sound /h/ is written only when /a/ follows; otherwiseit is unwritten.Vowel and consonant length is not notated, and in mostcircumstances the script is unable to notate a consonantnot followed by a vowel; in such cases, either an extravowel is inserted (often echoing the quality of the fol-lowing vowel), or the consonant is omitted. (See abovefor more details.) This means that determining the ac-tual pronunciation of written words is often difficult, andmakes use of a combination of the PIE etymology of aword, its form in later Greek, and variations in spelling.

Even so, for some words the pronunciation is not knownexactly, especially when the meaning is unclear from con-text or the word has no descendants in the later dialects.

3 Morphology

Unlike later varieties of Greek, Mycenaean Greek prob-ably had seven grammatical cases, the nominative, thegenitive, the accusative, the dative, the instrumental, thelocative, and the vocative. The instrumental and the loca-tive had fallen out of use by Classical Greek, and in mod-ern Greek, only the nominative, accusative, genitive andvocative remain.[6]

Also unlike later varieties of Ancient Greek, the verbalaugment is almost entirely absent from MycenaeanGreek, with only one known exception, , a-pe-do-ke (PY Fr 1184), although even this appears elsewherewithout the augment, as , a-pu-do-ke (KNOd 681).Omission of the augment is also seen in Homer, where itis sometimes included and sometimes not.[7]

4 Greek features

Main article: Proto-Greek language

Mycenaean has already undergone the following soundchanges peculiar to the Greek language and therefore isconsidered to be Greek.[8]

4.1 Phonological changes

• Initial and intervocalic *s has become /h/.

• Voiced aspirates have been devoiced.

• Syllabic liquids have become /ar,al/ or /or,ol/; syl-labic nasals have become /a/ or /o/.

• *kj and *tj have become /s/ before a vowel.

• Initial *j has become /h/ or replaced by ζ (exactvalue unknown, possibly [dz]).

• *gj and *dj have become ζ.

4.2 Morphological changes

• The use of -eus to produce agent nouns

• The third person singular ending -ei

• The infinitive ending -ein (contracted from -e-en)

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4.3 Lexical items

• Uniquely Greek words, e.g.:

• , wa-na-ka, *wanax (later Greek: ἄναξ,ánax, “lord”)

• , qa-si-re-u, *gʷasileus (later Greek: βα-σιλεύς, basiléus, “king”)

• , ka-ko, *kʰalkos (later Greek: χαλκός,chalkos, "bronze")

• Greek forms of words known in other languages,e.g.:

• , e-ra-wo or , e-rai-wo, *elaiwon(later Greek: ἔλαιον, élaion, "olive oil")

• , te-o, *tʰeos (later Greek: θεός, theos,“god”)

• , ti-ri-po, *tripos (later Greek: τρίπους,tripous, “tripod”)

5 Corpus

Main article: Linear B § Corpus

The corpus of Mycenaean-era Greek writing consists ofsome 6,000 tablets and potsherds in Linear B, from LMIIto LHIIIB. No Linear B monuments or non-Linear Btransliterations have yet been found.If it is genuine, the Kafkania pebble, dated to the 17thcentury BC, would be the oldest known Mycenean in-scription, and hence the earliest preserved testimony ofthe Greek language, but it is likely a hoax.[9]

6 See also

• Mycenaean Greece

• Greek language

7 Notes[1] Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel,

Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). “MycenaeanGreek”. Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evo-lutionary Anthropology.

[2] • Chadwick, John (1976). The Mycenaean World.Cambridge UP. ISBN 0-521-29037-6.

[3] Ventris and Chadwick (1973) pages 42–48.

[4] Ventris and Chadwick (1973) page 389.

[5] Ventris & Chadwick (1973) page 390.

[6] Andrew Garrett, “Convergence in the formation of Indo-European subgroups: Phylogeny and chronology”, in Phy-logenetic methods and the prehistory of languages, ed. Pe-ter Forster and Colin Renfrew (Cambridge: McDonald In-stitute for Archaeological Research), 2006, p. 140, citingIvo Hajnal, Studien zum mykenischen Kasussystem. Berlin,1995, with the proviso that “the Mycenaean case systemis still controversial in part”.

[7] Hooker 1980:62

[8] Ventris & Chadwick (1973) page 68.

[9] Thomas G. Palaima, “OL Zh 1: QVOVSQVE TANDEM?"Minos 37-38 (2002-2003), p. 373-85 full text

8 References

• Chadwick, John (1958). The Decipherment of Lin-ear B. Second edition (1990). Cambridge UP. ISBN0-521-39830-4.

• Chadwick, John (1976). The Mycenaean World.Cambridge UP. ISBN 0-521-29037-6.

• Ventris, Michael; Chadwick, John (1953). “Ev-idence for Greek dialect in the Mycenaeanarchives”. Journal of Hellenic Studies 73: 84–103.doi:10.2307/628239. JSTOR 628239.

• Ventris, Michael and Chadwick, John (1956). Doc-uments in Mycenaean Greek. Second edition (1973).Cambridge UP. ISBN 0-521-08558-6.

• Bartoněk, Antonin (2003). Handbuch des mykenis-chen Griechisch. Universitätsverlag C. Winter.ISBN 3-8253-1435-9.

9 Further reading

• Easterling, P & Handley, C. Greek Scripts: An illus-trated introduction. London: Society for the Promo-tion of Hellenic Studies, 2001. ISBN 0-902984-17-9

10 External links

• Jeremy B. Rutter, “Bibliography: The Linear BTablets and Mycenaean Social, Political, and Eco-nomic Organization”

• The writing of the Mycenaeans (contains an imageof the Kafkania pebble)

• Program in Aegean Scripts and Prehistory (PASP)

• Markos Gavalas, MYCENAEAN (Linear B) – EN-GLISH Dictionary (explorecrete.com)

4 10 EXTERNAL LINKS

• Palaeolexicon, Word study tool of ancient languages

• Studies inMycenaean Inscriptions and Dialect, glos-saries of individualMycenaean terms, tablet, and se-ries citations

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