Carian language
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Carian | ||
|---|---|---|
| Spoken in: | Ancient southwestern Anatolia | |
| Language extinction: | Early CE | |
| Language family: | Anatolian Luwian subgroup Carian |
|
| Writing system: | Carian script | |
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | none | |
| ISO 639-2: | ine | |
| ISO 639-3: | xcr | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. | ||
The Carian language was the language of the Carians. It was an Anatolian language, apparently closer to Lycian than to Lydian. Prior to the late 20th century CE the language remained a total mystery even though many characters of the script appeared to be Greek. Using Greek values investigators of the 19th and 20th centuries were unable to make headway and classified the language as non-Indo-European. Speculations multiplied, none very substantial. Progress finally came as a result of rejecting the presumption of Greek values.
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[edit] Decipherment
The Carian script consists of about 45 letters altogether. Numerous attempts to interpret the Carian inscriptions were made during the 20th century. In the 1960s the Russian researcher Vitaly Shevoroshkin showed that the earlier assumption of a syllabic or semisyllabic writing system was false. However, his decipherment didn't succeed, because he still took the values of letters resembling those of the Greek alphabet for granted. Another Russian researcher, Yuriy Otkupschikov (1988), suggested a completely different interpretation linking the Carian with the Palaeobalcanic languages.
The script was finally deciphered in the 1980s by egyptologist John D. Ray. Unlike his predecessors, he used the Carian-Egyptian bilingual inscriptions that were neglected in the past. The radically different values he assigned to the letters first met with a lot of scepticism, but after some refinements by Ignacio-Javier Adiego and Diether Schürr the readings gained acceptance in the early 1990s, and the discovery of a new bilingual in 1996 confirmed the essential validity of their decipherment.
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For more details on this topic, see Carian script.
[edit] Sources
Carian is known from these sources:[1]
- Personal names with a suffix of -ασσις, -ωλλος or -ωμος
- Twenty inscriptions from Caria including four bilinguals
- Inscriptions of the Caromemphites, an ethnic enclave at Memphis, Egypt
- Graffiti elsewhere in Egypt
- Scattered inscriptions elsewhere in the Aegean world
- Words stated to be Carian by ancient authors.
[edit] Description
[edit] Principles
Two features that help identify the language as Anatolian:[2]
- Asigmatic nominative (without the Indo-European nominative ending *-s) but -s for a genitive ending: úśoλ, úśoλ-s
- Similarity of basic words to other Anatolian languages: ted "father"; en "mother"
[edit] Fragments
| Greek | Transliterated | Translation |
|---|---|---|
| ἄλα | ala | horse |
| βάνδα | banda | victory |
| γέλα | gela | king |
| γίσσα | gissa | stone |
| σοῦα | soua | tomb |
|
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The Athenian Bilingual
The Greek is:[3]
- Σῆμα τόδε: Τυρί
- Καρὸς τὸ Σκύλ[ακος
The translation is:
- This is the tomb of Tur
- the Carian, the son of Scylax
The first line is repeated in Carian:
- Śías: san Tur
where san is equivalent to τόδε and evidences the Anatolian language assibilation, parallel to Luwian za-, "this." If śías is not exactly the same as soua it is roughly equivalent.
[edit] Language history
The Achaean Greeks arriving in small numbers on the coasts of Anatolia in the Late Bronze Age found them occupied by a population that did not speak Greek and were generally involved in political relationships with the Hittite Empire. After the fall of the latter the region became the target of heavy immigration by Ionian and Dorian Greeks who enhanced Greek settlements and founded or refounded major cities. They assumed for purposes of collaboration new regional names based on their previous locations: Ionia, Doris.
The writers born in these new cities reported that the people among whom they had settled, and with whom they had intermarried, were called Carians and spoke a language that was "barbarian", "barbaric" or "barbarian-sounding." No clue has survived from these writings as to what exactly the Greeks might mean by "barbarian." The reportedly Carian names of the Carian cities did not and do not appear to be Greek. Such names as Andanus, Myndus, Bybassia, Larymna, Chysaoris, Alabanda, Plarasa and Iassus were puzzling to the Greeks, some of whom attempted to give etymologies in words thay said were Carian. For the most part they still remain a mystery, to be accepted on faith until further evidence turns up.
Writing disappeared in the Greek Dark Ages but no earlier Carian writing has survived. When inscriptions, some bilingual, began to appear in the 7th century BCE it was already some hundreds of years after the city-naming phase. The earlier Carian may not have been exactly the same.
If Carian and Lycian are closely related then the tree model of language development requires a common ancestor language, which is most likely to have been Luwian. It was spoken in the Late Bronze Age mainly in eastern Anatolia, with pockets extending westward reaching the vicinity of Smyrna and Miletus down the Maeander and Cayster River valleys and to a lesser degree south of there; i.e., into Caria and Lycia.
Carian and Lycian therefore did not then exist but were local developments of the Greek Dark Ages. The disappearance of Luwian there coincides with the appearance of the daughter languages; i.e., Luwian was extinguished by cultural evolution rather than by Hellenization. The supposed Carian city names may have been more nearly Luwian or were assigned partly by some Lelege population.
The local development of Carian excludes some other theories as well: it was not widespread in the Aegean, is not related to Etruscan, was not written in any ancient Aegean scripts, and was not a substrate Aegean language. Its occurrence in various places of Classical Greece is due only to the travel habits of Carians, who apparently became co-travellers of the Ionians. The Carian cemetery of Delos probably represents the pirates mentioned in classical texts. The Carians who fought for Troy if they did were not classical Carians any more than the Greeks there were classical Greeks.
Being penetrated by larger numbers of Greeks and under the domination from time to time of the Ionian League Caria eventually Hellenized and Carian became a dead language. The interludes under the Persian Empire perhaps served only to delay the process. Hellenization would lead to the extinction of the Carian language in the first century BCE or early in the Common Era.
[edit] See also
[edit] Notes
- ^ Adiego, I.J. (2007), “Greek and Carian”, in Christidis, A.F.; Arapopoulou, Maria & Chriti, Maria, A History of Ancient Greek From the Beginning to Late Antiquity, Cambridge University press, pp. 759, 761, ISBN 0521833078. Translator Chris Markham.
- ^ Adiego (2007), page 761.
- ^ Adiego (2007) page 762.
[edit] References
- Adiego, I.J., The Carian Language (Leiden: Brill, 2006).
- Melchert, H. Craig. 2004. Carian in Roger D. Woodard, ed., The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 609–613.
- Blümel, W., Frei, P., et al., ed., Colloquium Caricum = Kadmos 38 (1998)
- Giannotta, M.E., Gusmani, R., et al., ed., La decifrazione del Cario. Rome. 1994
- Adiego, Ignacio-Javier, Studia Carica. Barcelona. 1993
- Ray, John D., An outline of Carian grammar, Kadmos 29:54-73 (1990).
- Откупщиков, Ю. В. "Догреческий субстрат. У истоков европейской цивилизации" [Otkupschikov, Yu. V. "Pre-Greek substrate. At the beginnings of the European civilization"]. Leningrad, 263 pp. (1988).
- Ray, John D., An approach to the Carian script, Kadmos 20:150-162 (1981)
