On 2006-04-26 09:05, tgpedersen wrote:
> Linear B is full of '<so-many>-po' 's "<so many>-footer"'s, and no
> feet at all.
Given their nature, Linear B texts cannot be assumed to be
representative of spoken Mycenaean Greek and its lexicon. They are
disbursing records, in which certain areas of vocabulary (wool, cloth,
oil, grain, types of vessels, names of offices and occupations, etc.)
are overrepresented for obvious reasons. In the Ancient Greek text
corpus (prose and poetry, including Homer), <pous> is about 8.5 times
more frequent than <tri-pous> (safely the most common compound with this
second member), 42 times more frequent than <tetra-pous>, 151 times more
frequent than <a-pous> and 754 times more frequent than <argi-pous>.
Piotr