Linear B

From Free net encyclopedia

This article is about the ancient syllabary. See linear_b for information on the ECMAScript engine.

Image:Linear B.jpg Linear B is a script that was used for writing Mycenaean, an early form of Greek. It preceded the Greek alphabet (which was an adaptation of the Phoenician alphabet) by several centuries: it seems to have died out with the fall of Mycenaean civilisation; the intervening period, in which there is no evidence of written language, is known as the Dark Ages.

Linear B occurs primarily on tablets dated from the 14th and 13th centuries BCE. The script appears to be related to Linear A, an undeciphered earlier script used for writing the Minoan language, and the later Cypriot syllabary; derivation from another writing system is held to be the reason for its poor compliance with the phonemic principle. It is partly syllabic, with additional logographic signs that are "determinative", or "designational" (yielding "classes", and "types"). As such, it rather resembles modern Japanese writing in graphemic structure.

The first clay tablet at Knossos was discovered by the British archaeologist Arthur Evans on March 31, 1900 and on April 6 he discovered a significant hoard of tablets (measuring 5x10 inches).

The major cities and palaces of Crete kept records for disbursements of goods. Wool, sheep, and grain were some common items, often given to groups of religious people and also to groups of "men watching the coastline". The tablets were kept in groups in baskets on shelves. When some of the palaces burned in large-scale fires precipitated by earthquakes or volcanic events (see Knossos), the fires made "fired-clay tablets" of a portion of the tablets found. Impressions of the basket weaving have been left in the clay.

1 Decipherment
2 Syllabic signs
3 Logograms
4 See also
5 Further reading
6 External links

[edit]

Decipherment

Michael Ventris and John Chadwick deciphered Linear B between 1951–1953. Before their work, Alice Kober had studied Linear B and had managed to construct grids, linking symbols that seemed to have a strong grammatical relationship.

Kober noticed that a number of Linear B words had common roots and suffixes. This led her to believe that Linear B represented an inflected language, with nouns changing their endings depending on their case. However, some characters in the middle of the words seemed to correspond with neither a root nor a suffix. Because this effect was found in other, known languages, Kober surmised that the odd characters were bridging syllables, with the beginning of the syllable belonging to the root and the end belonging to the suffix. This was a reasonable assumption, since Linear B had far too many characters to be considered alphabetic and far too few characters to be logographic; therefore, each character should represent a syllable.

Using the knowledge that certain characters shared the same beginning or ending sounds, Kober built a table similar to the one below; she was unable, however, to link the characters to actual phonetics.

Based on her work, and after making some inspired assumptions, Ventris was able to figure out the pronunciation of the syllables. The deciphering of Linear B proved that it was a written form of Greek, to the amazement of Ventris himself, but also in direct contradiction to the general scientific views of the times. Chadwick, an expert in historical Greek, helped Ventris decipher the text and rebuild the vocabulary and grammar of ancient Cretan Greek.

Ventris' discovery was of immense significance, because he actually showed that a Greek-speaking Minoan-Mycenaean culture existed on Crete. The large majority of Linear B tablets were inventories and bureaucratic documents, with large tables of numbers and sums. This helped historians analyze the structure of ancient Minoan civilization.

[edit]

Syllabic signs

Template:History of the Greek language Linear B has roughly 200 signs, divided into syllabic signs with phonetic values and logograms (or ideograms) with semantic values.

Linear B is assigned Unicode Range 10000–1007F for syllabic signs and 10080–100FF for logograms.

	-a	-e	-i	-o	-u
	𐀀 a	𐀁 e	𐀂 i	𐀃 o	𐀄 u
d-	𐀅 da	𐀆 de	𐀇 di	𐀈 do	𐀉 du
j-	𐀊 ja	𐀋 je		𐀍 jo	𐀎 ju
k-	𐀏 ka	𐀐 ke	𐀑 ki	𐀒 ko	𐀓 ku
m-	𐀔 ma	𐀕 me	𐀖 mi	𐀗 mo	𐀘 mu
n-	𐀙 na	𐀚 ne	𐀛 ni	𐀜 no	𐀝 nu
p-	𐀞 pa	𐀟 pe	𐀠 pi	𐀡 po	𐀢 pu
q-	𐀣 qa	𐀤 qe	𐀥 qi	𐀦 qo
r-	𐀨 ra	𐀩 re	𐀪 ri	𐀫 ro	𐀬 ru
s-	𐀭 sa	𐀮 se	𐀯 si	𐀰 so	𐀱 su
t-	𐀲 ta	𐀳 te	𐀴 ti	𐀵 to	𐀶 tu
w-	𐀷 wa	𐀸 we	𐀹 wi	𐀺 wo
z-	𐀼 za	𐀽 ze		𐀿 zo

The names of these signs are only roughly phonetical, since most are used to represent a whole class of syllables each, see Mycenaean language. Note that "j" represents the semivowel equivalent to English "y", and is used as a glide (e.g. -a-jo for -αῖος), the "r" characters were used to write both the /r/ and /l/ phonemes, and the "q" series is used for indo-eurpoean /kʷ/, /gʷ/, /kʷʰ/ and /gʷʰ/. There are some additional syllabic signs, the values of some of which are unknown, disputed, or infrequent. They are referred to either by a number, or by some hypothetical phonetic approximation, for example 64, a₂, a₃, au, nwa, pu₂, etc.

The writing system is apparently an offshoot of Linear A, which, having been apparently designed to write the Minoan language, did not fit the sounds of Greek too well. The Myceneans who used the syllabary had to work around this, until several hundred years later, when the first Greek alphabet was developed.

[edit]

Logograms

Due to the nature of the texts preserved, logographic representations of items counted are very frequent. Not all of their values are known, and their pronunciation is, at best, the object of educated guessing. The logograms represent concepts such as MAN, WOMAN, COW, BULL, OIL, WINE, CLOTH, GOLD, BRONZE etc. There are several dozen signs representing various kinds of pots and vessels. (Example: tripod, for ti-ri-po-de, followed by the logogram for "3-footed pot".)