
Minoan Stone Vessels with Linear A Inscriptions
B. Davis(Author)
Peeters Publishers
1st Edition
Published on 24. June 2014
Book
Hardback
445 pages
978-90-429-3097-1 (ISBN)
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Description
Inscribed Minoan stone vessels are ritual gifts that index their
dedicants' intention that both their gift and their name should survive
permanently at the place of dedication. These vessels contained
offerings, yet the vessels themselves were also offerings, serving as
permanent records of a ritual act. These rituals were most likely
communal, incorporating group feasting and drinking. The seasonality of
these rituals suggests that they were focused on the cycle of life:
fertility, birth, death and renewal. Offerings left with the vessels
suggest that these rituals also addressed other, more personal concerns.
As for Linear A itself: the language behind the script appears to
contain a fairly standard phonemic inventory, though there are hints of
additional, more exotic phonemes. The morphology of the language appears
to involve affixation, a typical mode of inflection in human languages.
The presence of significant prefixing tends to rule out PIE as a parent
language, while the word-internal vowel alternations typical of
Afroasiatic verbal inflection are nowhere to be found in this script. In
the end, Linear A appears most likely to represent a non-IE,
non-Afroasiatic language, perhaps with agglutinative tendencies, and
perhaps with VSO word order.
dedicants' intention that both their gift and their name should survive
permanently at the place of dedication. These vessels contained
offerings, yet the vessels themselves were also offerings, serving as
permanent records of a ritual act. These rituals were most likely
communal, incorporating group feasting and drinking. The seasonality of
these rituals suggests that they were focused on the cycle of life:
fertility, birth, death and renewal. Offerings left with the vessels
suggest that these rituals also addressed other, more personal concerns.
As for Linear A itself: the language behind the script appears to
contain a fairly standard phonemic inventory, though there are hints of
additional, more exotic phonemes. The morphology of the language appears
to involve affixation, a typical mode of inflection in human languages.
The presence of significant prefixing tends to rule out PIE as a parent
language, while the word-internal vowel alternations typical of
Afroasiatic verbal inflection are nowhere to be found in this script. In
the end, Linear A appears most likely to represent a non-IE,
non-Afroasiatic language, perhaps with agglutinative tendencies, and
perhaps with VSO word order.
More details
Series
Language
English
Place of publication
Leuven
Belgium
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Weight
1830 gr
ISBN-13
978-90-429-3097-1 (9789042930971)
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Schweitzer Classification