The Riddle of the Labyrinth (22 page)

It was also significant, as she noted, that a variety of Minoan endings could combine with a variety of stems, a defining property of suffixhood. (In English, for instance, the suffixes
-er
and
-ing
can attach to a wide array of stems, including
sing-, teach-
, and
work-
. They cannot, by contrast, attach to “pseudo-stems” like
wa-, la-
, and
ti-
above.)

A similar process, Kober showed, could be seen on the Linear B tablets. The suffixes -
and -
, for instance, could combine not only with the stem
, but also with other stems, as attested by the presence of word pairs like
and
;
and
; and
and
. Strikingly, although Kober had not set out looking for them, the suffixes -
and -
, which she found so often at the ends of Linear B words, were also the ones Evans had instinctively noted:

What Kober showed was not merely that these suffixes alternated in Linear B words, but also that they alternated
in regular fashion
, attaching to the same range of stems, just as
-er
and
-ing
do in English. “It was one thing to suggest that the writing on the Linear B tablets might conceal an inflected language,” Maurice Pope wrote in
The Story of Archaeological Decipherment
. “It was quite another to establish definite patterns of inflection. This is what Miss Kober did.”

It was a pathbreaking discovery, and it accomplished several things. For one, it narrowed the field of possible candidates for the language of the tablets. For another, it settled one vexing problem immediately: the question of whether the languages of Linear A and Linear B were the same. It was clear that the Linear B
script
had developed from the earlier Linear A; on that, scholars could agree. But were the languages they wrote also related? Most investigators, including Evans and Ventris, believed they were.

But to Kober, the data told a far different story. Her preparation had also included careful study of the published Linear A inscriptions, and none of them showed evidence of inflection. The conspicuous presence of inflection in Linear B, and its conspicuous absence in Linear A, convinced her that the respective languages were different. Hers was the minority view, but one to which she held firmly.

Finding inflection in Linear B would lead Kober to even deeper discoveries about the script, which she would publish toward the end of the 1940s. These discoveries centered on the very particular things that happen when an inflected language is written with a syllabic script. This critical interaction, she showed, can offer vital clues to the nature of the language in question. She hinted as much in 1945, in a telling footnote to her first major paper: