Cypriot

Cypriot syllabary

The Cypriot syllabary wrote Greek — the Arcado-Cypriot dialect — from roughly the 11th to the 4th century BC. Like Linear B it is deciphered, and pyaegean reads it through the same plugin model: a sign inventory, transliteration to phonetics, and a bridge into the Greek track.

import aegean
from aegean.scripts.cypriot import word_to_phonetic, greek_reading

aegean.registered_scripts()          # ['cypriot', 'cyprominoan', 'greek', 'lineara', 'linearb']
word_to_phonetic("PA-SI-LE-U-SE")    # 'pasileuse'  (βασιλεύς, "king")
greek_reading("WA-NA-SA")            # ('ἄνασσα', 'queen, lady (the Paphian goddess)')

Sign inventory

Built from the Unicode "Cypriot Syllabary" block (U+10800–U+1083F) — 55 syllabograms, each with its settled phonetic value. The script is more phonetically transparent than Linear B: it has no labiovelars, and the transliteration already sits close to the spoken Greek.

from aegean.core.script import get_script

len(list(get_script("cypriot").sign_inventory))   # 55

Transliteration and the Greek bridge

greek_reading returns (lemma, gloss) from a curated 17-entry lexicon of well-established Cypriot equations (largely the Idalion Bronze vocabulary, after Masson's ICS and Chadwick); pass the lemma to the LSJ backend for the full dictionary entry.

word_to_phonetic("A-PO-LO-NI")   # 'apoloni'  (Ἀπόλλωνι, "to Apollo")
greek_reading("KA-SE")           # ('καί', 'and (Arcado-Cypriot κάς)')
greek_reading("TU-KA")           # ('τύχη', 'fortune (Cypriot τύχα)')

The corpus

The Cypriot epigraphic corpus (ICS, Masson) is not openly redistributable, so only a small illustrative sample is bundled (Corpus.load("cypriot")). The sign inventory and transliteration are the shippable core; a fuller corpus is a future bring-your-own addition.

Provenance

The sign data comes from the Unicode Character Database (Unicode-3.0 license) — see Data & Provenance and NOTICE.