Mycenaean Greek


Mycenaean Greek is the earliest attested form of the Greek language. It was spoken on the Greek mainland and Crete in Mycenaean Greece. The language is preserved in inscriptions in Linear B, a script first attested on Crete before the 14th century BC. Most inscriptions are on clay tablets found in Knossos, in central Crete, as well as in Pylos, in the southwest of the Peloponnese. Other tablets have been found at Mycenae itself, Tiryns and Thebes and at Chania, in Western Crete. The language is named after Mycenae, one of the major centres of Mycenaean Greece.
The tablets long remained undeciphered, and many languages were suggested for them, until Michael Ventris, building on the extensive work of Alice Kober, deciphered the script in 1952.
The texts on the tablets are mostly lists and inventories. No prose narrative survives, much less myth or poetry. Still, much may be gleaned from these records about the people who produced them and about Mycenaean Greece, the period before the so-called Greek Dark Ages.

Phonology

Mycenaean preserves some archaic Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Greek features not present in later ancient Greek:
  • labialized velar consonants, written as in transcriptions of the Mycenaean spelling system. In other ancient Greek varieties, labialized velars were replaced with labials, dentals, or velars, depending on the context and the dialect. For example, Mycenaean , pronounced, corresponds to classical Greek βουκόλοι, "cowherds".
  • The semivowels. Both were lost in standard Attic Greek, although was preserved in some Greek dialects and written as digamma or beta.
  • The glottal fricative between vowels.
The voiceless and voiced affricates and , are hypothesized to have been used in the pronunciation of words written with in transcriptions of the Mycenaean spelling system. Voiced developed from Pre-Greek clusters of a voiced dental or velar stop + *y, or in certain instances from word-initial *y, and corresponds to ζ in the Greek alphabet. For example, the Mycenaean words , pronounced, correspond to classical Greek μέζων, τράπεζα. Voiceless developed from Pre-Greek clusters of a voiceless or voiceless aspirated velar stop + *y and corresponds to -ττ- or -σσ- in Greek varieties written in the Greek alphabet. The exact pronunciation of these consonants in Mycenaean is uncertain.
There were at least five vowels, which could be both short and long.
As noted below, Mycenaean was written in a syllabic script called Linear B, which is extremely defective; meaning it does not represent all phonemic distinctions of the spoken language. Multiple consonants are represented by the same series of signs; the script only distinguishes semivowels, the sonorants, the stops, the affricate, the sibilant fricative, and the glottal fricative. In general, voiced, voiceless and aspirate occlusives are not distinguished in writing: for example, the Linear B character, transcribed, could represent any of the sequences,, and. The one exception to this principle is the use of a separate series of characters for the voiced dental stop, transcribed, as opposed to the voiceless dental stops and . Both and are written ; is unwritten unless followed by.
The length of vowels and consonants is not notated. In most circumstances, the script is unable to notate a consonant not followed by a vowel. Either an extra vowel is inserted, or the consonant is omitted.
Thus, determining the actual pronunciation of written words is often difficult, and using a combination of the PIE etymology of a word, its form in later Greek and variations in spelling is necessary. Even so, for some words the pronunciation is not known exactly, especially when the meaning is unclear from context, or the word has no descendants in the later dialects.

Orthography

The Mycenaean language is preserved in Linear B writing, which consists of about 200 syllabic characters and ideograms. Since Linear B was derived from Linear A, the script of the undeciphered Minoan language, the sounds of Mycenaean are not fully represented. A limited number of syllabic characters must represent a much greater number of syllables used in spoken speech: in particular, the Linear B script only fully represents open syllables, where Mycenaean Greek frequently used closed syllables.
Orthographic simplifications therefore had to be made:
  • Contrasts of voice and aspiration were not marked for any consonants except the dentals d, t. For example,, may be either or .
  • r and l are not distinguished:, is .
  • The rough breathing is generally not indicated:, is . However,, a2 is optionally used to indicate ha at the beginning of a word.
  • The consonants l, m, n, r, s are omitted at the end of a syllable or before another consonant :, is ; \\

