Phrygian language
| Phrygian | |
|---|---|
| Region | Central Anatolia (now Turkey) |
| Extinct | After the 5th century AD |
Indo-European
| |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | xpg |
xpg | |
| Glottolog | phry1239 |
| Part of a series on |
| Indo-European topics |
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The Phrygian language (/ˈfrɪdʒiən/) was the Indo-European language of the Phrygians, spoken in Anatolia (modern Turkey), during classical antiquity (c. 8th century BC to 5th century AD).
Plato observed that some Phrygian words resembled Greek ones.[4] Modern consensus views Phrygian to be closely related to Greek.[5][6][7][8]
Discovery and decipherment[]
Ancient authors like Herodotus and Hesychius have provided us with a few dozen words assumed to be Phrygian, so-called glosses.[9] In modern times the first monument with a Phrygian text, found at Ortaköy (classical Orcistus), was described in 1752.[10] In 1800 at Yazılıkaya (classical Nakoleia) two more inscriptions were discovered.[11][12] On one of them the word ΜΙΔΑΙ, 'to Midas', could be read, which prompted the idea that they were part of a building, possibly the grave, of the legendary Phrygian king Midas. Later, when Western Orientalists and Bible scholars began to travel through Anatolia to become acquainted with the geographical background of Homer's world and the New Testament, more monuments were discovered. By 1862 sixteen Phrygian inscriptions were known, among them a few Greek-Phrygian bilinguals. This allowed German scholar to undertake the first serious attempt to decipher the script, though he overstressed the parallels of Phrygian to Armenian, which led to some false conclusions.[13] After 1880, the Scottish Bible scholar William Mitchell Ramsay discovered many more inscriptions. In the 20th century, the understanding of Phrygian has increased, due to a steady flow of new texts, more reliable transcriptions, and better knowledge of the Indo-European sound change laws. The alphabet is now well-known, though minor revisions of the rarer signs of the alphabet are still possible, one sign (
= /j/, transcribed y) was only securely identified in 1969.[14]
Classification[]
Phrygian is a member of the Indo-European linguistic family, but because of the fragmentary evidence, its exact position within that family is uncertain. Phrygian shares important features with Greek and Armenian. Between the 19th and the first half of the 20th century Phrygian was mostly considered a satəm language, and thus closer to Armenian and Thracian, while today it is commonly considered to be a centum language and thus closer to Greek.[15] The reason that in the past Phrygian had the guise of a satəm language was due to two secondary processes that affected it. Namely, Phrygian merged the old labiovelar with the plain velar, and secondly, when in contact with palatal vowels /e/ and /i/, especially in initial position, some consonants became palatalized. Furthermore, Kortlandt (1988) presented common sound changes of Thracian and Armenian and their separation from Phrygian and the rest of the palaeo-Balkan languages from an early stage.[7][16]
Modern consensus views Greek as the closest relative of Phrygian, a position that is supported by Brixhe, Neumann, Matzinger, Woodhouse, Ligorio, Lubotsky, and Obrador-Cursach. Furthermore, out of 36 isoglosses collected by Obrador Cursach, Phrygian shared 34 with Greek, with 22 being exclusive between them. The last 50 years of Phrygian scholarship developed a hypothesis that proposes a proto-Graeco-Phrygian stage out of which Greek and Phrygian originated, and if Phrygian was more sufficiently attested, that stage could perhaps be reconstructed.[2][3][6][7][17]
An alternative theory, suggested by Eric P. Hamp, is that Phrygian was most closely related to Italo-Celtic languages.[18][19]
Inscriptions[]
The Phrygian epigraphical material is divided into two distinct subcorpora, Old Phrygian and New Phrygian. These attest different stages of the Phrygian language; are written with different alphabets and upon different materials; and have different geographical distributions.
Old Phrygian is attested in 395 inscriptions in Anatolia and beyond. They were written in the Phrygian alphabet between 800 and 330 BCE. The Corpus des inscriptions paléo-phrygiennes (CIPPh) and its supplements[20] contain most known Old Phrygian inscriptions, though a few graffiti are not included. The oldest inscriptions - mid-8th century BCE - have been found on silver, bronze, and alabaster objects in tumuli (grave mounds) at Gordion (Yassıhüyük, the so-called "Midas Mound") and Bayındır (East Lycia).[21]
New Phrygian is attested in 117 funerary inscriptions, mostly curses against desecrators added after a Greek epitaph. New Phrygian was written in the Greek alphabet between the 1st and 3rd centuries CE and is restricted to the western part of ancient Phrygia, in central Anatolia. Most New Phrygian inscriptions have been lost, so they are only known through the testimony of the first compilers. New Phrygian inscriptions have been cataloged by William M. Ramsay (ca. 1900) and by Obrador-Cursach (2018).
Some scholars identify a third division, Middle Phrygian, which is represented by a single inscription from Dokimeion. It is a Phrygian epitaph consisting of six hexametric verses written in eight lines, and dated to the end of the 4th century BCE, following the Macedonian conquest. It is considered the first Phrygian text to be inscribed with the Greek alphabet. Its phraseology has some echoes of an Old Phrygian epitaph from Bithynia, but it anticipates phonetic and spelling features found in New Phrygian. Three graffiti from Gordion, from the 4th to the 2nd centuries BCE, are ambiguous in terms of the alphabet used as well as their linguistic stage, and might also be considered Middle Phrygian.[22]
| Features | Old Phrygian | New Phrygian |
|---|---|---|
| Number of inscriptions | 395 | 117 |
| Dating | ca. 800-330 BCE | Late 1st-3rd c. CE |
| Alphabet | Phrygian | Greek |
| Word dividers[24] | sometimes (spaces or colons) | never (continuous writing) |
| Writing material | Varied | Stone |
| Contents | Varied | Funerary |
| Area | Across Anatolia (and beyond) | Only central Anatolia |
| Archaeological context | Mainly yes | Never |
| Preserved | Mainly yes | Mainly no |
The distribution of the Old, Middle and New Phrygian inscriptions.
6th century BCE inscription with the Phrygian alphabet from the Midas Tomb, Midas City: ΒΑΒΑ: ΜΕΜΕϜΑΙΣ: ΠΡΟΙΤΑϜΟΣ: ΚΦΙJΑΝΑϜΕJΟΣ: ΣΙΚΕΝΕΜΑΝ: ΕΔΑΕΣ (Baba, advisor, leader from Tyana, dedicated this niche).[25][26]
The last mentions of the language date to the 5th century CE, and it was likely extinct by the 7th century CE.[27]
Alphabet[]
From ca. 800 till 300 BCE Phrygians used the Old-Phrygian alphabet of nineteen letters derived from the Phoenician alphabet. This script was usually written from left to right ("dextroverse"). The signs of this script are:[28]
| sign |  |
B | Γ | Δ | E | F | I | K |  |
 |
 |
O |  |
P |  |
T |  |
|
|
| variants | 8 | Λ |  |
 ,  ,
|