Lydian language


Lydian is an extinct Indo-European Anatolian language spoken in the region of Lydia, in western Anatolia. The language is attested in graffiti and in coin legends from the late 8th century or the early 7th century to the 3rd century BCE, but well-preserved inscriptions of significant length are so far limited to the 5th century and the 4th century BCE, during the period of Persian domination. Thus, Lydian texts are effectively contemporaneous with those in Lycian.
Strabo mentions that around his time, the Lydian language was no longer spoken in Lydia proper but was still being spoken among the multicultural population of Kibyra in southwestern Anatolia, by the descendants of the Lydian colonists, who had founded the city.

Text corpus and decipherment

In 1916 the Sardis bilingual inscription, a bilingual inscription in Aramaic and Lydian allowed Enno Littmann to decipher the Lydian language. From an analysis of the two parallel texts, he identified the alphabetic signs, most of them correctly, established a basic vocabulary, attempted translation of a dozen unilingual texts, gave an outline of Lydian grammar, and even recognized peculiar poetical characteristics in several texts. Eight years later William Hepburn Buckler presented a collection of 51 inscriptions then known. The 109 inscriptions known by 1986 have been treated comprehensively by Roberto Gusmani; new texts keep being found from time to time.
All but a few of the extant Lydian texts have been found in or near Sardis, the Lydian capital, but fewer than 30 of the inscriptions consist of more than a few words or are reasonably complete. Most of the inscriptions are on marble or stone and are sepulchral in content, but several are decrees of one sort or another, and some half-dozen texts seem to be in verse, with a stress-based meter and vowel assonance at the end of the line. Tomb inscriptions include many epitaphs, which typically begin with the words ?? ????? es wãnas. The short texts are mostly graffiti, coin legends, seals, potter's marks, and the like. The language of the Ionian Greek poet Hipponax is interspersed with Lydian words, many of them from popular slang.
Lydian can be officially studied at Marburg University, Germany, within the Hittitology minor program.

Classification

Within the Anatolian group, Lydian occupies a unique and problematic position. One reason is the still very limited evidence and understanding of the language. Another reason is a number of features that are not shared with any other Anatolian language. It is still not known whether those differences represent developments peculiar to pre-Lydian or the retention in Lydian of archaic features that were lost in the other Anatolian languages. Until more satisfactory knowledge becomes available, the status of Lydian within Anatolian remains a "special" one.

Writing system

The Lydian script, which is strictly alphabetic, consists of 26 signs:
sign
transliterationapgdewiyklmnorstufqšτãẽλñc
bvśsν
sound /a//p~b//g//ð//e://w/ or /v//i//i̯~j/?/k~ɡ//l//m//n//o://r//s//t~d//u//f/ or /ɸ//kʷ//ʃ/ or /ç//tʃ/ or /tç//ãː/?/ã/ or /æ̃/?/ʎ/ /ɲ/ or /ŋ/?/ts~dz/?
Greek equivalentΑΒΓΔΕFΙΚΛΜΝΟΡΣΤΥΦϙ-----

The script is related to or derived from that of Greek as well as its western Anatolian neighbours, the exact relationship still remaining unclear. The direction of writing in the older texts is either from left to right or right to left. Later texts show exclusively the latter. Use of word-dividers is variable. The texts were found chiefly at the ancient capital of Sardis and include decrees and epitaphs, some of which were composed in verse; most were written during the 5th century and the 4th century BCE, but a few may have been created as early as the 7th century.

Phonology

Vowels

Lydian has seven vowels: ? a, ? e, ? i, ? o, ? u, ? ã, and ? ẽ, the last two being nasal vowels, typically before a nasal consonant. The vowels e, o, ã, and ẽ occur only when accented. A vowel or glide ? y appears rarely, only in the oldest inscriptions, and probably indicates an allophone of i or e that is perhaps unstressed.
Lydian is notable for its extensive consonant clusters, which resulted from the loss of word-final short vowels, together with massive syncope; there may have been an unwritten in such sequences.

Consonants

transliteration scheme was often used, which may lead to confusion. This older system wrote v, ν, s, and ś, instead of today's w, ñ, š, and s. The modern system renders the sibilants more naturally and prevents confusion between v and the Greek nu symbol ν
Voicing was likely not distinctive in Lydian. However /p t k/ are voiced before nasals and apparently before /r/. The palatal affricate and sibilant may have been palato-alveolar.
It has now been argued that the laterals l and λ are actually flaps.
The sign ? has traditionally been transliterated d and interpreted as an interdental /ð/ resulting from the sound change *i̯ > ð or the lenition of Proto-Anatolian *t. However, it has recently been argued that in all contexts d in fact represents the palatal glide /j/, previously considered absent from Lydian. An interdental /ð/ would stand as the only interdental sound in Lydian phonology, whereas a palatal interpretation of d is complemented by a full series of other palatal consonants: λ, š, ñ, and τ.

Stress

developed rules to determine which syllable in a word has the stress accent. In short, the rules are:
  • Syllables with vowel -ã-, -ẽ-, -e-, -o-, -aa-, and -ii- always have stress. Syllables with -i-, -a- or -u- may be accented or unaccented.
  • Enclitics never have stress.
  • Prefixes, even those with a long vowel, do not have stress.
  • An -a- before a nasal never has stress.
  • In consonant clusters syllabic liquidae, nasals and sibilants do not have stress.
  • Within a declension or conjugation stress does not move from one syllable to another.
A useful application of those rules is the investigation of metres in Lydian poetry.

Morphology

Nouns

Nouns and adjectives distinguish singular and plural forms. Words in the texts are predominantly singular. Plural forms are scarce, and a dual has not been found in Lydian. There are two genders: animate and inanimate. Only three cases are securely attested: nominative, accusative, and dative-locative. A genitive case seems to be present in the plural, but in the singular usually a so-called possessive is used instead, which is similar to the Luwic languages: a suffix -li is added to the root of a substantive, and thus an adjective is formed that is declined in turn. However, recently it has been defended that a form ending in -l, formerly thought to be an "endingless" variant of the possessive, was indeed a genitive singular. Of an ablative case there are only a few uncertain examples.
Nouns, adjectives, and pronomina are all declined according to a similar paradigm:

Substantives

Examples of substantives:

Adjectives

Examples of adjectives:

Pronomina

Examples of pronomina:

Verbs

Just as in other Anatolian languages verbs in Lydian were conjugated in the present-future and preterite tenses with three persons singular and plural. Imperative or gerundive forms have not been found yet. Singular forms are often hard to distinguish from plural forms in the third person present active : the plural form seems to be in principle nasalized, but this could not always be expressed in the writing.
Lydian distinguished a mediopassive voice with the third-person singular ending -tλ or -daλ.
About a dozen conjugations can be distinguished, on the basis of the verbal root ending, and the endings of the third person singular being either unlenited or lenited. For example, šarpta- is an unlenited a-stem, qaλmλa- is a lenited a-stem. Differences between the various conjugations are minor.
Many Lydian verbs are composite, using prefixes such as ẽn-, ẽt-, fa-/f-, šaw-, and kat-/kaτ-, and suffixes like -ãn-/-ẽn-, -no-/-ño-, -ši-, and -ki- or -ti- ; their meaning is often difficult to determine.
Examples of verbal conjugation: