4 ms·

Naming here is a bit complicated. Are we talking about the writing system or the spoken language, for example? The linked article is using some terms in what I'

Naming here is a bit complicated. Are we talking about the writing system or the spoken language, for example? The linked article is using some terms in what I'd consider an unusual way (e.g. talking about a "Linear B language", vs. Linear B writing system or script). Linear B is mostly agreed to be a writing system for the Mycenaean Greek language [1], a language that was spoken on both Crete and the Mainland. So it wasn't solely a Minoan language. You could argue that it's sufficiently different from modern Greek to have a different name, but there isn't really a consistently followed rule for naming languages that way. For example, "Old English" is completely incomprehensible to a speaker of modern English, but nonetheless has that name. What language Linear A was used to write is more mysterious. Some researchers do in fact think it corresponded to a separate Minoan language that was not closely related to Greek, but there's no consensus. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycenaean_Greek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycenaean_Greek.

unscaled 5y ago
I'm not an expert in the field, so I might be woefully wrong, but as far I know the Minoan hypothesis (i.e. Linear A encodes a language isolate that we call Minoan) is almost universally accepted nowadays, even though it was not yet the case right after decipherment of Linear B in the 1950s. Most controversies that exist nowadays don't seem to be about Linear A being Minoan, but rather about trying to demonstrate a relation of the Minoan language itself to another language or language family. There have been attempts to link Minoan to Semitic languages , Anatolian languages and Etruscan, among others. Besides these attempts, I guess there still exist a small number of scholars who still argue that Linear A represents some form of Greek, but it's not a very popular opinion. The fact that the language of Linear B is Mycenaean Greek as uncontroversial as the existence of the Indo-Eruopean language family or the fact that hieroglyphs encode ancient Egyptian. Anyone claiming otherwise is probably going to be politely ignored and thrown out of the room.

unscaled 5y ago

I'm not an expert in the field, so I might be woefully wrong, but as far I know the Minoan hypothesis (i.e. Linear A encodes a language isolate that we call Minoan) is almost universally accepted nowadays, even though it was not yet the case right after decipherment of Linear B in the 1950s. Most controversies that exist nowadays don't seem to be about Linear A being Minoan, but rather about trying to demonstrate a relation of the Minoan language itself to another language or language family. There have been attempts to link Minoan to Semitic languages , Anatolian languages and Etruscan, among others. Besides these attempts, I guess there still exist a small number of scholars who still argue that Linear A represents some form of Greek, but it's not a very popular opinion. The fact that the language of Linear B is Mycenaean Greek as uncontroversial as the existence of the Indo-Eruopean language family or the fact that hieroglyphs encode ancient Egyptian. Anyone claiming otherwise is probably going to be politely ignored and thrown out of the room.