The Roman Syllabary, still often called the Traditional European Syllabary, is ultimately derived from Cretan glyphs, spread by the civilization of
across the northern
. The
simplified the syllabary for their own use, which the people of
imported more or less wholesale. The
empire spread the syllabary across
, where it is still used today for sacred or traditional texts, from
to
, to
as well of course in
documents around the world.Everybody else mostly writes in Hebrew nowadays, though. It’s much easier that way.
[Author's Note: Thanks to Brandon Koller for creating the font.]
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Daniel M. Bensen is an English teacher and writer in Sofia, Bulgaria. He is currently preparing for publication his time-travel adventure/romance Groom of the Tyrannosaur Queen.
The problem with Linear B is that it was an abortion of a writing system even by Bronze Age standards, which is saying something.
ReplyDeleteIt's utterly unsuited to writing any inflected Indo-European language. Which in those days meant any Indo-European language, which in turn means that whatever Linear A was developed for, it very probably wasn't IE.
Eg., the closest you can get in Linear B to writing "anthropos", the Greek word for "man", is something that comes out roughly as at-to-ro-po-se. In Greek (and Latin and other IE languages of the period) word order is flexible but -inflections- (the changes at the end of the word) are absolutely crucial.
Furthermore, many Linear B glyphs not only had alternative meanings depending on context, they had DOZENS of alternative meanings.
This meant that anything beyond a very simple sentence would be an "educated guess", not actual reading.
Learning to read or write it would be a stone bitch and it's not a surprise it wasn't used for anything but repetitive accounting lists.
Most Bronze Age syllabaries were really, really awful Rube Goldberg messes. And Linear B was about the worst of the lot.
So is Japanese, all things considered. A modular language based on ideograms ill-suited for a vocalic, grammatically simple language, which has given birth to the most complex written system I know of... and it's been in use for thousands of years. True, there were no other systems at hand, but the Coreans did invent their own phonetic script... I don't see why the Greeks would not adopt the syllabic nature of LB to their needs. French and English are written with a ton of phonetic fossiles (ought, enough, dough, etc, or roux, croix, août...) and people seem to do just fine.
ReplyDeleteSo, have a syllabic language that doesn't reflect the phonology entirely, seems natural to me. Simplify it, adapt it, add in signs to mark mute vowels, maybe then the syllabary will condense into a narrower group of vowels. AT-TO-RO-PO-SE can become AN-T(h)-RO-PO-S(-)
I mean, if Hanzi are still in use (and Kanji, for God's sake)...