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.
- ISBN13 9789042930971
- Publish Date 24 June 2014
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country BE
- Imprint Peeters Publishers
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 421
- Language English