Mycenaean Greek - Phonology

Phonology

Compared with later Ancient Greek, Mycenaean preserves a number of archaic features of its Indo-European heritage, such as the labiovelar consonants (written /q/), which later split into /b, p, pʰ/ or /d, t, tʰ/ depending on context and dialect. It also preserves PIE /j/ and intervocalic /h/, both later lost in all dialects, as well as /w/, which survived in some Greek dialects as the alphabetic digamma or F or as a sound written β, but was lost in standard Attic Greek The pronunciation of the sound written /z/ (which derives from, and some initial, and later became Greek ζ, pronounced in Attic Greek) is unclear, and it is also unclear whether it corresponded to a single voiced consonant or two consonants, a voiced–voiceless pair.

There were also at least five vowels /a e i o u/, which could be both short and long.

As noted above, the syllabic Linear B script used to record Mycenaean is extremely defective, distinguishing only the semivowels /w/ and /j/; the sonorants /m n r/; the sibilant /s/; the occlusives /p t d k q z/; and (marginally) /h/. Voiced, voiceless and aspirate occlusives are all written with the same sound, except that /d/ has its own letter (/t/ stands for and ). Both and are written /r/. The sound /h/ is distinguished only when /a/ follows; otherwise it is unwritten. Vowel and consonant length is not notated, and in most circumstances the script is unable to notate a consonant not followed by a vowel; in such cases, either an extra vowel is inserted (often echoing the quality of the following vowel), or the consonant is omitted. (See above for more details.) This means that determining the actual pronunciation of written words is often difficult, and makes use of a combination of the PIE etymology of a word, its form in later Greek, and inconsistent spelling. Even so, for some words the pronunciation is not known exactly, esp. when the meaning is unclear from context or the word has no descendants in the later dialects.