Spelling B

I got a wee bit into the character system of Linear B today. I wanted to engrave side names on the tablets I'm lasering up for my mini loom. But anyhow.

Everyone knows their alphabet. That is, alpha, beta, gamma, delta...  And, yes, there's an alphabet song for Classical Greek. There aren't obvious equivalents in the Linear B script. No "B" sound, for instance. I don't know what the rules are for transliteration. Apparently I'm not alone; evidence from the Linear B tablets at Pylos is the scribes themselves did not have consistent spelling -- neither between scribes, nor even the same scribe on different days.  (There are also clear indications of a scribe smoothing out the clay and marking a different symbol instead.)

Contrast this with say kana. Written Japanese is a combination of ideograms and syllabary. The former being the "kanji" or characters adapted from the Chinese, the latter the kana; hirigana and the harder, more angular katakana (it's the same -kana suffix for both; there's one of the subtle rules of Japanese that softens hard consonants in certain contexts.)

The katakana are sort of like italics; perhaps carrying over from their use to transcribe foreign words, they carry a sense of emphasis and angularity. So katakana get used a lot in advertising, and sound effects in manga are almost entirely in katakana (sometimes a manga-ka will use hiragana for a more old fashioned/refined feel).

There is a bit of variation but the general rules for transcribing English are easy enough to pick up. "Brian" comes out as ブライアン or "Bu-ra-i-a-n." Linear B has a similar problem; "mi-sa-ra-jo" in Linear B is probably meant as "misraios," meaning a person from Egypt. As you can see, diphthongs are difficult to transcribe unambiguously, and compound consonants are worse. This is why in all academic writing, the original Linear B inscription is usually spelled out, with the currently assumed Mycenaean Greek transliteration given after, if at all.



There's another cross-language bit of interest here. The same scribes are recognized by their handwriting. In specific, the direction and order of the strokes used to form the characters are different from scribe to scribe. If there is a paper attempting to trace them back to groups or teachers I haven't seen it, but it is unlikely, since basically the Linear B fragments form very narrow slices of time (most of the preserved material was the temporary clay records of a single week's work for that particular shop, which then got fired and thus preserved when the shop itself was fired, and, well, not preserved. Or at least, only archaeologically.

This differs quite strongly from Japanese, where the stroke order (and direction) are an imbedded part of the learning process. Perhaps that is because when you are getting up into the 14-stroke Kanji, you need something to keep it sorted in your head. The Linear B characters are generally simple -- rather alchemical looking, if you ask me -- and in any case in the hands of individual scribes degenerate pretty quickly into simplified scribbles.



And just because the picture isn't complex enough. Linear A was used to write Minoan, and the only thing we're really sure of is it wasn't Greek or even of the same language family. However! There was a long transition period in which Mycenaean words were sneaking into Linear A inscriptions. This is the best entry the would-be Michael Ventris's of this generation have into finally unlocking Linear A.

By the way, despite existing dictionaries and syllabary not all characters in Linear B are unambiguous. But then, there seem to be some ideograms worked in there as well. For many languages, the ideograms came first and then were re-used rebus-style to construct a syllabary. Say you have ideograms for cow, asp, and tortoise, but you need to write "cat." Well, use the first three ideograms and make it clear you are only using them for their sounds.

In Japanese, this can be ambiguous; it isn't always obvious on first glance if you are meant to use the On or Kun reading. In Egyptian Hieroglyphs, there's actually a special character that means, "read the previous group as sounds only." All languages with this system give ample opportunity for puns (puns, which, alas, are difficult to translate, dependent as they are on the juxtaposition of sound and meaning in a particular character set.)

(In Takahashi Rumiko's Urusai Yatsura there is a crazy Buddhist monk whose name is written Sakuranbo -- a nice traditional-sounding name; a common name for the quiet traditional girl in manga is Sakura. Both mean the Japanese Cherry, but in the monk's case the pronunciation "Cheri" is given in ruby above the kanjii of his name. Also not unheard of that a Japanese name is meant to be pronounced differently than written, although it never gets to the Monty Python sketch level. The joke has hardly started, though. Instead of the usual kanji for the Japanese Cherry, two kanji with similar pronunciation are used; two characters that when mashed together like this could be read as meaning "Deranged Monk." Actually; the "deranged" here is "Ranbo," which has a certain sense of explosive violence that meant that the Japanese posters for Sylvester Stallone's trio of movies about a violent veteran simply used his character name rather than trying to translate the title. Oh, and of course -- this is Takahashi-sensei after all -- that sort of random explosive violence is entirely appropriate for the crazy free-for-all style of the manga, and Cherry has a too-often repeated phrase in which he compares monastic life to a cherry, "sweet on the outside but inside it's the pits.")



How much of any of this I'll use I don't know. Scribe 103 is going to be a character in the novel, and if my Cretan weaver continues to have her strange gift of seeing writings from the future she is going to have to study (and inevitably will geek out a little about) writing. But at this point I don't even know if the magic is staying...