Lycian language

Lycian
𐊗𐊕𐊐𐊎𐊆𐊍𐊆 Trm̃mili
Xanthos stele with Lycian inscriptions
Native to	Lycia, Lycaonia
Region	Southwestern Anatolia
Ethnicity	Lycians
Era	500 – ca. 200 BC[1]
Language family	Indo-European Anatolian Luwo-Lydian Luwo-Palaic Luwic Lyco-Carian Lycian–Sidetic Lycian
Early forms	Proto-Indo-European Proto-Anatolian
Lycian script
Language codes
ISO 639-3	xlc
Linguist List	xlc
Glottolog	lyci1241

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The Lycian language (𐊗𐊕𐊐𐊎𐊆𐊍𐊆 Trm̃mili)^[2] was the language of the ancient Lycians who occupied the Anatolian region known during the Iron Age as Lycia. Most texts date back to the fifth and fourth century BC. Two languages are known as Lycian: regular Lycian or Lycian A, and Lycian B or Milyan. Lycian became extinct around the beginning of the first century BC, replaced by the

Payava (his name is Pamphylian) as depicted on his tomb. The Lycian inscription runs: “Payava, son of Ed[...], acquired [this grave] in the sacred [burial] area of the acropolis(?) of A[rttumba]ra (a Lycian ruler), when Lycia saw(?) S[alas](??) [as governor(?)]. This tomb I made, a 10 year [h]iti (project?), by means of Xanthian ahamas.” Payava may be the soldier at the right, honoring his ruler Arttumbara with a laurel wreath.^[3] 375-360 BC.

The inscription on the front of Payava's tomb in the Lycian language.

From the late eighteenth century Western European travellers began to visit Asia Minor to deepen their acquaintance with the worlds of Homer and the New Testament. In southwest Asia Minor (Lycia) they discovered inscriptions in an unknown script. The first four texts were published in 1820, and within months French Orientalist Antoine-Jean Saint-Martin used a bilingual showing individuals' names in Greek and Lycian as a key to transliterate the Lycian alphabet and determine the meaning of a few words.^[4] During the next century the number of texts increased, especially from the 1880s when Austrian expeditions systematically combed through the region. However, attempts to translate any but the most simple texts had to remain speculative, although combinatorial analysis of the texts cleared up some grammatical aspects of the language. The only substantial text with a Greek counterpart, the Xanthos stele, was hardly helpful because the Lycian text was quite heavily damaged, and worse, its Greek text does not anywhere come near to a close parallel.^[5]

It was only after the decipherment of Hittite, by Bedřich Hrozný in 1917, that a language became known that was closely related to Lycian and could help etymological interpretations of the Lycian vocabulary. A next leap forward could be made with the discovery in 1973 of the Letoon trilingual in Lycian, Greek and Aramaic.^[6] Though much remains unclear, comprehensive dictionaries of Lycian have been composed since by Craig Melchert^[7] and Günter Neumann.^[8]

Sources

Lycian is known from these sources, some of them fairly extensive:^[9][10][11]

• 172 inscriptions on stone in the
  Lycian script dating from the 5th and 4th century BC (until ca. 330 BC).^[12]
  They include:
  • The
    Antiphellos
    . The total number of lines on the stele is 255, including 138 in Lycian A, 12 in Greek, and 105 in Milyan.
  • The Letoon trilingual, in Lycian A, Greek and Aramaic.
  • 150 burial instructions carved on rock tombs.
  • 20 votive or dedicatory inscriptions.
• About 100 inscriptions on coins minted at Xanthus from the reign of Kuprili, 485-440 BC, to the reign of Pericle, 380-360 BC.^[13]
• Personal and place names in Greek.

Lycian alphabet

The Lycian alphabet consists of about 29 signs, many of them reminiscent of the Greek alphabet:

Classification

Lycian was an Indo-European language, one in the Luwian subgroup of Anatolian languages. A number of principal features help identify Lycian as being in the Luwian group:^[14]

• palatals (satem
  change): *h₁éḱwos to Luwian á-zú-wa/i-, Lycian esbe 'horse'.
• Replacement of genitive case with adjectives ending in -ahi or -ehi, Luwian -assi-.
• A
  middle
  endings:
  • PIE *-to to Luwian -ta, Lycian -te or -de in the third person singular
  • PIE *-nto to Luwian -nta, Lycian -(n)te in the third person plural
• Similarity of words: Luwian māssan(i)-, Lycian māhān(i) 'god'.

The Luwian subgroup also includes cuneiform and hieroglyphic Luwian,

From the inscriptions, scholars have identified at least two languages that were termed Lycian. One is considered standard Lycian, also termed Lycian A; the other, which is attested on side D of the Xanthos stele, is Milyan or Lycian B, separated by its grammatical particularities.

Grammar

Nouns

Nouns and adjectives distinguish

Nouns can be divided in five declension groups: a-stems, e-stems, i-stems, consonant stems, and mixed stems; the differences between the groups are very minor. The declension of nouns goes as follows:^[16][17][18]

Pronouns

Demonstrative pronoun

The paradigm for the demonstrative pronoun ebe, "this" is:^[19][18]

Personal pronoun

The demonstrative ebe, 'this', is also used as a personal pronoun: 'this one', therefore 'he, she, it'. Here is a paradigm of all attested personal pronouns:^[18]

Other pronouns

Other pronouns are:^[18]

• Relative or interrogative pronouns: ti-, 'who, which'; teri or ẽke, 'when'; teli, 'where'; km̃mẽt(i)-, 'how many' (also indefinite: 'however many').

• Indefinite pronouns: tike-, 'someone, something'; tise, 'anyone, anything'; tihe, 'any'.

• Reflexive pronoun: -ti (suffixed), 'himself'.

Numerals

The following numerals are attested:^[18]

Verbs

Just as in other Anatolian languages (Luwian, Lydian) verbs in Lycian were conjugated in the present-future and preterite tenses and in the imperative with three persons singular and plural. Some endings have many variants, due to nasalization (-a- → -añ-, -ã-; -e- → -eñ-, -ẽ-), lenition (-t- → -d-), gemination (-t- → -tt-; -d- → -dd-), and vowel harmonization (-a- → -e-: prñnawãtẽ → prñnewãtẽ).

About a dozen conjugations can be distinguished, on the basis of (1) the verbal root ending (a-stems, consonant stems, -ije-stems, etc.), and (2) the endings of the third person singular being either unlenited (present -ti; preterite -te; imperative -tu) or lenited (-di; -de; -du). For example, prñnawa-^(ti) (to build) is an unlenited a-stem (prñnawati, he builds), a(i)-^(di) (to make) is a lenited a(i)-stem (adi, he makes). Differences between the various conjugations are minor.

Verbs are conjugated as follows; Mediopassive (MP) forms are in brown:^[20][21]

A

Emmanuel Laroche, who analysed the Lycian text of the Letoon trilingual,^[24] concluded that word order in Lycian is slightly more free than in the other Anatolian languages. Sentences in plain text mostly have the structure

ipc (initial particle cluster) - V (Verb) - S (Subject) - O (direct Object).

The verb immediately follows an "initial particle cluster", consisting of a more or less meaningless particle "se-" or "me-" (literally, 'and') followed by a series of up to three suffixes, often called emphatics. The function of some of these suffixes is mysterious, but others have been identified as pronomina like "he", "it", or "them". The subject, direct object, or indirect object of the sentence may thus proleptically be referred to in the initial particle cluster. As an example, the sentence "X built a house" might in Lycian be structured: "and-he-it / he-built / X / a-house".

Other constituents of a sentence, like an indirect object, predicate, or complimentary adjuncts, can be placed anywhere after the verb.

Contrary to this pattern, funeral inscriptions as a rule have a standard form with the object at the head of the sentence: "This tomb built X"; literally: "This tomb / it / he built / X" (order: O - ipc - V - S). Laroche suspects the reason for this deviation to be that in this way emphasis fell on the funerary object: "This object, it was built by X". Example:^[25]

1.		ebẽñnẽ prñnawã mẽti prñnawatẽ	This building, [it was] he who built it:
2.		xisteriya xzzbãzeh tideimi	Qisteria, Qtsbatse's son,
3.		hrppi ladi ehbi se tideime	for his wife and for the sons.

In line 1 mẽti = m-ẽ-ti is the initial particle cluster, where m- = me- is the neutral "steppingstone" to which two suffixes are affixed: -ẽ- = "it", and the relative pronoun -ti, "who, he who".

Subject-verb-object hypothesis

Kim McCone proposed in the 1970s that Lycian's unmarked word order was instead

Further examples of subject-initial unmarked clauses cited by Melchert include:[27]

Endonym

A few

• Language of the mountain people (Laroche): Luwian tarmi- "pointed object" becomes a hypothetical *tarmašši- "mountainous" used in Trm̃mis- "Lycia." Lycia and Pisidia each had a hill-town named Termessos.
• Attarima (Carruba): A previously unknown
  Lukka
  .
• Termilae (Bryce): A people displaced from Crete about 1600 BC.
• Termera (Strabo^[31]): A Lelege people displaced by the Trojan War, first settling in Caria and assigning such names as Telmessos, Termera, Termerion, Termeros, Termilae, then displaced to Lycia by the Ionians.^[32]

See also

• Letoon trilingual
• Lycia
• Lycian script

References