Social:Carian alphabets

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Short description: Greek-derived alphabets used to write the Carian language of Anatolia
Carian
Carian kulaldis.png
Inscription in Carian of the name ๐Šจ๐Šฃ๐Š ๐Šฆ๐Šน๐Šธ, qlaฮปiล›[1]
Type
Alphabet
LanguagesCarian language
Time period
7th to 1st centuries BCE
Parent systems
Egyptian hieroglyphs[2]
Sister systems
Lycian, Lydian, Phrygian
DirectionLeft-to-right
ISO 15924Cari, 201
Unicode alias
Carian
U+102A0–U+102DF

The Carian alphabets are a number of regional scripts used to write the Carian language of western Anatolia. They consisted of some 30 alphabetic letters, with several geographic variants in Caria and a homogeneous variant attested from the Nile delta, where Carian mercenaries fought for the Egyptian pharaohs. They were written left-to-right in Caria (apart from the Carianโ€“Lydian city of Tralleis) and right-to-left in Egypt.

Carian was deciphered primarily through Egyptianโ€“Carian bilingual tomb inscriptions, starting with John Ray in 1981; previously only a few sound values and the alphabetic nature of the script had been demonstrated. The readings of Ray and subsequent scholars were largely confirmed with a Carianโ€“Greek bilingual inscription discovered in Kaunos in 1996, which for the first time verified personal names, but the identification of many letters remains provisional and debated, and a few are wholly unknown.

The Carian alphabet resembles the Greek alphabet, but the exact Greek variant from which it could have originated, has not yet been identified. The main reason for this is that some of the Greek letters have different sound values in Carian.[5] Two hypotheses have been suggested to explain this. The first is that the Greek letters were randomly attributed to phonetic values; though some letters retained their Greek value. The second proposed by Adiego (2007), is "that the Carian alphabet underwent a strong process of cursivisation, dramatically changing the form of many letters. At a certain point this graphic system underwent a change to 'capital' letters, for which the Greek capital letters were used as models - but now only from a formal point of view, disregarding their phonetic values (...).".[4]

Scripts

There is a range of graphic variation between cities in Caria, some of which extreme enough to have separate Unicode characters.[lower-alpha 1] The Kaunos alphabet is thought to be complete. There may be other letters in Egyptian cities outside Memphis, but they need to be confirmed. There is considerable geographical variation in all letters, especially the representation of the lateral phonemes l and ฮป.[6] The letters with identified values in the various cities are as follows:[7]

Hyllarima Euromos Mylasa Stratonicea Kildara Sinuri Kaunos Iasos Memphis transl.[8] IPA[9] possible Greek origin
๐Š  ๐Š  ๐Š  ๐Š  ๐Š [lower-alpha 2] ๐Š [lower-alpha 2] ๐Š  ๐Š  ๐Œ€ ๐Š  a /a/ ฮ‘
๐Šก ยซ ? ๐‹‰[lower-alpha 3] ๐‹Œ ๐‹ ๐‹Œ?[lower-alpha 4] ๐‹Œ[lower-alpha 4] ฮฒ /แตb/ Not a Greek value; perhaps a ligature of Carian ๐Šฌ๐Šฌ. ๐Šก directly from Greek ฮ’.
๐Šข (<) ๐Šข (ฯน) ๐Šข (<) ๐Šข (ฯน) ๐Šข (ฯน) ๐Šข (ฯน) ๐Šข (ฯน) ๐Šข (< ฯน) d /รฐ/? ฮ” D
๐‹ƒ ๐‹ƒ <> ๐Šฃ ๐‹ƒ ๐Šฃ ๐Šฃ ๐Šฃ ๐Šฃ l /l~ษพ/? ฮ›
๐Šค ๐Šค ๐‹ ๐Šค ๐‹ˆ ๐‹ˆ ๐Šค ๐Šค ๐‹? ๐Šค ฮ• y /y/ Perhaps a modified ฯœ.
8px 8px 8px 8px 8px CarianR.png ๐Šฅ CarianR.png ๐Šฅ ๐Šฅ r /r/ ฮก
๐‹Ž ๐Šฃ ๐Šฃ ๐Šฃ ๐Šฆ ๐Šฆ ๐Šฆ ๐‹ ๐Šฆ ๐Šฆ ฮป /lห~ld/? Not a Greek value. ๐‹Ž from ฮ› plus diacritic, others not Greek
ส˜ ส˜ ส˜ ส˜ ส˜ ๐Šจ? ส˜ ๐Šจ? ๐Šจ ๐Šจ ส˜ ๐Šจ q /kสท/ ฯ˜
ฮ› ฮ› ฮ› ฮ› ๐Šฌ ๐Šฉ ๐Šฌ ฮ“ ฮ› ๐Šฌ ฮ› b /ฮฒ/? ๐…ƒ[lower-alpha 5]
๐Šช ๐Šช ๐Šช ๐Šช ๐Šช ๐ˆ‹ ๐Šช ๐ˆ‹ ๐ˆ‹ ๐Šช ๐Šช ๐ˆ‹ m /m/ ๐ŒŒ[lower-alpha 6]
๐Šซ ๐Šซ ๐Šซ ๐Šซ ๐Šซ ๐Šซ ๐Šซ ๐Šซ ๐Šซ o /o/ ฮŸ
๐Šญ ๐Šญ ๐Šญ ๐Šญ ๐Šญ ๐Šญ ๐Œ“ ๐Šญ ๐Šญ t /t/ ฮค
๐คญ ๐คญ ๐คญ ๐คญ ๐Œ“ ๐คญ ๐Œ“ ๐Šฏ ๐คญ ๐คง ๐Œƒ ๐Šฎ ฯท ลก /สƒ/ Not a Greek value.
๐Šฐ ๐Šฐ ๐Šฐ ๐Šฐ ๐Šฐ ๐Šฐ ๐Šฐ ๐Šฐ ๐Šฐ s /s/ ฯบ
๐Šฑ ๐Šฑ ๐Šฑ ๐Šฑ ๐Šฑ ? ?
๐Šฒ ๐Šฒ ๐Šฒ ๐Šฒ ๐Šฒ V ๐Šฒ V ๐Šฒ ๐Šฒ V V ๐Šฒ u /u/ ฮฅ /u/
๐Šณ ๐Šณ ๐Šณ ๐Šณ ๐Šณ รฑ /nฬฉ/
๐Šด ๐Šด ๐Š› ๐Šด ๐Šด ๐Šด ๐Šด ๐Š› ๐Šด ๐Š› kฬ‚ /c/ Not a Greek value. Maybe a modification of ฮš, ฮง, or ๐Šจ.
๐Šต ๐Šต ๐Šœ ๐Šต ๐Šต ๐Šต ๐Šœ ๐Šต ๐Šœ ๐Šต ๐Šต ๐Šœ ๐Šต n /n/ ๐Œ[lower-alpha 7]
๐Šท ๐Šท ๐Šท ๐Šท ๐Šท ๐Šท ๐Šท ๐Šท p /p/ ฮ’[lower-alpha 8]
๐Šธ ๐Šธ ๐Šธ ๐Šธ ๐Šธ ๐Šธ ฮ˜ ๐Šธ ๐Šธ ฮ˜ ล› /รง/? Not a Greek value. Perhaps from อฒ sampi?
๐ˆฃ ๐Šน- โŠฒ- ๐Šฎ- ๐คง- ๐คง- ๐Šน ๐Šน ๐Šน i /i/ ฮ•, ฮ•ฮ™, or ๐Œ‡[10]
๐‹ ๐‹ ๐‹ ๐Šบ ๐Šบ ๐Šบ ๐Šบ ๐Šบ ๐Šบ e /e/ ฮ—, ๐Œ‡
๐Šฝ ๐Šผ ๐Šฝ ๐Šผ ๐Šฝ ๐Šผ ๐Šผ ๐Šผ ๐Šผ ๐Šผ๐Šฝ k /k/ Perhaps ฮจ (locally /kสฐ/) rather than ฮš.
๐Šพ ๐Šพ ๐Šพ ๐Šพ ๐Šพ ๐Šพ ๐Šพ ๐Šพ ๐Šพ ฮด /โฟd/ Not a Greek value. Perhaps a ligature of ฮ”ฮ”.
๐‹?[lower-alpha 9] ๐‹ ๐‹€ ฮณ /แต‘kสท/? Not a Greek value.
๐‹‚ ๐‹‚ z /tอกs/ or /st/ Not a Greek value?
๐‹„ ๐‹„ ๐‹„ ล‹ /แต‘k/
๐Šป รฝ /ษฅ/ Not a Greek value; perhaps a modification of Carian ๐Šบ?
๐Šฟ ะจ w /w/ ฯœ /w/
๐‹… ๐Š‘ j /j/ Perhaps related to Phrygian /j/, ๐ˆฟ ~ ๐Œ”
๐‹† ?
๐‹ƒ ๐‹‰ ล•, ฤบ[6] /rสฒ/? Used in Egypt for Greek ฯฯ.
๐‹‡ ๐Šถ?[lower-alpha 10] ๐‹‡ ฯ„ /tอกสƒ/ Not a Greek value. Perhaps from อฒ sampi?

