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Concept
Carian language
Summary
The Carian language is an extinct language of the Luwic subgroup of the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European language family, spoken by the Carians. The known corpus is small, and the majority comes from Egypt; 170 Carian inscriptions from Egypt are known, whilst only 30 are known from Caria itself.
Caria is a region of western Anatolia between the ancient regions of Lycia and Lydia, a name possibly first mentioned in Hittite sources. 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 the effects of a sprachbund, is disputed.
Carian is known from these sources:
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
Words stated to be Carian by ancient authors.
Personal names with a suffix of -ασσις (-assis), -ωλλος (-ōllos) or -ωμος (-ōmos) in Greek records
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.
Official source
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