Lemnian language
The Lemnian language was spoken on the island of Lemnos, Greece, in the second half of the 6th century BC. It is mainly attested by an inscription found on a funerary stele, termed the Lemnos stele, discovered in 1885 near Kaminia. Fragments of inscriptions on local pottery show that it was spoken there by a community. In 2009, a newly discovered inscription was reported from the site of Hephaistia, the principal ancient city of Lemnos. Lemnian is largely accepted as being a Tyrsenian language, and as such related to Etruscan and Raetic. After the Athenians conquered the island in the latter half of the 6th century BC, Lemnian was replaced by Attic Greek.
Classification
A relationship between Lemnian, Raetic and Etruscan, as a Tyrsenian language family, has been proposed by German linguist Helmut Rix due to close connections in vocabulary and grammar. For example,- Both Etruscan and Lemnian share two unique dative cases, type-I *-si and type-II *-ale, shown both on the Lemnos Stele and in inscriptions written in Etruscan ;
- A few lexical correspondences have been noted, such as Lemnian avis and Etruscan avils ; or Lemnian šialχvis and Etruscan šealχls, both sharing the same internal structure "number + decade suffix + inflectional ending" ;
- They also share the genitive in *-s and a simple past tense in *-a-i.
According to Dutch historian Luuk De Ligt, the Lemnian language could have arrived in the Aegean Sea during the Late Bronze Age, when Mycenaean rulers recruited groups of mercenaries from Sicily, Sardinia and various parts of the Italian peninsula.
Scholars such as Norbert Oettinger, Michel Gras and Carlo De Simone think that Lemnian is the testimony of an Etruscan commercial settlement on the island that took place before 700 BC, not related to the Sea Peoples.
After more than 90 years of archaeological excavations at Lemnos, nothing has been found that would support a migration from Lemnos to Etruria or to the Alps where Raetic was spoken. The indigenous inhabitants of Lemnos, also called in ancient times Sinteis, were the Sintians, a Thracian population.
A 2021 archeogenetic analysis of Etruscan individuals concluded that the Etruscans were autochthonous and genetically similar to the Early Iron Age Latins, and that the Etruscan language, and therefore the other languages of the Tyrrhenian family, may be a surviving language of the ones that were widespread in Europe from at least the Neolithic period before the arrival of the Indo-European languages, as already argued by German geneticist Johannes Krause who concluded that it is likely that the Etruscan language "developed on the continent in the course of the Neolithic Revolution". The lack of recent Anatolian-related admixture and Iranian-related ancestry among the Etruscans, who genetically joined firmly to the European cluster, might also suggest that the presence of a handful of inscriptions found at Lemnos, in a language related to Etruscan and Raetic, "could represent population movements departing from the Italian peninsula".
Phonology
Vowels
Like Etruscan, the Lemnian language appears to have had a four-vowel system, consisting of "i", "e", "a" and "o". Other languages in the neighbourhood of the Lemnian area, namely Hittite and Akkadian, had similar four-vowel systems, suggesting early areal influence.Writing system
The Lemnian inscriptions are in Western Greek alphabet, also called the "red alphabet". The red type is found in most parts of central and northern mainland Greece, as well as the island of Euboea, and in colonies associated with these places, including most colonies in Italy. The alphabet used for Lemnian inscriptions is similar to an archaic variant used to write the Etruscan language in southern Etruria.Inscriptions
Lemnos Stele
The stele, also known as the stele of Kaminia, was found built into a church wall in Kaminia and is now at the National Archaeological Museum of Athens. The 6th century date is based on the fact that in 510 BC the Athenian Miltiades invaded Lemnos and hellenized it. The stele bears a low-relief bust of a male soldier and is inscribed in an alphabet similar to the western Greek alphabet. The inscription is in Boustrophedon style, and has been transliterated but had not been successfully translated until serious linguistic analysis based on comparisons with Etruscan, combined with breakthroughs in Etruscan's own translation started to yield fruit.The inscription consists of 198 characters forming 33 to 40 words, word separation sometimes indicated with one to three dots. The text on the front consists of three parts, two written vertically and one horizontally. Comprehensible is the phrase sivai avis šialχvis, reminiscent of Etruscan maχs śealχis-c, seeming to refer to the person to whom this funerary monument was dedicated, holaiesi φokiašiale, who appeared to have been an official called maras at some point marasm avis aomai, compare Etruscan -m "and", and maru. Oddly, this text also contains a word naφoθ that seems to be connected to Etruscan nefts "nephew/uncle"; but this is may be borrowing from Latin nepot-, suggesting that the speakers of this language migrated at some point from the Italic peninsula. Kloekhorst, on the other hand, suggested in 2021 that it is more likely to have been borrowed from the Phrygian nevot-, with the same meaning, which would instead suggest that the speakers of this language would have migrated from Anatolia. However, the origin of the Phrygian language is itself a matter of debate. Some linguists hypothesize that it is of Balkan rather than Anatolian origin, and a connection between Etruscan and Anatolian languages was rejected by Simon in 2021. Simon finds no substantial evidence supporting the theory of Anatolian loanwords in Etruscan, a clear rejection that erodes the linguistic foundation for non-autochthonous origins.
G. Kleinschmidt in 1893 proposed such translation of expression haralio eptesio - king έπιτιδημι. It is a high probability that here king/tyrant of Athens Hippias was mentioned. Tyrand Hippias died in Lemnos in 490 BC.
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Hephaistia inscription
Another Lemnian inscription was found during excavations at Hephaistia on the island of Lemnos in 2009. The inscription consists of 26 letters arranged in two lines of boustrophedonic script.Transcription: