The Riddle of the Labyrinth (24 page)

Elsewhere on the tablets, she spotted the same stems with a different ending, -
. This she called Case II. The words now looked like this:

She found these stems with still another ending, the one-character suffix -
. This she called Case III:

From these three cases, Kober built a paradigm. Not every noun could be found in every case on the tablets, but she seeded the paradigm with as many examples as she could. Michael Ventris would waggishly name these trios of related forms “Kober's triplets”:

Kober homed in on the “spelling change” that affects the third character in each word. In Cases I and II the third character is
, but in Case III it becomes
. What, she wondered, accounted for the change?

The changeable nature of this character, Kober realized, signified much. This was the “bridging” character—the link between a word's stem and its suffix. As such, it comprised a piece of each: the last consonant of the stem plus the first vowel of the suffix—a single character that does the work of
se
in
kisses
. To illustrate this character's role, Kober again turned to a hypothetical example from Latin, this time involving the noun stem
serv-
, “slave.” Here
serv-
is shown in three different cases (
servus, servum
, and
servo)
, with the hyphen marking the boundary between stem and suffix:

Case I (nominative): serv-
us
“the slave” (subject)

Case II (accusative): serv-
um
“the slave” (direct object)

Case III (dative): serv-
o
“to/for the slave” (indirect object)

Suppose we expand on Kober's example by imagining once more that Latin were written with a syllabic script. The three cases of
serv-
might then be divided into chunks as shown below. It is important to note that when the words are written syllabically, the final
-s
of
servus
is missing, as is the final
-m
of
servum
. There is a reason: Syllabaries like Linear B—in which each character stands for one consonant plus one vowel—are bad at representing final consonants, and often simply delete them.

Here are the three words, written syllabically. This time, the hyphen indicates the boundary between
syllables
:

Case I: ser-
vu

Case II: ser-
vu

Case III: ser-
vo

Our little paradigm contains just three distinct syllables: “ser,” “vu,” and “vo.” We can drive Kober's point home graphically by creating a three-character syllabary with which to write them; I have arbitrarily chosen
,
, and
as the characters in our tiny syllabic script. The three syllables will now be rendered this way: “ser” =
; “vu” =
; “vo” =
.