Origin

The Carian scripts, which have a common origin, have long puzzled scholars. Most of the letters resemble letters of the Greek alphabet, but their sound values are generally unrelated to the values of the Greek letters. This is unusual among the alphabets of Asia Minor, which generally approximate the Greek alphabet fairly well, both in sound and shape, apart from sounds which had no equivalent in Greek. However, the Carian sound values are not completely disconnected: ๐Š  /a/ (Greek ฮ‘), ๐Šซ /o/ (Greek ฮŸ), ๐Šฐ /s/ (Greek ฯบ san), and ๐Šฒ /u/ (Greek ฮฅ) are as close to Greek as any Anatolian alphabet, and ๐Šท, which resembles Greek ฮ’, has the similar sound /p/, which it shares with Greek-derived Lydian ๐คก.

Adiego (2007) therefore suggests that the original Carian script was adopted from cursive Greek, and that it was later restructured, perhaps for monumental inscription, by imitating the form of the most graphically similar Greek print letters without considering their phonetic values. Thus a /t/, which in its cursive form may have had a curved top, was modeled after Greek qoppa (ฯ˜) rather than its ancestral tau (ฮค) to become ๐Šญ. Carian /m/, from archaic Greek ๐ŒŒ, would have been simplified and was therefore closer in shape to Greek ฮ than ฮœ when it was remodeled as ๐Šช. Indeed, many of the regional variants of Carian letters parallel Greek variants: ๐Šฅ CarianR.png are common graphic variants of digamma, ๐Šจ ส˜ of theta, ๐Šฌ ฮ› of both gamma and lambda, ๐Œ“ ๐Šฏ ๐Œƒ of rho, ๐Šต ๐Šœ of phi, ๐Šด ๐Š› of chi, ๐Šฒ V of upsilon, and ๐‹ ๐Šบ parallel ฮ— ๐Œ‡ eta. This could also explain why one of the rarest letters, ๐Šฑ, has the form of one of the most common Greek letters.[11] However, no such proto-Carian cursive script is attested, so these etymologies are speculative.

Further developments occurred within each script; in Kaunos, for example, it would seem that ๐Šฎ /ลก/ and ๐Šญ /t/ both came to resemble a Latin P, and so were distinguished with an extra line in one: ๐Œ“ /t/, ๐Šฏ /ลก/.

Decipherment

Limestone stela depicting a false door, cornice above. There are Carian inscriptions. Late Period. From Saqqara, H5-873, Egypt. The Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, London

Numerous attempts at deciphering the Carian inscriptions were made during the 20th century. After World War II, most of the known Carian inscriptions were collected and published, which provided good basis for decipherment.

In the 1960s the Russian researcher Vitaly Shevoroshkin showed that earlier assumptions that the script was a syllabic or semisyllabic writing system was false. He devoted many years to his study, and used proper methodology. He made it clear that Carian was indeed alphabetically written, but made few significant advances in the understanding of the language. He took the values of letters resembling those of the Greek alphabet for granted, which proved to be unfounded.[8]

Other researchers of Carian were H. Stoltenberg, O. Masson, Yuri Otkupshchikov, P. Meriggi (1966), and R. Gusmani (1975), but their work was not widely accepted.

Stoltenberg, like Shevoroshkin, and most others, generally attributed Greek values to Carian symbols.[12]

In 1972, an Egyptologist K. Zauzich investigated bilingual texts in Carian and Egyptian (what became known as 'Egyptian approach'). This was an important step in decipherment, that produced good results.[13]

This method was further developed by T. Kowalski in 1975, which was his only publication on the subject.[14]

The British Egyptologist John D. Ray apparently worked independently from Kowalski; nevertheless he produced similar results (1981, 1983). He used Carianโ€“Egyptian bilingual inscriptions that had been neglected until then. His big breakthrough was the reading of the name Psammetichus (Egyptian Pharaoh) in Carian.

The radically different values that Ray assigned to the letters initially met with scepticism. Ignasi-Xavier Adiego, along with Diether Schรผrr, started to contribute to the project in the early 1990s. In his 1993 book Studia Carica, Adiego offered the decipherment values for letters that are now known as the โ€˜Ray-Schรผrr-Adiego systemโ€™. This system now gained wider acceptance. The discovery of a new bilingual inscription in 1996 (the Kaunos Carian-Greek bilingual inscription) confirmed the essential validity of their decipherment.

Unicode

Main page: Carian (Unicode block)

Carian was added to the Unicode Standard in April, 2008 with the release of version 5.1. It is encoded in Plane 1 (Supplementary Multilingual Plane).

The Unicode block for Carian is U+102A0–U+102DF:

๐Šก๐‹Š๐‹‹๐‹Œ๐‹ are graphic variants, as are ๐Šค๐‹ˆ๐‹, ๐‹Ž๐Šฆ๐‹, ๐Šบ๐‹, ๐Šผ๐Šฝ, ๐‹‚๐‹ƒ, ๐‹๐‹€, and possibly ๐‹‡๐Šถ.

A Carian keyboard is available for use with Keyman.[15]

See also

Notes

  1. โ†‘ Some of the others, such as ๐…, ฮ›, ๐คญ, ๐ˆฃ, ๐…ค, ส˜, ฯน, ๐ˆ‹, ๐Š‘, ะจ, ฯท, have been filled in below with similar characters from other Unicode ranges.
  2. โ†‘ 2.0 2.1 actually a reversed ฯ 
  3. โ†‘ Resembles 6ฬจ or Gฬจ
  4. โ†‘ 4.0 4.1 closer to a reverse ๐‹Š
  5. โ†‘ Archaic form of ฮ’, for example in Crete
  6. โ†‘ Archaic form of ฮœ
  7. โ†‘ Archaic form of ฮ
  8. โ†‘ Compare Lydian ๐คก, which also has the value /p/.
  9. โ†‘ if ๐‹ is equivalent to ๐‹€
  10. โ†‘ if ๐Šถ is equivalent to ๐‹‡

