Did you know you speak Mycenaean Greek? You do!
Richard Vallance Janke



NOTES on Mycenaean Greek Vocabulary in Linear B: A to KO

[1] The Mycenaean word anemon is the genitive plural (“of the winds”) for anemo = “wind”, and like so many other Mycenaean words, it serves as the first part of English words dealing with various aspects of wind (generation), such as “anemometer”. All other entries with the tag [1] are of this type.

[2] Since it is impossible for any Mycenaean word to begin with la, given that there is no L series of syllabograms (la le li lo lu) in Linear B, the first syllabogram, i.e. the first syllable of the Mycenaean word for “labyrinth” begins instead with the Linear B syllabogram da. This is quite exceptional, even for Mycenaean Linear B, because the R + vowel series of syllabograms (ra re ri ro ru) normally replaces a Greek lambda. Yet in this case, the Mycenaean scribes opted for da instead of ra (which would have given rapuritoyo). Even so, the tendency for Mycenaean scribes to flip-flop between the D and R series of syllabograms to stand in for the missing L series is not so unusual. Their preference, however, was squarely in favour of the R series.

[3] “at the teacher’s” = French chez le professeur, is an archaic version of either the dative or the archaic instrumental singular, the latter still extant in Mycenaean Greek.

[4] duwo (with the standard Mycenaean digamma) is Mycenaean for ancient Greek duo. It is almost always inscribed as the special syllabogram for a Talent (worth a fortune in gold), scale or the number two, which of course looks remarkably like a scale.

[5] A great many modern English words begin with the extremely archaic Greek preposition epi. I have provided two examples here.

[6] The original Mycenaean and Homeric meaning of the English word for “elephant” was “ivory”, but the sense gradually changed to the former by the time of Classical Athens, when in the Attic dialect it had assumed its present-day meaning of “elephant”. Remember, since Mycenaean Greek had no L series of syllabograms, the scribes had to resort to the R series instead. This might sound shocking to plenty of us poor Westerners speaking Occidental languages, in which there is pretty much always a relatively clear distinction between the liquids “l” & “r”. Yet, in many languages, confusion appears to reign supreme over any perceived distinction between what we Westerners take to be separate liquids, “l” and “r”, modern Japanese being a prime example of this phenomenon. However, the confusion exists only in the imaginary confines our Occidental language mindsets, and not at all in linguistic mindset of the Japanese, who instinctively conflate the duplicate liquid phenomena we in the West perceive as “l” & “r” into a single, unitary consonantal construct, which they find perfectly easy to pronounce, thank you very much! Toujours l'histoire de l'envers du miroir. It all depends on which side of the double-blind mirror you find yourself standing.

[7] Many English words begin with the Mycenaean and ancient Greek prefix eu, which can assume numerous connotations of the concept, “well”, “healthy”, “positive”, “of sound mind” or similar notions. Hence the English word I arbitrarily selected here. Anyone can think of plenty of other equally convincing alternatives in English.

[8] Mycenaean kadamiya is a pre-Greek, proto-Indo European word.

[9] The Mycenaean word kono omits the initial “s” which appears in the later ancient East Greek Ionic or Attic word schoinos, meaning a “rush” (plant). The modern English scientific word is also a plant, although a different one. But there is more here than meets the eye.

Since Linear B is a an open-ended syllabary in which all syllabograms must end with a vowel, any two

consonants which can stand seamlessly together in even the earliest dialectical Greek alphabets cannot do so in Linear B. It is simply impossible. Something has to give. The usual scribal practice was to drop or omit the first of the two consonants (though the Linear B scribes would never have thought of it that way. It just came naturally to them). In other instances, both consonants are retained, through the insertion of a “dummy” vowel after both. The so-called “rules” governing which dummy vowel is inserted in preference over another after each of the two consecutive consonants which would otherwise have not appeared in later alphabetic Greek texts are relatively fluid. But if one stops even for a moment to consider the preference for one vowel over another in any given Mycenaean Linear B word subject to this constraint, one quickly realizes that, as is always the case with ancient Greek, it all boils down to the same old same old issue of euphony. It had to sound “right” to the Greek ear, even if that ear was a proto-ear (ahem!) In fact, there can be little doubt but that the Mycenaeans actually did pronounce both the consonants even in those instances where one was dropped (usually the first).