    Morphology

Nouns likely decline for 7 cases: nominative, genitive, accusative, dative, vocative, instrumental and locative; 3 genders: masculine, feminine, neuter; and 3 numbers: singular, dual, plural. Dative, locative and instrumental were already in the process of merging, which was completed by Classical Greek; however, a distinct instrumental plural ending -phi still remained. In Modern Greek, only nominative, accusative, genitive and vocative remain as separate cases with their own morphological markings.
Adjectives agree with nouns in case, gender, and number. The comparative degree is formed with the suffix -yos; the superlative is not attested.
Verbs probably conjugate for 3 tenses: past, present, future; 3 aspects: perfect, perfective, imperfective; 3 numbers: singular, dual, plural; 4 moods: indicative, imperative, subjunctive, optative; 3 voices: active, middle, passive; 3 persons: first, second, third; infinitives, and verbal adjectives. However, the attested forms include only 3rd person indicatives, with a majority of forms in the present tense, only a limited number of future and aorist attestations, and one perfect form. Infinitives in -hen, as well as active and passive participles are also attested.
The verbal augment is almost entirely absent from Mycenaean Greek with only one known exception,, a-pe-do-ke, but even that appears elsewhere without the augment, as, a-pu-do-ke. The augment is sometimes omitted in Homer.

Greek features

Mycenaean had already undergone the following sound changes particular to the Greek language and so is considered to be Greek:

Phonological changes

  • Initial and intervocalic *s to.
  • Voiced aspirates devoiced.
  • Syllabic liquids to or ; syllabic nasals to or.
  • *kj and *tj to before a vowel.
  • Initial *j to or replaced by z.
  • *gj and *dj to /z/.
  • *-ti to /-si/.

    Morphological changes

  • The use of -eus to produce agent nouns
  • The third-person singular ending -ei
  • The infinitive ending -ein, contracted from ''-e-en''

    Lexical items

  • Uniquely Greek words:
  • *, qa-si-re-u, *gʷasiléus
  • *, ka-ko, *kʰalkós
  • Greek forms of words known in other languages:
  • *, wa-na-ka, *wánaks
  • *, wa-na-sa, *wánassa
  • *, e-ra-wo or, e-rai-wo, *élaiwon
  • *, te-o, *tʰehós
  • *, ti-ri-po, *''tripos''

    Comparison with Ancient (Homeric) Greek

Corpus

The corpus of Mycenaean-era Greek writing consists of some 6,000 tablets and potsherds in Linear B, from LMII to LHIIIB. No Linear B monuments or non-Linear B transliterations have yet been found.
The so-called Kafkania pebble has been claimed as the oldest known Mycenaean inscription, with a purported date to the 17th century BC. However, its authenticity is widely doubted, and most scholarly treatments of Linear B omit it from their corpora.
The earliest generally-accepted date for a Linear B tablet belongs to the tablets from the 'Room of the Chariot Tablets' at Knossos, which are believed to date to the LM II-LM IIIA period, between the last half of the 15th century BCE and the earliest years of the 14th.

Variations and possible dialects

While the Mycenaean dialect is relatively uniform at all the centres where it is found, there are also a few traces of dialectal variants:
  • i for e in the dative of consonant stems
  • a instead of o as the reflex of ṇ
  • the e/i variation in e.g. te-mi-ti-ja/ti-mi-ti-ja
Based on such variations, Ernst Risch postulated the existence of some dialects within Linear B. The "Normal Mycenaean" would have been the standardized language of the tablets, and the "Special Mycenaean" represented some local vernacular dialect of the particular scribes producing the tablets.
Thus, "a particular scribe, distinguished by his handwriting, reverted to the dialect of his everyday speech" and used the variant forms, such as the examples above.
It follows that after the collapse of Mycenaean Greece, while the standardized Mycenaean language was no longer used, the particular local dialects reflecting local vernacular speech would have continued, eventually producing the various Greek dialects of the historic period.
Such theories are also connected with the idea that the Mycenaean language constituted a type of a special koine representing the official language of the palace records and the ruling aristocracy. When the 'Mycenaean linguistic koine' fell into disuse after the fall of the palaces because the script was no longer used, the underlying dialects would have continued to develop in their own ways. That view was formulated by Antonin Bartonek. Other linguists like Leonard Robert Palmer and also support this view of the 'Mycenaean linguistic koine'. However, since the Linear B script does not indicate several possible dialectical features, such as the presence or absence of word-initial aspiration and the length of vowels, it is unsafe to extrapolate that Linear B texts were read as consistently as they were written.
The evidence for "Special Mycenaean" as a distinct dialect has, however, been challenged. Thompson argues that Risch's evidence does not meet the diagnostic criteria to reconstruct two dialects within Mycenaean. In particular, more recent paleographical study, not available to Risch, shows that no individual scribe consistently writes "Special Mycenaean" forms. This inconsistency makes the variation between "Normal Mycenaean" and "Special Mycenaean" unlikely to represent dialectical or sociolectical differences, as these would be expected to concentrate in individual speakers, which is not observed in the Linear B corpus.