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| Minoan | |
|---|---|
| (undeciphered) | |
 Linear A tablet | |
| Region | Crete |
| Era | About 2100–1450 BC |
| Cretan hieroglyphs,Linear A | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | Either:omn – Minoanlab – Linear A |
omn Minoan | |
lab Linear A | |
| Glottolog | mino1236 Minoan |
TheMinoan language is the language (or languages) of the ancientMinoan civilization ofCrete written in theCretan hieroglyphs and later in theLinear A syllabary. As the Cretan hieroglyphs are undeciphered and Linear A only partly deciphered, the Minoan language is unknown and unclassified. With the existing evidence, it is even impossible to be certain that the two scripts record the same language.
TheEteocretan language, attested in a few alphabetic inscriptions from Crete 1,000 years later, is possibly a descendant of Minoan, but is also unclassified.[1]
Minoan is anunclassified language, or perhaps multiple indeterminate languages written in the same script. It has been compared inconclusively to theIndo-European,Semitic andTyrsenian language families and is a language isolate.[2][3][4][5][6][7][8]
Minoan is mainly known from the inscriptions in Linear A, which are fairly legible by comparison withLinear B. The Cretan hieroglyphs are dated from the first half of the 2nd millennium BC. The Linear A texts, mostly written in clay tablets, are spread all over Crete with more than 40 localities on the island.
From theEighteenth Dynasty of Egypt come four texts containing names and spells in the language ofKeftiu. They are, as usual in non-Egyptian texts, written in Egyptian hieroglyphs, which has allowed the pronunciation of those names and spells to be reconstructed.
On the basis of these texts, the phonetic system of the Keftiu language has been reconstructed as having the following consonants:[11]
| Labial | Dental | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Uvular | Glottal | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | m | n | |||||
| Stop | pb | td | ts | k | q | ||
| Fricative | f | s | ʃ | h | |||
| Trill | r | ||||||
| Approximant | j | w |
Brent Davis, a linguist and archaeologist at the University of Melbourne, has proposed that the basic word order of the language written in Linear A may beverb-subject-object (VSO), based on the properties of a common formulaic sequence found in Linear A.[12]Object–verb–subject (OVS) word order has also been proposed.[11]
