The linguistic classification of the ancient
Thracian language
The Thracian language () is an extinct and poorly attested language, spoken in ancient times in Southeast Europe by the Thracians. The linguistic affinities of the Thracian language are poorly understood, but it is generally agreed that it wa ...
has long been a matter of contention and uncertainty, and there are widely varying hypotheses regarding its position among other
Paleo-Balkan languages. It is not contested, however, that the Thracian languages were
Indo-European languages which had acquired
satem
Languages of the Indo-European family are classified as either centum languages or satem languages according to how the dorsal consonants (sounds of "K", "G" and "Y" type) of the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) developed. An ...
characteristics by the time they are attested.
Hypothesized links
Daco-Thracian
A ''Daco-Thracian'' (or ''Thraco-Dacian'') grouping with
Dacian as either the same language or different from Thracian was widely held until the 1950s, but is untenable (according to
J. P. Mallory) in light of toponymic evidence: only a percent of place names north of the Danube betray "pan-Thracian" roots.
The hypothesis of a Thraco-Dacian or Daco-Thracian branch of IE, indicating a close link between the Thracian and Dacian languages, has numerous adherents, including Russu 1967,
Georg Solta 1980, Vraciu 1980, Crossland, Trask (2000), McHenry (1993), Mihailov (2008). Crossland (1982) considers that the divergence of a presumed original Thraco-Dacian language into northern and southern groups of dialects is not so significant as to rank them as separate languages. According to
Georg Solta (1982), there is no significant difference between Dacian and Thracian. Rădulescu (1984) accepts that Daco-Moesian possesses a certain degree of dialectal individuality, but argues that there is no fundamental separation between Daco-Moesian and Thracian. Polomé (1982) considers that the evidence presented by Georgiev and Duridanov, although substantial, is not sufficient to determine whether Daco-Moesian and Thracian were two dialects of the same language or two distinct languages.
In the 1950s, the
Bulgarian linguist
Vladimir I. Georgiev published his work which argued that Dacian and
Albanian should be assigned to a language branch termed ''Daco-Mysian'',
Mysian
Mysians ( la, Mysi; grc, Μυσοί, ''Mysoí'') were the inhabitants of Mysia, a region in northwestern Asia Minor.
Origins according to ancient authors
Their first mention is by Homer, in his list of Trojans allies in the Iliad, and accordin ...
(the term ''Mysian'' derives from the Daco-Thracian tribe known as the ''
Moesi
In Roman literature of the early 1st century CE, the Moesi ( or ; grc, Μοισοί, ''Moisoí'' or Μυσοί, ''Mysoí''; lat, Moesi or ''Moesae'') appear as a Paleo-Balkan people who lived in the region around the River Timok to the south ...
'') being thought of as a transitional language between Dacian and Thracian. Georgiev argued that Dacian and Thracian are different languages, with different phonetic systems, his idea being supported by the placenames, which end in ''-dava'' in Dacian and Mysian, as opposed to ''-para'', in Thracian placenames. Georgiev argues that the distance between Dacian and Thracian was approximately the same as that between the Armenian and Persian languages. The claim of Georgiev that Albanian is a direct recent descendant of Daco-Moesian, not only a part of the branch, is highly based on speculations as suffixes from Dacian toponyms as
Dava, for example, are lacking in modern Albanian toponymy (with one exception
Thermidava).
Balto-Slavic
The Baltic classification of Dacian and Thracian has been proposed by the Lithuanian polymath
Jonas Basanavičius
Jonas Basanavičius (, pl, Jan Basanowicz; 23 November 1851 – 16 February 1927) was an activist and proponent of the Lithuanian National Revival. He participated in every major event leading to the independent Lithuanian state and is often give ...
, referred to as "Patriarch of Lithuania", who insisted this is the most important work of his life and listed 600 identical words of Balts and
Thracians
The Thracians (; grc, Θρᾷκες ''Thrāikes''; la, Thraci) were an Indo-European speaking people who inhabited large parts of Eastern and Southeastern Europe in ancient history.. "The Thracians were an Indo-European people who occupied t ...
and was the first to investigate similarities in vocal traditions between Lithuanians and Bulgarians. He also theoretically included Dacian and
Phrygian in the related group, but a part of this inclusion was unsupported by other authors, such as the linguistic analysis of
Ivan Duridanov, which found Phrygian completely lacking parallels in either Thracian or Baltic languages.
The Bulgarian linguist Ivan Duridanov, in his first publication claimed that Thracian and Dacian are genetically linked to the Baltic languages and in the next one he made the following classification:
"The Thracian language formed a close group with the Baltic (resp. Balto-Slavic), the Dacian and the 'Pelasgian
The name Pelasgians ( grc, Πελασγοί, ''Pelasgoí'', singular: Πελασγός, ''Pelasgós'') was used by classical Greek writers to refer either to the predecessors of the Greeks, or to all the inhabitants of Greece before the emergenc ...
' languages. More distant were its relations with the other Indo-European languages, and especially with Greek, the Italic and Celtic languages, which exhibit only isolated phonetic similarities with Thracian; the Tokharian and the Hittite were also distant."
Of about 200 reconstructed Thracian words by Duridanov, most cognates (138) appear in the Baltic languages, mostly in Lithuanian, followed by Germanic (61), Indo-Aryan (41), Greek (36), Bulgarian (23), Latin (10) and Albanian (8). The use of toponyms is suggested to determine the extent of a culture's influence. Parallels have enabled linguists, using the techniques of
comparative linguistics, to decipher the meanings of several Dacian and Thracian placenames with, they claim, a high degree of probability. Of 300 attested Thracian geographic names, most parallels were found between Thracian and Baltic geographic names in the study of Duridanov. According to Duridanov,
"the similarity of these parallels stretching frequently on the main element and the suffix simultaneously, which makes a strong impression".
He also
reconstructed Dacian words and
Dacian placenames and found parallels mostly in the Baltic languages, followed by Albanian. Other Slavic authors noted that Dacian and Thracian have much in common with Baltic
onomastics and explicitly not in any similar way with Slavic onomastics, including cognates and parallels of lexical isoglosses, which implies a recent common ancestor.
After creating a list of names of rivers and personal names with a high number of parallels, the Romanian linguist Mircea M. Radulescu classified the
Daco-Moesian and Thracian as Baltic languages, result of Baltic expansion to the south and also proposed such classification for
Illyrian.
[M. Radulescu, "The Indo-European position of lllirian, Daco-Mysian and Thracian: a historic Methodological Approach", ''Journal of Indo-European Studies'' 15 (3–4), 239–271, 1987]
The Venezuelan-Lithuanian historian
Jurate Rosales classifies Dacian and Thracian as Baltic languages.
The American linguist Harvey Mayer refers to both Dacian and Thracian as Baltic languages and refers to them as Southern or Eastern Baltic. He claims to have sufficient evidence for classifying them as Baltoidic or at least "Baltic-like", if not exactly, Baltic dialects or languages
and classifies
Dacians and
Thracians
The Thracians (; grc, Θρᾷκες ''Thrāikes''; la, Thraci) were an Indo-European speaking people who inhabited large parts of Eastern and Southeastern Europe in ancient history.. "The Thracians were an Indo-European people who occupied t ...
as "Balts by extension".
Mayer claims that he extracted an unambiguous evidence for regarding Dacian and Thracian as more tied to Lithuanian than to Latvian.
[
]
Thraco-Illyrian
Thraco-Illyrian is a hypothesis that the Thraco-Dacian and Illyrian languages comprise a distinct branch of Indo-European
The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutc ...
. Thraco-Illyrian
The term Thraco-Illyrian refers to a hypothesis according to which the Daco-Thracian and Illyrian languages comprise a distinct branch of Indo-European. Thraco-Illyrian is also used as a term merely implying a Thracian- Illyrian interference, m ...
is also used as a term merely implying a Thracian-Illyrian interference
Interference is the act of interfering, invading, or poaching. Interference may also refer to:
Communications
* Interference (communication), anything which alters, modifies, or disrupts a message
* Adjacent-channel interference, caused by extr ...
, mixture or sprachbund, or as a shorthand way of saying that it is not determined whether a subject is to be considered as pertaining to Thracian or Illyrian. Downgraded to a geo-linguistic concept, these languages are referred to as Paleo-Balkan.
The rivers Vardar
The Vardar (; mk, , , ) or Axios () is the longest river in North Macedonia and the second longest river in Greece, in which it reaches the Aegean Sea at Thessaloniki. It is long, out of which are in Greece, and drains an area of around . Th ...
and Morava are generally taken as the rough line of demarcation between the Illyrian sphere on the west and Thracian on the east. There is, however, much interference in the area between Illyrian and Thracian, with Thracian groups inhabiting Illyrian lands (the Thracian Bryges
Bryges or Briges ( el, Βρύγοι or Βρίγες) is the historical name given to a people of the ancient Balkans. They are generally considered to have been related to the Phrygians, who during classical antiquity lived in western Anatolia. ...
for example) and Illyrian groups overlapping into the Thracian zone (the Dardani
The Dardani (; grc, Δαρδάνιοι, Δάρδανοι; la, Dardani) or Dardanians were a Paleo-Balkan people, who lived in a region that was named Dardania after their settlement there. They were among the oldest Balkan peoples, and their ...
seem to be a Thraco-Illyrian mix; Wilkes, 1992 ''et al.''). It appears that Thracian and Illyrian do not have a clear-cut frontier. Similarities found between the Illyrian and Thracian lect
In sociolinguistics, a variety, also called an isolect or lect, is a specific form of a language or language cluster. This may include languages, dialects, registers, styles, or other forms of language, as well as a standard variety.Meecham ...
s can thus be seen as merely linguistic interference.
Others such as I.I. Russu argue that there should have been major similarities between Illyrian and Thracian, and a common linguistic branch (not merely a Sprachbund) is probable. Among the Thraco-Illyrian correspondences Russu considers are the following:
Not many Thraco-Illyrian correspondences are definite, and a number may be incorrect, even from the list above. However, Sorin Paliga states: "According to the available data, we may surmise that Thracian and Illyrian were mutually understandable, e.g. like Czech
Czech may refer to:
* Anything from or related to the Czech Republic, a country in Europe
** Czech language
** Czechs, the people of the area
** Czech culture
** Czech cuisine
* One of three mythical brothers, Lech, Czech, and Rus'
Places
* Czech, ...
and Slovak, in one extreme, or like Spanish and Portuguese, at the other." Other linguists argue that Illyrian and Thracian were different Indo-European branches which later converged through contact. It is also of significance that Illyrian languages still have not been classified whether they were centum
Languages of the Indo-European family are classified as either centum languages or satem languages according to how the dorsal consonants (sounds of "K", "G" and "Y" type) of the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) developed. An e ...
or satem
Languages of the Indo-European family are classified as either centum languages or satem languages according to how the dorsal consonants (sounds of "K", "G" and "Y" type) of the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) developed. An ...
language, while it is undisputed that Thracian was a satem
Languages of the Indo-European family are classified as either centum languages or satem languages according to how the dorsal consonants (sounds of "K", "G" and "Y" type) of the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) developed. An ...
language by the Classical Period.
Due to the fragmentary attestation of both Illyrian and Thraco-Dacian, the existence of a Thraco-Illyrian branch remains controversial. In fact, this linguistic hypothesis was seriously called into question in the 1960s. New publications argued that no strong evidence for Thraco-Illyrian exists, and that the two language-areas show more differences than correspondences. The place of Paeonian language
Paeonian, sometimes spelled Paionian, is a poorly attested, extinct language spoken by the ancient Paeonians until late antiquity.
Paeonia once stretched north of Macedon, into Dardania, and in earlier times into southwestern Thrace.
Classi ...
remains unclear. Modern linguists are uncertain on the classification of Paeonian, due to the extreme scarcity of materials we have on this language. On one side are Wilhelm Tomaschek
Wilhelm Tomaschek, or Vilém Tomášek (May 26, 1841, Olomouc – September 9, 1901, Vienna) was a Czech-Austrian geographer and orientalist. He is known for his work in the fields of historical topography and historical ethnography. and Paul Kretschmer Paul Kretschmer (2 May 1866 – 9 March 1956) was a German linguist who studied the earliest history and interrelations of the Indo-European languages and showed how they were influenced by non-Indo-European languages, such as Etruscan.
