Mycenaean Greek language

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Mycenaean Greek
Native Name Unknown
Spoken in: southern Balkans/Crete
Language extinction: 12th century BC
Language family: Indo-European
 Greek
  Ancient Greek
   Mycenaean Greek 
Writing system: Linear B
Language codes
ISO 639-1: None
ISO 639-2: ine
ISO 639-3: gmy 
Map of Greece as described in Homer's Iliad. The geographical data is believed to refer primarily to Bronze Age Greece, when Mycenaean Greek would have been spoken, and therefore can be used as an estimator of the range.
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.
History of the
Greek language
(see also: Greek alphabet)
Proto-Greek (c. 2000 BC)
Mycenaean (c. 1600–1000 BC)
Ancient Greek (c. 1000–330 BC)
Dialects:
Aeolic, Arcadocypriot, Attic-Ionic,
Doric, Locrian, Pamphylian;
Homeric Greek.
Possibly Macedonian.
Koine Greek (c. 330 BC–330)*
Medieval Greek (330–1453)
Modern Greek (from 1453)
Dialects:
Cappadocian, Cretan, Cypriot,
Demotic, Griko, Katharevousa,
Pontic, Tsakonian, Yevanic

*Dates (beginning with Ancient Greek) from D.B. Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics: An Exegetical Syntax of the New Testament (Grand Rapids 1997), 12.

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 in central Crete, and in Pylos in the southwest of the Peloponnese. 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 by a preponderance of evidence 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.

Contents

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. In essence, a limited number of syllabic signs must represent a much greater number of produced syllables, better represented phonetically by the letters of an alphabet. Orthographic simplifications therefore had to be made. The main ones are:[1]

In addition to these spelling rules, signs are not polyphonic (more than one sound) but sometimes they are homophonic (a sound can be represented by more than one sign), which are not "true homophones" but are "overlapping values."[3] Long words may omit a middle or final sign.

For more details on this topic, see Linear B.

Phonology

The script differentiates five vowel qualities, a, e, i, o, u, the semivowels w and j (also transcribed as y), three sonorants, m, n, r (standing in for l as well), one sibilant s and six occlusives, p, t, d, k, q (the usual transcription for all labiovelars) and z (which includes [kʲ], [gʲ] and [dʲ] sounds which later became Greek ζ).

Mycenaean also preserves /w/, which survived in some Greek dialects as the alphabetic digamma or F until it was altogether lost later, and the intervocalic /h/.

The Mycenaean form of Greek preserves a number of archaic features of its Indo-European heritage, such as the labiovelar consonants that underwent context-dependent sound changes by the time alphabetic Greek writing began a few hundred years later.

Morphology

Unlike later varieties of Greek, Mycenaean Greek probably had seven grammatical cases, the nominative, the genitive, the accusative, the dative, the instrumental, the locative, and the vocative. The instrumental and the locative had fallen out of use by Classical Greek, and in modern Greek, only the nominative, accusative, genitive and vocative remain.[4]

Greek features

Main article: Proto-Greek language

Mycenaean has already undergone the following sound changes that created the Greek language and therefore is considered to be Greek.[5]

Phonological changes

Morphological changes

Lexical items

Corpus

Main article: Linear B#Corpus

The corpus of Mycenaean-era Greek writing consists of some 6000 tablets and potsherds in Linear B, from LMII to LHIIIB. No Linear B monuments nor non-Linear B transliterations have yet been found.

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.

Notes

  1. ↑ Ventris and Chadwick (1973) pages 42-48.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Ventris and Chadwick (1973) page 389.
  3. ↑ Ventris & Chadwick (1973) page 390.
  4. ↑ Andrew Garrett, "Convergence in the formation of Indo-European subgroups: Phylogeny and chronology", in Phylogenetic methods and the prehistory of languages, ed. Peter Forster and Colin Renfrew (Cambridge: McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research), 2006, p. 140, citing Ivo Hajnal, Studien zum mykenischen Kasussystem. Berlin, 1995, with the proviso that "the Mycenaean case system is still controversial in part".
  5. ↑ Ventris & Chadwick (1973) page 68.

References

External links

Ages of Greek
c. 2000 BC c. 1600–1100 BC c. 800–300 BC c. 300 BC – AD 330 c. 330–1453 since 1453

Proto-Greek

Mycenaean