Carian language
| Carian | |
|---|---|
| Region | Ancient southwestern Anatolia |
| Era | attested 7th–3rd century BCE |
| Carian script | |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | |
|
Linguist list
|
xcr |
| Glottolog | cari1274 |
The Carian language is an extinct language of the Luwian subgroup of the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European language family. The Carian language was spoken in Caria, a region of western Anatolia between the ancient regions of Lycia and Lydia, by the Carians, a name possibly first mentioned in Hittite sources. Prior to the late 20th century CE the language remained a total mystery even though many characters of the script appeared to be from the Greek alphabet. Using Greek phonetic values of letters 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 phonetic values.
Carian is known from these sources:
Two features that help identify the language as Anatolian:
The Athenian Bilingual
The Greek is:
The translation is:
The first line is repeated in Carian:
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.
Carian is closely related to Lycian and Milyan (Lycian B), and both are closely related to, though not direct descendants of, Luwian. Whether the correspondences between Luwian, Carian, and Lycian are due to direct descent (i.e. a language family as represented by a tree-model), or are due to dialect geography, is disputed.
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.
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