Mycenaean language? |
Did you mean | Travel | Economics | Finance | Marketing | Business | Culture | Geography | History | Life | Mathematics | Science | Society | Technology | New site added |
| Add a link on the top of this Mycenaean language page Express submission by secure payment ! |
Mycenaean is the most ancient attested form of the Greek language, spoken on the Greek mainland and on Crete in the 16th to 11th centuries BC, before the Dorian invasion. It is preserved in inscriptions in Linear B, a script invented on Crete before the 14th century BC. Most instances of these inscriptions are on clay tablets found in Knossos and in Pylos. The language is named after Mycenae, the first of the palaces to be excavated.
The tablets remained long undeciphered, and every conceivable language was suggested for them, until Michael Ventris deciphered the script in 1952 and uncontestably proved the language to be an early form of 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 about the people who produced them, and about the Mycenaean period at the eve of the so-called Greek Dark Ages.
Have to see |
Contents |
|
Phonology and orthography
The Mycenaean language is preserved in Linear B writing, which consists of about 200 syllabic signs and logograms. Since Linear B was derived from Linear A, the script of an undeciphered Minoan language probably unrelated to Greek, it does not reflect fully the phonetics of Mycenaean: consonant clusters must be dissolved orthographically, and r and l are not disambiguated, nor is there a disambiguation for the Greek phonological categories of voiced/unvoiced (excepting dentals d, t) and aspirated/unaspirated; syllable-final l, m, n, r, s are omitted.
The script differentiates five vowel qualities, a, e, i, o, u, the semi-vowels w and j (also transcribed as y), three liquids, m, n, r and seven occlusives, d, k, p, q, s, t, z.
Thus *khrusos, "gold" was spelled with the syllabic signs ku-ru-so, *gwous, "cow" with the signs qo-u, and *khalkos "bronze" as ka-ko.
The Mycenaean form of Greek preserves a number of archaic features of its Indo-European language heritage, such as the labiovelar consonants that underwent context-dependent sound changes by the time alphabetic Greek writing began a few hundred years later.
Corpus
The Mycenaean corpus consists of some 6000 tablets, and may be increased by future finds. The tablets are classified by the location of their excavation.
- KN Knossos: ca. 4360 tablets
- PY Pylos : 1087 tablets
- TH Thebes (mycenaean /Tegway/): 99 tablets + 238 published in 2002.
- MY Mycenae: 73 tablets
- TI Tiryns: 27 tablets.
- KH Chania: 4 tablets
- another 170 inscriptions in Linear B were found on vessels.
The publication of the Thebes tablets (L. Godart and A. Sacconi, 2002) was long anticipated, and their actual content was rather disappointing compared to what had been hinted at by the ors in the previous years.
If it is genuine, the Kafkania pebble, dated to the 17th century BC, would be the oldest known Mycenean inscription, and hence the earliest preserved testimony of the Greek language.
References
- Chadwick, John (1958) The Decipherment of Linear B, Second ion (1990). Cambridge UP. ISBN 0521398304
- Chadwick, John (1976) The Mycenaean World, Cambridge UP. ISBN 0521290376
- Ventris, Michael, "Evidence for Greek dialect in the Mycenaean archives", in Journal of Hellenic Studies, LXXVII (1953), pp 84ff.
- Ventris, Michael and Chadwick, John (1956) Documents in Mycenaean Greek, Second ion (1974). Cambridge UP. ISBN 0521085586
External links
- Jeremy B. Rutter, "Bibliography: The Linear B Tablets and Mycenaean Social, Political, and Economic Organization"
- The writing of the Mycenaeans (contains an image of the Kafkania pebble)
- Program in Aegean Scripts and Prehistory (PASP)
See also
| History of the Greek language (see also: Greek language and Category:Hellenic languages and dialects) |
| Pre-history: Proto-Greek language
|
| First phase: Mycenaean language (using Linear B) and unrelated Phoenician alphabet ancestor to Greek alphabet
|
| Second phase: Ancient Greek, consisting in several dialects, amongst which: Ionic, Attic, Doric, Aeolic,w/. (for relations and distinctive features between these dialects, see individual articles and Greek dialects article) |
| Third phase: Koine Greek (Κοινή, synonyms: Hellenistic Greek and Alexandrian dialect, from approx. 323 BC)
|
| Fourth phase: Medieval Greek (synonym: Byzantian Greek or Byzantine Greek language, from approx. 330-395)
|
| Fifth (&sixth) phase: Modern Greek (Νεοελληνική, from approx. 1453) |
| dialects: Demotic or Dhimotiki (Δημοτική), Tsakonic or Tsakonian (Τσακωνική), Pontic (Ποντιακή),w/. |
| "official" formats: 19th century: Katharevousa (Καθαρεύουσα) - since 1976: Koine Modern Greek (Κοινή Νεοελληνική) |