NOTES on Mycenaean Greek Vocabulary in Linear B: KU to ZE

[1] kunaya – While some scholars are bound to vociferously disagree with me on this account, in so far as I am concerned, Mycenaean Greek had no g (gamma) per se, whereas as everyone and their dog knows ancient Greek did. Many English words begin with gamma, as for instance “gynecology”. It could be argued that the Mycenaean scribes might just as easily have resorted to spelling this word qunaya, except for the inconveniently naughty little fact that there exists no syllabogram qu in Linear B. On the other hand, examples abound where the Mycenaean scribes preferred the Q series of syllabograms (qa qe qi qo) over the the K (ka ke ki ko) when both were equally plausible orthographically. Once again, practice was unpredictable. But there is nothing strange at all about that. Just think of modern English. The American spellings: center, civilization, color and harbor are roundly rejected by the British who spell them as centre, civilisation, colour and harbour, while we Canadians (wouldn't you just know it?) go along with all of the British spellings except for civilization, where we retain the (so-called) American orthography. Confused? Don't worry. Everyone else is too.

[2] As with suffixes, so with prefixes. Many English words begin with the Greek prefix peda.

[3] The ancient Phoenicians were justly regaled for their prized purple cloth, the recipe for which they inherited from the splendid purple dye from the murex shell, the finest in the entire then known world (the middle Mediterranean and the Aegean) that the Minoans at Knossos had produced before them. Hence, many Linear B scholars equate ponikiya (feminine) with Phoenician as a synonym for “purple”. But there are other equally valid approaches to deciphering the concept “purple”, all of which we shall eventually take into consideration in future articles focusing on ancient Greek colour perception.

[4] The Mycenaean syllabary can express words beginning with “te”, but for some reason unknown to us, yet linguistically sound nevertheless, they spelled the number 4 = qetoro the same way the Romans did, given that the Latin equivalent for 4 = quattuor. Archaic Greek dialects sometimes expressed the number 4 as petro, sometimes as tetro and so on and so forth, and, just to make it all the more puzzling to us, as the much more euphonic tessares in Aeolic and Ionic Greek.
This phenomenon was as commonplace in the evolutionary time line of ancient Greek orthography, varying wildly from one dialect to the next in both classes of ancient Greek (East and West) as it has been throughout the history of the orthography of the English language, or for that matter, of Lord knows how many languages, ancient or modern. Surprise, surprise! While orthography was relatively predictable within the confines of any given ancient Greek dialect, it was insanely unreliable from one (archaic) ancient Greek dialect to the next (of which there were plenty). So it is scarcely surprising that the spelling of the number 4 did not fossilize until the Attic tettares shoved all other spellings aside, sadly even the much more ear-pleasing Ionic tessares. Pick a word, almost any word you like, in any ancient Greek dialect, and you can rest assured that it will almost certainly not be spelled (exactly) the same way in a neighbouring dialect, however closely allied the two are, not even in the Mycenaean and Arcado-Cypriot dialects which were grosso modo twins so many respects.

[5] The English word “quartet” is derived from the Latin quattuor, which in turn apparently had its
own distant precedent in the Mycenaean qetoro, although I think we can pretty much rule out the notion that the Latin spelling was derived from the former, already ancient by the time of Rome's ascendancy. It is just that Mycenaean Greek and Latin happened by some fluke of linguistic gymnastics to resort to the same basic spelling for 4.

[6] Since Mycenaean Greek had no L series of syllabograms, words beginning with lambda in (archaic) ancient Greek had to be spelled with the R series of syllabograms in the syllabary. Hence, rewo = archaic Greek lewon = English “lion”, while rino = ancient Greek linon = English “linen”. For once anyway, pretty straightforward.

[7] While sitophobia = “fear of eating” in English does not seem to correspond with sitos = “wheat” in ancient Greek, in fact it is a near perfect match, since wheat was one of the main dietary staples of all ancient civilizations right on through from the Mesopotamian to the Roman. So if sitos was one of the staple foods absolutely essential to survival, anyone who was afraid of consuming wheat was in serious danger of fading away and dying. Ergo.

[8] The Mycenaean infinitive weide = archaic Greek weidein (both incorporating the digamma, which was normative and extremely common until at least the 10th. century BCE) = English “to see”. Note however that that the aorist weise began again with digamma, whence “vision” in English.

© by Richard Vallance Janke 2015 (All Rights Reserved/ Tous droits réservés )
H.B.A. - Latin, French & German (Sir Wilfred Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, 1968) M.L.S. (Master of Library and Information Science, University of Western Ontario, 1975)
Winner of the Data Courier Award for Excellence in Online Published Papers in Information and Computer Science, Chicago, Illinois, October, 1983 ($1,000 USD)
Reference & Systems Analyst Librarian, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada,
prior to retirement in 2010
Self-taught / Autodidact ancient Greek, Xenophon, Herodotus, Thucydides, Homer, Sappho, Alcaeus, Alcman, East Greek Dialects, Mycenaean Linear B & Arcado-Cypriot Linear C (1999-present)
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