lethargic_man | Linguistics geekery GIP update

Thanks to rochvelleth—and to livredor for pointing her in my direction—I now have Mycenaean and Homeric Greek in my linguistics geekery icon too, yay! I have updated the original post to read as follows:

The first text on the third screen gives the phrase in Mycenaean Greek, written in Linear B, the script the Bronze-Age Greeks used, three thousand years ago. Linear B is an adaptation of Linear A, the script used to represent the Minoan language, and hopelessly unsuited to Greek: the text, which is glōssōn kharis, ends up represented as ko-ro-to-no ka-ri. (A similar mangling of language happened in the Middle East, where the cuneiform invented for representing Sumerian was shoehorned into representing Semitic languages too.)

Following the collapse of the Mycenaean civilisation, Greece entered a dark age so severe they even lost the art of writing. When they took writing back up centuries later, it was with a derivative of the Phoenician script. The second text shows the form of the phrase in Homeric Greek—hē glōsseōn kharis—using characters from the Dipylon inscription—one of the oldest inscriptions in the Greek alphabet, dating from not long after Homer himself, and is written from right to left.

The third text on the third screen shows the phrase in two different dialects of Ancient Greek (hē glōsséōn kháris in Ionic, and hē glṓttōn kháris in Attic); it also shows the form (hē glṓssōn kháris) in the Koine: the lowest-common-denominator language which, according to Wikipedia, arose amongst the soldiers of Alexander the Great's army, and is best known for being the language of the New Testament. (Thanks to darcydodo for helping me out with these.) The Ionic form is in fact the same as the Homeric one, but since Homer's time, the alphabet had changed, with new letters (Ω and η here), and diacritic marks.

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