The Minoan language is the language (or languages) of the ancient Minoan civilization 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, and ...

written in the

Cretan hieroglyphs Cretan hieroglyphs are a hieroglyphic writing system used in early Bronze Age Crete, during the Minoan era. They predate Linear A by about a century, but the two writing systems continued to be used in parallel for most of their history. , the ...

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 civil ...

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 Eteocretan ( from grc-gre, Ἐτεόκρητες, Eteókrētes, lit. "true Cretans", itself composed from ἐτεός ''eteós'' "true" and Κρής ''Krḗs'' "Cretan") is the pre-Greek language attested in a few alphabetic inscriptions of an ...

, 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 The London Medical Papyrus is an ancient Egyptian papyrus in the British Museum, London, England. The writings of this papyrus are of 61 recipes, of which 25 are classified as medical while the remainder are of magic. The medical subjects of the wr ...

(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, Dutc ...

, 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

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