Eteocypriot is an
extinct
Extinction is the termination of a kind of organism or of a group of kinds (taxon), usually a species. The moment of extinction is generally considered to be the death of the last individual of the species, although the capacity to breed and ...
pre-Indo-European language that was spoken in
Cyprus
Cyprus ; tr, Kıbrıs (), officially the Republic of Cyprus,, , lit: Republic of Cyprus is an island country located south of the Anatolian Peninsula in the eastern Mediterranean Sea. Its continental position is disputed; while it is geo ...
by the pre-Hellenic population until the
Iron Age
The Iron Age is the final epoch of the three-age division of the prehistory and protohistory of humanity. It was preceded by the Stone Age (Paleolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic) and the Bronze Age (Chalcolithic). The concept has been mostly appl ...
. The name means "true" or "original Cypriot" parallel to
Eteocretan
Eteocretan ( from grc-gre, Ἐτεόκρητες, Eteókrētes, lit. "true Cretans", itself composed from ἐτεός ''eteós'' "true" and Κρής ''Krḗs'' "Cretan") is the pre-Greek language attested in a few alphabetic inscriptions of anc ...
, both of which names are used by modern
scholars
A scholar is a person who pursues academic and intellectual activities, particularly academics who apply their intellectualism into expertise in an area of study. A scholar can also be an academic, who works as a professor, teacher, or researcher ...
to mean the pre-Greek languages of those places. Eteocypriot was written in the
Cypriot syllabary
The Cypriot or Cypriote syllabary is a syllabic script used in Iron Age Cyprus, from about the 11th to the 4th centuries BCE, when it was replaced by the Greek alphabet. A pioneer of that change was King Evagoras of Salamis. It is descended fr ...
, a syllabic script derived from
Linear A
Linear A is a writing system that was used by the Minoans of Crete from 1800 to 1450 BC to write the hypothesized Minoan language or languages. Linear A was the primary script used in palace and religious writings of the Minoan civil ...
(via the Cypro-Minoan variant
Linear C). The language was under pressure from
Arcadocypriot Greek from about the 10th century BC and finally became extinct in about the 4th century BC.
The language is as yet unknown except for a small vocabulary attested in bilingual inscriptions. Such topics as
syntax
In linguistics, syntax () is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure ( constituency) ...
and possible
inflection
In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and defin ...
or
agglutination
In linguistics, agglutination is a morphological process in which words are formed by stringing together morphemes, each of which corresponds to a single syntactic feature. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglutinative lang ...
remain an enigma. Partial translations depend to a large extent on the language or language group assumed by the translator, but there is no consistency. It is conjectured by some linguists to be related to the
Etruscan __NOTOC__
Etruscan may refer to:
Ancient civilization
*The Etruscan language, an extinct language in ancient Italy
*Something derived from or related to the Etruscan civilization
**Etruscan architecture
**Etruscan art
**Etruscan cities
** Etrusca ...
and
Lemnian languages, by others to be related to
Hurrian
The Hurrians (; cuneiform: ; transliteration: ''Ḫu-ur-ri''; also called Hari, Khurrites, Hourri, Churri, Hurri or Hurriter) were a people of the Bronze Age Near East. They spoke a Hurrian language and lived in Anatolia, Syria and Northern ...
, and by some to
Northwest Semitic
Northwest Semitic is a division of the Semitic languages comprising the indigenous languages of the Levant. It emerged from Proto-Semitic language, Proto-Semitic in the Early Bronze Age. It is first attested in proper names identified as Amorite ...
. Those who do not advocate any of those theories often adopt the default of an unknown pre-Greek language. Due to the small number of texts found, there is currently much unproven speculation.
Eteocypriot may be descended from the language of the
Cypro-Minoan
The Cypro-Minoan syllabary (CM) is an undeciphered syllabary used on the island of Cyprus during the late Bronze Age (c. 1550–1050 BC). The term "Cypro-Minoan" was coined by Arthur Evans in 1909 based on its visual similarity to Linear A on M ...
inscriptions, a collection of poorly-understood inscriptions from
Bronze Age
The Bronze Age is a historic period, lasting approximately from 3300 BC to 1200 BC, characterized by the use of bronze, the presence of writing in some areas, and other early features of urban civilization. The Bronze Age is the second pri ...
Cyprus. Both Cypro-Minoan and Eteocypriot share a common genitive suffix ''-o-ti''.
Corpus
Several hundred inscriptions written in the Cypriot syllabary (VI-III BC) cannot be interpreted in Greek. While it does not necessarily imply that all of them are non-Greek, there are at least two locations where multiple inscriptions with clearly non-Greek content were found:
*
Amathus
Amathus or Amathous ( grc, Ἀμαθοῦς) was an ancient city and one of the ancient royal cities of Cyprus until about 300 BC. Some of its impressive remains can be seen today on the southern coast in front of Agios Tychonas, about west o ...
