This is a plain-language reference about Linear A, the script of Bronze Age Minoan Crete. It is written to be careful rather than exciting: it explains what is genuinely known, marks what is uncertain as uncertain, and leaves the rest alone.
The guiding idea is simple. Linear A has not been deciphered. That means most of what can honestly be said about it is modest — and a reference worth trusting should sound modest too. Where the evidence is firm, this site says so plainly. Where it is thin or contested, it says that instead of papering over the gap.
Linear A remains undeciphered. We can sound out many of its signs, but no one has established what language lies behind them.
This site is not a decipherment, and makes no claim to read the Minoan language. We can pronounce a great many of the signs; we cannot translate the texts. Nothing here should be taken as a reading of what the Minoans meant — only as a record of what the evidence currently supports.
Where you see a proposed meaning that goes beyond the firmly established cases, it is labelled as a proposal — a scholarly suggestion, not a settled fact. Many such proposals exist; few are secure.
The pronunciations on this site are not guessed from Linear A itself. They are carried over from Linear B, the later, related script that Michael Ventris deciphered in 1952. Because many Linear A signs closely resemble Linear B signs, scholars assign the Linear B sound to the matching Linear A sign.
This transfer is a careful reconstruction, not a certainty. The two scripts are roughly three and a half centuries apart and were used for different languages, so a shared shape need not mean a shared sound. Some Linear A signs have no known value at all — no usable Linear B counterpart exists — and this site does not invent one for them.
A word is given a meaning here only when the support is strong. The clearest cases come from the accounting tablets, where a word's job can be checked against the numbers beside it:
Almost everything else is presented as unknown, or as a labelled, unproven proposal. Where scholars disagree, the site says so rather than picking a side. The aim is that a reader never mistakes a hopeful suggestion for an established result.
This site currently shows no Linear A sign-glyphs at all. That is deliberate. The signs will be added only once each one can be verified exactly — matched to a real attested document rather than reproduced from a convenient font that may differ from the originals.
Until that verification is done for a given sign, leaving it out is the honest choice. The broader, ongoing research behind this reference lives elsewhere and will follow; this site is the conservative public summary of it.