Carian language

Carian is known from these sources:^[5][6]

• Nearly 40 inscriptions from Caria including five Carian-Greek bilinguals (however, only for two of them the connection between the Carian and Greek text is evident).
• Two inscriptions from mainland Greece: a bilingual from Athens and a graffito from Thessaloniki.
• 60 funeral inscriptions of the Caromemphites, an ethnic enclave at Memphis, Egypt, five of them bilingual (Carian-Egyptian); two inscriptions from Sais in the Nile delta are also bilingual.

(The Caromemphites were descendants of Carian mercenaries who in the first quarter of the sixth century BCE came to Egypt to fight in the Egyptian army, as told by Herodotus, Histories, II.152-154, 163-169.)

• 130 graffiti from Abydos, Thebes, Abu Simbel, and elsewhere in Egypt.
• Coin legends from Mylasa, Kasolaba, Kaunos, and elsewhere in Caria, and Telmessos in Lycia.^[7]
• Words stated to be Carian by ancient authors.
• Personal names with a suffix of -ασσις (-assis), -ωλλος (-ōllos) or -ωμος (-ōmos) in Greek records.

Text in Carian: Kaunusa tiñ árdajós martaša arpandab tarśñpi mašina xrá́m za

Prior to the late 20th century the language remained a total mystery even though many characters of the script seemed 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 erroneously classified the language as non-Indo-European.

A breakthrough was reached in the 1980s, using bilingual funerary inscriptions (Carian-Egyptian) from Egypt (Memphis and Sais). By matching personal names in Carian characters with their counterparts in Egyptian hieroglyphs, John D. Ray, Diether Schürr, and Ignacio J. Adiego were able to unambiguously derive the phonetic value of most Carian signs. It turned out that not a single Carian consonant sign has the same phonetic value as signs of similar shape in the Greek alphabet. By 1993 the so-called "Ray-Schürr-Adiego System" was generally accepted, and its basic correctness was confirmed in 1996 when in Kaunos (Caria) a new Greek-Carian bilingual was discovered, where the Carian names nicely matched their Greek counterparts.^[8]

The language turned out to be Indo-European, its vocabulary and grammar closely related to the other Anatolian languages like Lycian, Milyan, or Lydian. A striking feature of Carian is the presence of large consonant clusters, due to a tendency to not write short vowels. Examples:

sb		= 'and'		cf. Milyan sebe, 'and'
ted		= 'father'		cf. Lycian tedi-, Lydian taada-, 'father'
en		= 'mother'		cf. Lycian ẽni, Lydian ẽnaś, 'mother'
Ktmno, k̂tmño		(Carian personal name)		Greek Hekatomnos (cf. Hecatomnus of Mylasa)
Psmaśk, Pismaśk, Pismašk		(Egyptian personal name)		Psamtik (cf. Greek Psammetikhos I, II, III, IV)
Kbid-, Kbd-		(name of a Carian city)		cf. Lycian χbide (Greek Kaunos)

The sound values of the Carian alphabetic signs are very different from those in the usual Greek alphabets. Only four vowels signs are the same as in Greek (A = α, H = η, O = ο, Y = υ/ου), but not a single consonant is the same. The reason for this might be that the Carians originally developed an alphabet consisting of consonants only (like the Phoenician and Hieroglyphic alphabets before them), and later added the vowel signs, borrowed from a Greek alphabet.

The Carian alphabet consisted of about 34 characters:

More information transcription, a ...

transcription	a	b	β	d	δ	e	γ	i	j	k	k̂	l	λ	Í	m	n	ñ	ŋ	o	p	q	r	s	ś	š	t	τ	u	w	y	ý	z	18	39
Carian sign	𐊠	Λ,𐊩	𐋊	𐊢,<	𐊾	𐊺,𐋏	𐋀	𐊹	𐋅	𐊼,𐊽	𐊴,+	𐊣	𐊦	𐋃	𐊪	𐊵	𐊳	𐋄	𐊫	𐊷	ʘ,𐊨	,𐊥	𐊰	𐊸	𐤧,𐤭	𐊭	𐋇	𐊲,V	𐊿	𐊤,𐋈	𐊻	𐋂	𐊱	𐋆
(rare variants)		𐊱?[9]	𐋋,𐋌, 𐋍,𐊡			𐊧	𐋁		𐤴			𐋎?	𐋏,𐋎	𐋉											𐊮,𐊯	Ρ,𐊬	𐊶			𐋐
IPA	/a/	/β/	/ᵐb/	/ð/?	/ⁿd/	/e/	/ᵑkʷ/?	/i/	/j/	/k/	/c/	/l~r/	/l:~d/	/rʲ/?	/m/	/n/	/ɲ/	/ᵑk/	/o/	/p/	/kʷ/	/r/	/s/	/ç/	/ʃ/	/t/	/tʃ/	/u/	/w/	/y/	/ɥ/	/ts/	?	?
interchangeable?[10]	a←e					e→a		j→i				ℓ-variants[11]																w→u		ý→y

Close

In Caria inscriptions are usually written from left to right, but most texts from Egypt are written right-to-left; in the latter case each character is written mirrorwise. Some, mostly short, inscriptions have word dividers: vertical strokes, dots, spaces or linefeeds.

The Athenian Bilingual Inscription^{[20][21][22][23]}

Σε̂μα τόδε : Τυρ[ Greek:^[24] Sema tode Tyr — "This is the tomb of Tur...,"
Καρὸς τô Σκύλ[ακος] Greek: Karos to Skylakos — "the Carian, the son of Scylax" ()
𐊸𐋅𐊠𐊰 : 𐊰𐊠𐊵 𐊭𐊲𐊥[ Carian:^[25] Śjas: san Tur[ "This is the tomb of Tur..."
[Ἀ]ριστοκλε̂ς ἐπ[οίε̄] Greek: Aristokles epoie — "Made by Aristocles."

The word 𐊰𐊠𐊵 san is equivalent to τόδε and evidences the Anatolian language assibilation, parallel to Luwian za-, "this".^[20] If 𐊸𐋅𐊠𐊰 śjas is not exactly the same as Σε̂μα Sēma it is roughly equivalent.

This section does not cite any sources. (June 2018)

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 were called Carians and spoke a language that was "barbarian", "barbaric" or "barbarian-sounding" (i.e. not Greek). 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 they said were Carian. For the most part they still remain a mystery.

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.

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^{[citation needed]}. Its occurrence in various places of Classical Greece is due only to the travel habits of Carians^{[citation needed]}, 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 1st century BCE or early in the Common Era.

• Carian alphabets