Your name in Linear B

The rules it uses

• Every sign ends in a vowel. Linear B has signs for a vowel alone (a) or a consonant plus a vowel (ka), and nothing for a consonant by itself.
• Consonants at the end of a word are dropped: pater is written pa-te. A final stop is kept with the vowel before it, the way wanaks is written wa-na-ka.
• Some consonants before another consonant are dropped: s (sperma, pe-mo), l and r (khalkos, ka-ko), and m or n before a stop (panta, pa-ta).
• Other clusters get an empty vowel, borrowed from the next syllable: tripos, ti-ri-po; Alexandra, a-re-ka-sa-da-ra.
• One sign, several sounds. The r signs write r and l; the p signs write p, b and ph; the k signs write k, g and kh; the t signs write t and th. Only d is kept apart from t.
• No h. The h sound is not written (hippos, i-qo).
• Sounds Greek didn’t have are matched to the nearest one: f becomes p, v becomes w, j and a soft g become z. A double letter is written once.
• No sign for that syllable? The grid has gaps (there is no wu or zu), so the nearest sign is used.

Names that are already Greek come out best: try Alexandra, which appears on a real tablet from Mycenae as a-re-ka-sa-da-ra, or Andreas, Theodora, Philip, Penelope. Different scholars might spell a modern name slightly differently; the rules leave some choices open.