Editing Linear B (section)

=== Alice Kober's triplets ===

About the same time, [[Alice Kober]] studied Linear B and managed to construct grids, linking similar symbols in groups of threes.<ref>Fox, (2013) pp.163–7</ref> Kober noticed that a number of Linear B words had common roots and suffixes. This led her to believe that Linear B represented an inflected language, with nouns changing their endings depending on their case. However, some characters in the middle of the words seemed to correspond with neither a root nor a suffix. Because this effect was found in other known languages, Kober surmised that the odd characters were bridging syllables, with the beginning of the syllable belonging to the root and the end belonging to the suffix. This was a reasonable assumption, since Linear B had far too many characters to be considered alphabetic and too few to be [[logogram|logographic]]; therefore, each character should represent a syllable. Kober's systematic approach allowed her to demonstrate the existence of three grammatical cases and identify several pairs of signs that shared vowels or consonants with one another.<ref name="Pope2008">{{cite book |last1=Pope |first1=Maurice |chapter=The Decipherment of Linear B |editor1-last=Duhoux |editor1-first=Yves |editor2-last=Davies |editor2-first=Anna Morpurgo |title=A Companion to Linear B: Mycenaean Texts and their World |volume=1 |location=Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium |publisher=Peeters |date=2008 |pages=3–11 |isbn=9789042918481}}</ref><ref>[http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~hayward/crypto/kober.pdf] Kober, Alice E., "The Minoan Scripts: Fact and Theory.", American Journal of Archaeology, vol. 52, no. 1, pp. 82–103, 1948</ref>

Kober also showed that the two-symbol word for 'total' at the end of livestock and personnel lists, had a different symbol for gender. This gender change with one letter, usually a vowel, is most frequent in Indo-European languages.<ref>Robinson, (2002) p.71</ref> Kober had rejected any speculation on the language represented, preferring painstaking cataloguing and analysis of the actual symbols,<ref>Fox, (2013) pp.107–9</ref> though she did believe it likely that Linear A and Linear B represented different languages.<ref name="Pope2008" />