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Mycenaean Greek
Spoken in:	southern Balkans/Crete
Language extinction:	12th century BC
Language family:	Indo-European  Greek   Mycenaean Greek
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	none
ISO 639-2:	none
ISO 639-3:	gmy
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

Note: This article contains special characters.

History of the Greek language (see also: Greek alphabet)

Proto-Greek (c. 2000 BC)

Mycenaean (c. 1600–1100 BC)

Ancient Greek (c. 800–300 BC) Dialects: Aeolic, Arcadocypriot, Attic-Ionic, Doric, Pamphylian; Homeric Greek. Possible dialect: Macedonian.

Koine Greek (from c. 300 BC)

Medieval Greek (c. 330–1453)

Modern Greek (from 1453) Dialects: Cappadocian, Cretan, Cypriot, Demotic, Griko, Katharevousa, Pontic, Tsakonian, Yevanic

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.

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.^[1]

Contents 1 Orthography 2 Phonology and Morphology 2.1 Archaic Features 2.2 Innovations 3 Corpus 4 Notes 5 References 6 External links

[edit] Orthography

Main article: Linear B

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 semivowels w and j (also transcribed as y), three sonorants, m, n, r, 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).

Thus *khrusos, "gold" was spelled with the syllabic signs ku-ru-so 𐀓𐀬𐀰, *gwous, "cow" with the signs qo-u 𐀦𐀄, and *khalkos "bronze" as ka-ko 𐀏𐀒.

[edit] Phonology and Morphology

[edit] Archaic Features

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.

Mycenaean also preserves /w/, lost in later Greek and intervocalic /h/.

[edit] Innovations

[edit] 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.

[edit] Notes

1. ^ 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".

[edit] References

• Chadwick, John (1958). The Decipherment of Linear B. Second edition (1990). Cambridge UP. ISBN 0-521-39830-4. 
• Chadwick, John (1976). The Mycenaean World. Cambridge UP. ISBN 0-521-29037-6. 
• 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 edition (1974). Cambridge UP. ISBN 0-521-08558-6. 
• Bartoněk, Antonin (2003). Handbuch des mykenischen Griechisch. Universitätsverlag C. Winter. ISBN 3-8253-1435-9. 

[edit] 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)

Ages of Greek
c. 2000 BC	c. 1600–1100 BC	c. 800–300 BC	c. 300 BC–AD 330	c. 330–1453	1453–present
Proto-Greek	Mycenaean	Ancient Greek	Koine Greek	Medieval Greek	Modern Greek