“What does 'deciphering' Cretan Hieroglyphic script mean? A few points on potentially 'inflected' sign sequences”

In the process that led to the decipherment of Linear B, the crucial role of Alice Kober’s identification of the so-called ‘triplets’ is well established. These are groups of sign sequences characterized by a common base and varying endings. Although these ‘triplets’ did not correspond to cases of two or more declensions, as Kober initially hypothesized, they were nonetheless pivotal. They confirmed that the language underlying the Linear B documentation was inflectional and, more specifically, enabled Ventris to determine which syllabograms shared identical consonantal or vocalic elements. Turning to Cretan Hieroglyphic, it is widely acknowledged that the limited documentation available does not allow for statistical-combinatorial analysis comparable to that carried out for Linear B. Nevertheless, the existence of Cretan Hieroglyphic sequences that share most signs but differ by one or two has been noted by several scholars. Even in the case of the earliest Cretan writing, it has been proposed that such sequences could help identify terms generically described as "inflected" or displaying morphological features such as prefixes, infixes, or suffixes. To minimize the risk of accidental similarities when using this method to detect possible morphological patterns, longer sequences are preferred (e.g., those with three shared signs instead of one or two). Unfortunately, the corpus contains very few such cases, and the sequences of interest often occur on glyptic material, i.e., without contextual information. Consequently, in a study on the topic, Jean-Pierre Olivier concluded his analysis by stating: «si, dans l’un ou l’autre des exemples qui ont été présentés, on cherche du côté d'une ‘flexions’, on pourra penser à: ⁠une marque du genre (sans choisir où est le féminin ou le masculin... ou un autre genre); ⁠une marque du nombre (sans choisir où est le pluriel ou le singulier... ou un autre nombre); une marque du temps ou du mode (dans ce cas on pourrait penser à présent/futur ou achevé/ina- chevé... ou à toute autre paire envisageable); ⁠une marque de quelque chose d'entièrement différent...» . This means that, for individual cases, more precise explanations cannot currently be provided. However, as has been recently highlighted , at least two factors must be considered when analyzing possible cases of ‘inflection’ in Cretan Hieroglyphic. First, in sequences where only two signs are shared and a third sign is either present or absent (for instance, 031), it remains plausible that no morphological pattern is involved at all. Second, the reasoning typically applied to these hieroglyphic sequences—likely influenced by what we know from Linear B documentation—assumes that the sequences represent phonetic constructs of a syllabic nature. This assumption, however, has been questioned, given the general (and at least apparent) ‘irrationality’ with which the signs are combined, marked by significant variability in alignment and directionality. In light of these caveat, this study aims to reanalyse all Cretan hieroglyphic sequences that share most of their signs but differ in one or two, paying particular attention to their contexts of attestation. The objective is to assess, in the first instance, whether they can plausibly represent variants of the same words and whether the differing signs can legitimately be interpreted as morphological markers, with their presence or absence being linguistically motivated.