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 (16th to 12th centuries BC). 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.

Mycenaean preserves some archaic Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Greek features not present in later ancient Greek:

The voiceless and voiced affricates /ts/ and /dz/ (marked with asterisks in the table above), are hypothesized to have been used in the pronunciation of words written with ⟨z⟩ in transcriptions of the Mycenaean spelling system. Voiced /dz/ developed from Pre-Greek clusters of a voiced dental or velar stop + *y (*dy, *gy, *ɡʷy), or in certain instances from word-initial *y, and corresponds to ζ in the Greek alphabet. For example, the Mycenaean words 𐀕𐀿, 𐀵𐀟𐀼 (me-zo, to-pe-za), pronounced medzōs, torpedza, correspond to classical Greek μέζων, τράπεζα. Voiceless /ts/ developed from Pre-Greek clusters of a voiceless or voiceless aspirated velar stop + *y (*ky, *kʰy, *kʷy, kʷʰy) 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 /a e i o u/, 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 ⟨j w⟩, the sonorants ⟨m n r⟩, the stops ⟨p t d k q⟩, the affricate ⟨z⟩, the sibilant fricative ⟨s⟩, and (marginally) the glottal fricative ⟨h⟩. In general, voiced, voiceless and aspirate occlusives are not distinguished in writing: for example, the Linear B character 𐀒, transcribed ⟨ko⟩, could represent any of the sequences /ɡo/, /ko/, and /kʰo/. The one exception to this principle is the use of a separate series of characters for the voiced dental stop /d/, transcribed ⟨d⟩, as opposed to the voiceless dental stops /t/ and /tʰ/ (both written with the same series of characters and transcribed as ⟨t⟩). Both /r/ and /l/ are written ⟨r⟩; /h/ is unwritten unless followed by /a/.

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 (often echoing the quality of the following vowel), or the consonant is omitted. (See above for more details.)