The Minoan language is the language (or languages) of the ancient
Minoan civilization
The Minoan civilization was a Bronze Age Aegean civilization on the island of Crete and other Aegean Islands, whose earliest beginnings were from 3500BC, with the complex urban civilization beginning around 2000BC, and then declining from 1450 ...
of
Crete
Crete ( el, Κρήτη, translit=, Modern: , Ancient: ) is the largest and most populous of the Greek islands, the 88th largest island in the world and the fifth largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, after Sicily, Sardinia, Cyprus, ...
written in the
Cretan hieroglyphs and later in the
Linear A
Linear A is a writing system that was used by the Minoans of Crete from 1800 to 1450 BC to write the hypothesized Minoan language or languages. Linear A was the primary script used in palace and religious writings of the Minoan civi ...
syllabary. As the Cretan hieroglyphs are undeciphered and Linear A only partly deciphered, the Minoan language is unknown and unclassified: indeed, with the existing evidence, it is impossible to be certain that the two scripts record the same language.
The
Eteocretan language, attested in a few alphabetic inscriptions from Crete 1,000 years later, is possibly a descendant of Minoan, but is also unclassified.
Tradition
Minoan is mainly known from the inscriptions in Linear A, which are fairly legible by comparison with
Linear B
Linear B was a syllabic script used for writing in Mycenaean Greek, the earliest attested form of Greek. The script predates the Greek alphabet by several centuries. The oldest Mycenaean writing dates to about 1400 BC. It is descended from ...
. The Cretan hieroglyphs are dated from the first half of the 2nd millennium BC. The Linear A texts, mostly written in clay tablets, are spread all over Crete with more than 40 localities on the island.
The Egyptian texts
From the
Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt there are four texts containing names and sayings in the Keftiu language (
de). They are, as usual in non-Egyptian texts, written in Egyptian hieroglyphs, which have allowed the pronunciation of those names and sayings to be reconstructed.
*Magic Papyrus Harris ( Harris XII, 1–5); Beg. 18th Dynasty: a saying in the Keftiu language
*Writing board (B.M. 5647); early 18th Dynasty: school blackboard with Keftiu name
*
London Medical Papyrus (B.M., 10059); end of the 18th Dynasty: Two Sayings Against Disease (#32–33)
*Aegean placard list (
de): some Cretan place names.
On the basis of these texts, the phonetic system of the Minoan language can be reconstructed to have the following consonants:
Classification
Minoan is an
unclassified language
An unclassified language is a language whose genetic affiliation to other languages has not been established. Languages can be unclassified for a variety of reasons, mostly due to a lack of reliable data but sometimes due to the confounding inf ...
, or perhaps multiple indeterminate languages written in the same script. It has been compared inconclusively to the
Indo-European
The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Du ...
,
Semitic and
Tyrsenian language families, and has been proposed to be a member of a
pre-Indo-European language family. with different propositions also being made in favor of Minoan being a member of the
Indo-European
The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Du ...
language family.
Syntax
Brent Davis, a linguist and archaeologist at the University of Melbourne, has proposed that the basic word order of the language written in Linear A may be
verb-subject-object (VSO), based on the properties of a common formulaic sequence found in Linear A.
[Brent Davis, 'Syntax in Linear A: The Word-Order of the ‘Libation Formula’ ' Kadmos 52(1), 2013, pp.35-52]
References
External links
* Duhoux, Yves
Pre-Hellenic languages of Crete
{{Authority control
Minoan civilization
Unclassified languages of Europe
Extinct languages of Europe
Languages extinct in the 2nd millennium BC