References

  • Adiego Lajara, I.J. The Carian Language. With an appendix by Koray Konuk. Leiden: Brill, 2007, ISBN:978-90-04-15281-6
  • H. Craig Melchert, "Carian", in Woodward ed. The Ancient Languages of Asia Minor, 2008.
  • Davies, Anna Morpurgo, "Decipherment" in International Encyclopedia of Linguistics, William J. Frawley, ed., 2nd ed. (Oxford, 2003) I:421.
  • Everson, Michael (2006-01-12). "Proposal to encode the Carian script in the SMP of the UCS." Contains many useful illustrations and tables.
  • Schรผrr, Diether, "Zur Bestimmung der Lautwerte des karischen Alphabets 1971-1991", Kadmos 31:127-156 (1992).
  • Swiggers & Jenniges, in: P.T. Daniels & W. Bright (eds.), The World's Writing Systems (New York/Oxford, 1996), pp. 285โ€“286.
  • Vidal M.C. "European Alphabets, Ancient Classical", in Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd ed., 2006.
  1. โ†‘ Palaeolexicon. "The Carian word qlaฮปiล›". http://www.palaeolexicon.com/ShowWord.aspx?Id=17767. 
  2. โ†‘ Himelfarb, Elizabeth J. "First Alphabet Found in Egypt", Archaeology 53, Issue 1 (Jan./Feb. 2000): 21.
  3. โ†‘ Cross, Frank Moore (2018-08-14) (in en). Leaves from an Epigrapher's Notebook: Collected Papers in Hebrew and West Semitic Palaeography and Epigraphy. BRILL. p. 58. ISBN 978-90-04-36988-7. https://books.google.com/books?id=wN6mDwAAQBAJ. 
  4. โ†‘ 4.0 4.1 Boyes, Philip J.; Steele, Philippa M. (2020). Understanding Relations Between Scripts II: Early Alphabets. Oxbow Books. pp. 115. ISBN 978-1-78925-092-3. 
  5. โ†‘ 5.0 5.1 Scriptsource.org - Carian "Visually, the letters bear a close resemblance to Greek letters. Decipherment was initially attempted on the assumption that those letters which looked like Greek represented the same sounds as their closest visual Greek equivalents. However it has since been established that the phonetic values of the two scripts are very different. For example the theta ฮธ symbol represents โ€˜thโ€™ in Greek but โ€˜qโ€™ in Carian. Carian was generally written from left to right, although Egyptian writers wrote primarily from right to left. It was written without spaces between words."
  6. โ†‘ 6.0 6.1 Lajara, Ignasi-Xavier Adiego (January 2018) (in en). A kingdom for a Carian letter. https://www.academia.edu/38670469. 
  7. โ†‘ Adiego 2007:207ff
  8. โ†‘ 8.0 8.1 Ignacio-Javier Adiego Lajara, The Carian Language. Volume 86 of Handbook of Oriental Studies. BRILL, 2006 ISBN:9004152814 p179ff
  9. โ†‘ Kloekhorst, Alwin (2009). "Studies in Lycian and Carian Phonology and Morphology" (in en). Kadmos 47 (1โ€“2). doi:10.1515/KADMOS.2008.011. ISSN 0022-7498. https://www.academia.edu/345130. 
  10. โ†‘ Archaic form of ฮ—
  11. โ†‘ Perhaps coincidentally, ๐Šฎ /ลก/ resembles ฯท (sho), which was used for /ลก/ in the Greek-derived Bactrian alphabet.
  12. โ†‘ Stoltenberg, H. L. (1958a) โ€œNeue Lesung der karischen Schriftโ€, Die Sprache 4, 139โ€“151
  13. โ†‘ Ignacio-Javier Adiego Lajara, The Carian Language. Volume 86 of Handbook of Oriental Studies. BRILL, 2006 ISBN:9004152814 p187ff
  14. โ†‘ THOMAS W. KOWALSKI (1975), LETTRES CARIENNES: ESSAI DE DECHIFFREMENT DE Lโ€™ECRITURE CARIENNE Kadmos. Volume 14, Issue 1, Pages 73โ€“93, DOI 10.1515/kadm.1975.14.1.73
  15. โ†‘ "Carian keyboard". SIL International. https://keyman.com/keyboards/carian. Retrieved 2023-03-09.