What is Carian Language?

Carian
Spoken in:	Southwestern Anatolia
Language extinction:	?
Language family:	Anatolian   Carian
Writing system:	Carian script
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	none
ISO 639-2:	ine
ISO 639-3:	xcr

The Carian language was the language of the Carians. It was an Anatolian language, apparently closer to Lycian than to Lydian. It is attested by a number of proper names (Sangodos, Kaphenos, Truoles, Nastes, Nomion, Mausolos, etc.) and a small corpus of inscriptions, most of which are found in Egypt.

The Carian script consists of about 45 letters altogether. Numerous attempts to interpret the Carian inscriptions were made during the 20th century. In the 1960s the Russian researcher Vitaly Shevoroshkin showed that the earlier assumption of a syllabic or semisyllabic writing system was false. However, his decipherment didn't succeed, because he still took the values of letters resembling those of the Greek alphabet for granted. Another Russian researcher, Yuriy Otkupschikov (1988), suggested a completely different interpretation linking the Carian with the Palaeobalcanic languages. The script was finally deciphered in the 1980s by egyptologist John D. Ray. Unlike his predecessors, he used the Carian-Egyptian bilingual inscriptions that were neglected in the past. The radically different values he assigned to the letters first met with a lot of scepticism, but after some refinements by Ignacio-Javier Adiego and Diether Schürr the readings gained acceptance in the early 1990s, and the discovery of a new bilingual in 1996 confirmed the essential validity of their decipherment.

The language was heavily influenced by older aboriginal languages of Anatolia, such as the pre-Indo-European tongue of the Leleges who also dwelt in Caria (and with whom the Carians were sometimes confounded). Hellenization of Caria would lead to the extinction of the Carian language in the first century BC or early in the Common Era.

References

• Melchert, H. Craig. 2004. Carian in Roger D. Woodard, ed., The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 609–613.
• Blümel, W., Frei, P., et al., ed., Colloquium Caricum = Kadmos 38 (1998)
• Giannnotta, M.E., Gusmani, R., et al., ed., La decifrazione del Cario. Rome. 1994
• Adiego, Ignacio-Javier, Studia Carica. Barcelona. 1993
• Ray, John D., An outline of Carian grammar, Kadmos 29:54-73 (1990).
• Откупщиков, Ю. В. "Догреческий субстрат. У истоков европейской цивилизации" [Otkupschikov, Yu. V. "Pre-Greek substrate. At the beginnings of the European civilization"]. Leningrad, 263 pp. (1988).
• Ray, John D., An approach to the Carian script, Kadmos 20:150-162 (1981)