Lycian language Totally Explained

Everything about Lycian Language totally explained

Lycian (Lycian Trm̃mili) is a modern adjective meaning in this case the inscriptional language of ancient Lycia as well as its presumed spoken counterpart. The ancient Greeks and Romans considered Lycia to be populated by Lycians. The name probably came from Lukka, an infamous marauding people inhabiting the shores of Lycia in the Late Bronze Age. Lycia comprised part of today's Antalya and Fethiye provinces of southern Turkey, especially the mountainous headland between Fethiye Bay and the Gulf of Antalya. The Lukka probably also were in Lycaonia, located the next headland to the east, also mountainous, in Antalya and Mersin provinces.
Lycian was an Indo-European language, one of the Luwian subgroup of Anatolian languages. The Luwian subgroup contained also cuneiform and hieroglyphic Luwian, Carian, Sidetic and Pisidic. All but Luwian were spoken only in the Iron Age, after roughly 1000 BC; thus neither the Lukka during the time of the Sea Peoples nor the Lycians of the Catalogue of Trojans could have spoken any Lycian. Luwian on the other hand extended back into the Late Bronze Age and preceded the fall of the Hittite Empire. It vanished about the time of the Neo-Hittite states in southern Anatolia (and Syria); thus, the Iron Age members of the subgroup are localized daughter languages of Luwian. Whether the Lukka people always resided in southern Anatolia or always spoke Luwian are different topics. Lycian became extinct around the beginning of the first century BC being replaced by Greek.
The language is known from a few fairly extensive inscriptions. From them scholars have identified at least two dialects. One is considered standard Lycian, also termed Lycian A; the other, which is attested on side d of the Xanthos stele, is termed Lycian B or Milyan, separated by its grammatical particularities. Lycian had its own alphabet, which was closely related to the Greek alphabet but included at least one character borrowed from Carian.

Endonym

A few etymologies of the Lycian language endonym are offered:) 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.

Sources

Lycian is known from these sources:

Personal and place names in Greek.

172 inscriptions on stone in the Lycian script dating from the late 5th century BC to the late 4th century BC. They are categorized as:

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.

The Letoon trilingual, in Lycian A, Greek and Aramaic.

The Xanthus stele bilingual. The inscribed upper part of a tomb at Xanthos, called the Xanthus Stele or the Xanthus Obelisk. A Lycian A inscription covers the south, east and part of the north faces. The north side also contains a 12-line poem in Greek and additional text, found mainly on the west side, in a dialect of Lycian called Milyan or Lycian B. The dialect appears only there and on a tomb in Antiphellos. The total number of lines on the stele is 255, including 243 in Lycian and 12 in Greek. The inscriptional material covers about 170 years, 500-330 BC.

Description

Principles

Some features that help to identify Lycian as being in the Luwian group:

Assibilation of Indo-European (IE in this article) palatals (Satem change): *ekwo- (the original k was palatal) to Luwian á-zú-wa/i-, Lycian esbe, "horse."

Replacement of genitive case with adjectives ending in -ahi or -ehi, Luwian -assi-.

A preterite active formed with Indo-European secondary middle endings:

IE *-to to Luwian -ta, Lycian te- or de- in the third person singular
IE *-nto to Luwian -nta, Lycian (n)te in the third person plural

Similarity of words: Luwian māssan(i)-, Lycian māhān(i), "god."Further Information

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