Script Comparison in the Investigation of Cypro-Minoan

This paper deals with part of the research for the doctoral thesis “Investigating the Signs and Sounds of Cypro-Minoan”. The project in question has the purpose of advancing our present knowledge of the Cypro-Minoan syllabic inscriptions by means of two primary tasks: (1) to establish a judicious signary that distinguishes individual signs and maps their paleographical variation to the possible extent; (2) to investigate the sounds represented by those signs. The investigation of the phonetic values comprises itself three methodological steps: a comparative method, an internal analysis, and the testing of the hypothetical sign readings obtained from the first two procedures. Given the scope of the conference, focus will be on the application of the comparative method to the study of Cypro-Minoan, which involves comparisons with its direct ancestor and successor scripts, here argued to be Linear A and the Cypro-Greek syllabary, respectively. For each Cypro-Minoan grapheme, the goal of the method is to find in both Linear A and Cypro-Greek signs that are formally comparable and at the same time have similar phonetic values. The main points to be discussed are the relations between the involved Aegean-Cypriot syllabic scripts, the details of the method, how the latter fits into a larger research on Cypro-Minoan signs, and some of its results.