(including a bilingual Eteocypriot-Greek text)
* a few short inscriptions from Golgoi (currently
Athienou
Athienou ( el, Αθηένου or , ) is a village in Larnaca District, Cyprus. It is one of only four villages located within the United Nations Buffer Zone, the other three being Pyla, Troulloi and Deneia. Today, Athienou has a population o ...
:
Markus Egetmeyer Marcus, Markus, Márkus or Mărcuș may refer to:
* Marcus (name), a masculine given name
* Marcus (praenomen), a Roman personal name
Places
* Marcus, a main belt asteroid, also known as (369088) Marcus 2008 GG44
* Mărcuş, a village in Dobârl ...
suggested that their language (which he calls ''Golgian'' resp. ''Golgisch'' in German) may be different from those of Amathus).
While the language of
Cypro-Minoan
The Cypro-Minoan syllabary (CM) is an undeciphered syllabary used on the island of Cyprus during the late Bronze Age (c. 1550–1050 BC). The term "Cypro-Minoan" was coined by Arthur Evans in 1909 based on its visual similarity to Linear A on M ...
inscriptions is often supposed to be the same as (or ancestral to) Eteocypriot, that has yet to be proven, as the script is only partly legible.
Amathus bilingual
The most famous Eteocypriot inscription is a bilingual text inscribed on a black marble slab found on the
acropolis
An acropolis was the settlement of an upper part of an ancient Greek city, especially a citadel, and frequently a hill with precipitous sides, mainly chosen for purposes of defense. The term is typically used to refer to the Acropolis of Athens, ...
of
Amathus
Amathus or Amathous ( grc, Ἀμαθοῦς) was an ancient city and one of the ancient royal cities of Cyprus until about 300 BC. Some of its impressive remains can be seen today on the southern coast in front of Agios Tychonas, about west o ...
about 1913, dated to around 600 BC and written in both the
Attic dialect
Attic Greek is the Greek dialect of the ancient region of Attica, including the ''polis'' of Athens. Often called classical Greek, it was the prestige dialect of the Greek world for centuries and remains the standard form of the language that is ...
of
Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic peri ...
and Eteocypriot. The Eteocypriot text in Cypriot characters runs right to left; the Greek text in all capital
Greek letters
The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BCE. It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the earliest known alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as w ...
, left to right. The following are the syllabic values of the symbols of the Eteocypriot text (left to right) and the Greek text as is:
:Eteocypriot:
:: 1:
:: 2:
[The inscription is given as portrayed in Gordon, ''Evidence'', Page 5. Breaks in the stone obscure the syllables in brackets.]
:A suggested pronunciation is:
:: 1:
:: 2:
::
:Greek:
:: 3:
:: 4:
:which might be rendered into modern script as:
:: 3:
:: 4: .
Cyrus H. Gordon translates this text as
::''The city of the Amathusans (honored) the noble Ariston (son) of Aristonax.''
[''Forgotten Scripts'', p. 120.]
Gordon's translation is based on Greek inscriptions in general and the fact that "the noble Ariston" is in the
accusative case
The accusative case (abbreviated ) of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb.
In the English language, the only words that occur in the accusative case are pronouns: 'me,' 'him,' 'her,' 'us,' and ‘the ...
, implying a
transitive verb
A transitive verb is a verb that accepts one or more objects, for example, 'cleaned' in ''Donald cleaned the window''. This contrasts with intransitive verbs, which do not have objects, for example, 'panicked' in ''Donald panicked''.
Transitiv ...
. Gordon explains that "the verb is omitted ... in such dedicatory inscriptions".
The inscription is important as verifying that the symbols of the unknown language, in fact, have about the same phonetic values as they do when they are used to represent Greek. Gordon says, "This bilingual proves that the signs in Eteocypriot texts have the same values as in the Cypriot Greek texts...."
See also
*
Aegean language family
References
Sources
*
*
* Jones, Tom B., Notes on the Eteocypriot inscriptions, American journal of philology. LXXI 1950, c. 401–407
*
*
Masson, Olivier,
Leds inscriptions étéochypriotes, in:
Syria 30 (1-2), 1953, pp. 83-88.
*
Masson, Olivier,
Inscriptions étéochypriotes, in: in:
Syria 34 (1-2), 1957, pp. 61-80.
*Duhoux, Yves,
Eteocypriot and Cypro-Minoan 1–3, in: Kadmos 48, 2000, pp. 39-75, .
External links
Paleolexicon - History, Prehistory and the Language of Cyprus
{{DEFAULTSORT:Eteocypriot Language
Aegean languages in the Bronze Age
Languages of Cyprus
Extinct languages of Europe
Prehistoric Cyprus
Pre-Indo-Europeans
Unclassified languages of Europe
Languages attested from the 10th century BC
Languages extinct in the 4th century BC