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by yorwba 2 hours ago
There's actually at least one Greek word of Semitic derivation attested in Linear B https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kupirijo_in_museum.j... namely the island of Cyprus https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%9A%CF%8D%CF%80%CF%81%CE%B... , whence also "copper." If the pre-Greek population of Crete was Semitic, there should be a lot more such loans, especially toponyms.

Speaking of Greek, Linear B and Semitic, the related Cypriot syllabary was deciphered thanks to a bilingual inscription in Phoenician and Greek: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idalion_bilingual And just as in Crete, there is an undeciphered pre-Greek language written in the same script: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eteocypriot_language

1 comments

I'm not an expert on linguistics, but I will say that Crete at that time was polylingual. No one is saying that everyone on the island spoke this Minoan semitic language; only the semitic people on the island, and it was a diverse population.