A Companion to Linear B - The University of Texas at Austin

§12.1.1.4 SCRIBES, SCRIBAL HANDS AND PALAEOGRAPHY 51
No Linear B text gives us the equivalent of a full abecedarium for the Linear
B syllabary, i.e., the standard order in which the signs were learned, what
we would call, using the parallel of the Roman alphabet as it is learned in
English-speaking cultures, the Mycenaean ABC’s. 30 Evans had made a list of
‘reading’ the signs. It is natural to wonder what Bennett and Kober meant by ‘sound values’.
How could they hope to ‘read’ the signs?
Both Kober and Bennett by 1947 knew the approximate number of unique signs, about ninety,
that occurred in the sign groups that clearly functioned as words within the sentences and
phrases in the Linear B texts. Study of the patterns of use of these signs showed, even without
decipherment, that they functioned as phonograms and not, say, as what are called ‘categorizing
signs’ or determinatives.
This number of phonograms (fewer than ninety) meant that Linear B was likely a syllabic
script of an ‘open-syllabic’ kind, e.g., the Classical Cypriote Syllabary and the Japanese kana
systems (hiragana and katakana). Consequently Bennett and Kober (and eventually Ventris)
knew that most signs represented combinations of consonants (C) and vowels (V); some signs
represented pure vowels (V); and some other signs might represent modifications of the basic
C+V type of signs. In Linear B, we now know that signs of this third type include signs in
which the consonants are palatalized (Cy+V) and labialized (Cw+V), signs in which the vowel
a is aspirated or the first element in a diphthong, and a sign for l/r + ai (ra 3).
In such a script, the pure vowel signs will show a high frequency of occurrence at the beginning
of words. Likewise, if the language represented by the script is ‘inflected’, i.e., if the
forms of words vary in regular ways in order to denote such things as gender, or noun cases,
or tenses and moods and voices of verbs, there should be detectable instances of sign variation
where signs with the same consonants, but different vowels can be identified in the abstract
(see POPE 2008, 4). Thus, over time, with enough texts of the right kind, a grid, of the kind
that Kober was first to construct, can be developed. Eventually test values based on assumptions
about the ‘meaning’ of individual words can then be applied.
In the case of Linear B, Ventris ‘guessed’ in spring 1952 that the word-units at Knossos displaying
such alternations in groups of three were place names that had fortunately survived
into the historical period in their noun forms and in the masculine and feminine (or neuter
plural) forms of their corresponding adjectives. For example: ko-no-so = Knos(s)os masculine
nominative singular (other cases, singular and plural, are possible); ko-no-si-jo = Knos(s)iyos
or Knos(s)iyoi masculine nominative singular or plural (other cases, singular and plural, are
possible); ko-no-si-ja = Knos(s)iya or Knos(s)iyai (other cases, singular and plural, and neuter
nominative and accusative plural, are possible).
Already in the mid-1940’s, Bennett (BENNETT 1947, 109-143) used the relative frequency of
sign occurrence in different word positions and comparisons with consonantal frequencies in
modern languages and with syllabic sign frequencies in the Cypriote Syllabic Script to hypothesize
that the groups of signs that we now know as (1) to and ti, (2) so and si, (3) yo and ya,
and (4) wo, we, wi, and u (vocalic w) shared within each group a common consonant, which,
as we see now, they do. Likewise an undated notebook of Kober’s shows that she had over
twenty signs already located correctly in her ‘grid’ of consonantal and vocalic values sometime
before her death in September 1950.
30 On the bottom right of the recto or front surface of tablet Tn 316 (see Fig. 12.17) occurs a
sequence of signs written large and clearly as a kind of graffiti. These read: di-we si-pœ-®œ
ti-μî-†œ. On the verso or back surface of tablet Aq 218 occurs the sequence, written after the
clay had dried: di-we si-pœ-®œ-ti-mi-to-qœ-®ê. On Xa 412 verso occurs di-we Òî-po-ro ti-μîto-qo.
On the versos of Aq 218 and Xa 412, these signs are all that is written.
The three tablets seem to have been written by different persons. It is thus possible that these
sequences are rather rote phrases written rather automatically when testing clay surfaces. Perhaps