CHAPTER XXXIX (a) - THE PREHISTORY OF THE GREEK LANGUAGE

Summary

THE IDENTIFICATION OF GREEK

The nature of the Greek language during the prehistoric period is, for obvious reasons, hard to determine, so that most statements about it must be qualified as probable rather than certain. There are three sources from which we can obtain information about it: by working backwards from the classical dialects, especially those recorded by inscriptions earlier than the fourth century B.C.; from the documents of the Mycenaean age written in the Linear B script, which can now be interpreted as Greek; and by the comparison of Greek with the related languages which we trace back to a common, hypothetical origin known as Indo-European. The combination of all three sources allows us to make some deductions with fair certainty. In many cases, however, one of our sources may fail us; a word may be attested by Mycenaean and classical Greek, but have no certain cognates elsewhere; many features are known from both comparative and classical evidence, but are either absent from the scanty Mycenaean material or attested ambiguously by it; and a few rest upon comparative and Mycenaean evidence unsupported by historic Greek. Satisfactory deductions about the prehistoric period are impossible without at least two sources.

Historic Greek may be defined as the language as it is known from texts and monuments from the eighth century B.C. onwards. Homeric Greek should be reckoned as historic, though it is known to include much linguistic material of prehistoric date. The prehistoric period therefore runs from the creation of a separate Indo-European idiom recognizable as Greek, which at the lowest estimate must be well before 1500 B.C., down to the eighth century.