Mycenaean phonology

Mycenaean preserves some archaic Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Greek features not present in later Ancient Greek.

One archaic feature is the set of labiovelar consonants, written $⟨q⟩$. They split into, , or in Ancient Greek depending on context and dialect.

Another set is the semivowels and the glottal fricative  between vowels. All of these were lost in standard Attic Greek, but was preserved in some Greek dialects and written as digamma $⟨ϝ⟩$ or beta $⟨β⟩$.

It is unclear how the sound transcribed as $⟨z⟩$ was pronounced. It may have been a voiced or voiceless affricate or  (marked with asterisks in the table above). It derives from, , and some initial , and was written as ζ in the Greek alphabet. In Attic, it was pronounced in many cases, and as  in Modern Greek.

There were at least five vowels, which could be both short and long.

As noted above, the syllabic Linear B script used to record Mycenaean is extremely defective, distinguishing only the semivowels $⟨j w⟩$; the sonorants $⟨m n r⟩$; the sibilant $⟨s⟩$; the stops $⟨p t d k q z⟩$; and (marginally) $⟨h⟩$. Voiced, voiceless and aspirate occlusives are all written with the same symbols, except that $⟨d⟩$ stands for and $⟨t⟩$ for both  and ). Both  and  are written $⟨r⟩$.  The sound  is written only when  follows; otherwise it is unwritten.

Vowel and consonant length is not notated, and in most circumstances the script is unable to notate a consonant not followed by a vowel; in such cases, either an extra vowel is inserted (often echoing the quality of the following vowel), or the consonant is omitted. (See above for more details.) This means that determining the actual pronunciation of written words is often difficult, and makes use of a combination of the PIE etymology of a word, its form in later Greek, and variations in spelling. Even so, for some words the pronunciation is not known exactly, especially when the meaning is unclear from context or the word has no descendants in the later dialects.