Biograph ...
, who claim it belonged to the Illyrian family, and on the other side is Dimiter Dechev, who claims affinities with Thracian
The Thracians (; grc, Θρᾷκες ''Thrāikes''; la, Thraci) were an Indo-European speaking people who inhabited large parts of Eastern and Southeastern Europe in ancient history.. "The Thracians were an Indo-European people who occupied ...
.
In 1977 Georgiev claimed that Daco-Mysian was closely related to the Thracian branch of Indo-European and that Illyrian was different from Thracian "as much as Iranian from Latin" for example.[Траките и техният език (1977 В Георгиев)]
p. 132, 183, 192, 204
Albanian
There are a number of close cognates between Thracian and Albanian, but this may indicate only that Thracian and Albanian are related but not very closely related satem IE languages on their own branches of Indo-European, analogous to the situation between Albanian and the Baltic languages: Albanian and Baltic share many close cognates, while according to Mayer, Albanian is a descendant of Illyrian and escaped any heavy Baltic influence of Daco-Thracian.
The view of a link between Albanian and Thracian has not gained wide acceptance among scholars and is rejected by most linguists, including Albanian ones, who mainly consider that Albanian belongs to the Illyrian branch of IE.
Thraco-Phrygian or Thraco-Armenian hypothesis
For a long time a Thraco-Phrygian hypothesis grouping Thracian with the extinct Phrygian language
The Phrygian language () was the Indo-European language of the Phrygians, spoken in Anatolia (modern Turkey), during classical antiquity (c. 8th century BC to 5th century AD).
Phrygian ethno-linguistic homogeneity is debatable. Ancient Greek aut ...
was considered, largely based on Greek historians like Herodotus
Herodotus ( ; grc, , }; BC) was an ancient Greek historian and geographer
A geographer is a physical scientist, social scientist or humanist whose area of study is geography, the study of Earth's natural environment and human society ...
and Strabo. By extension of identifying Phrygians with Proto-Armenians, a Thraco-Phrygian branch of Indo-European was postulated with Thracian, Phrygian and Armenian and constituent languages. The evidence for this seems to have been mostly based on interpretations of history and identifying the eastern Mushki
The Mushki (sometimes transliterated as Muški) were an Iron Age people of Anatolia who appear in sources from Assyria but not from the Hittites. Several authors have connected them with the Moschoi (Μόσχοι) of Greek sources and the Geor ...
with Armenians and assuming they had branched off from western Mushki (whom have been conclusively identified as Phrygians). However, in 1988 Fredrik Kortlandt argued, on linguistic grounds, such as a common treatment of Proto-Indo-European glottal stops, that Armenian descended from a Thracian dialect. Thus, forming a Thraco-Armenian branch of Indo-European.
In 2016 Kortlandt extended his theories, postulating a link between Thraco-Armenian and the hypothetical Graeco-Phrygian
Graeco-Phrygian () is a proposed subgroup of the Indo-European language family which comprises the Hellenic and Phrygian languages.
Modern consensus views Greek as the closest relative of Phrygian, a position that is supported by Brixhe, N ...
language family. Despite Thracian and Armenian being Satem languages and Greek and Phrygian being Centum languages, Kortlandt identifies sound correspondences and grammatical similarities, postulating a relationship between his Thraco-Armenian family and the more established Graeco-Phrygian family.
Graeco-Armenian
Graeco-Armenian (or Helleno-Armenian) is the hypothetical common ancestor of Greek and Armenian that postdates Proto-Indo-European. Its status is somewhat similar to that of the Italo-Celtic grouping: each is widely considered plausible without b ...
is by itself a common hypothesized subgrouping of Indo-European languages. Kortlandt considers Albanian to be a descendant of Dacian, which he regards as belonging to a separate language family than Thraco-Armenian.
Older textbooks grouped Phrygian and Armenian with Thracian, but the belief is no longer popular and is mostly discarded. Today, Phrygian is not widely seen as linked to Thracian. Georgiev claimed that Thracian is different from Phrygian "as much as Greek from Albanian", comparing 150 Phrygian inscriptions.[ Duridanov found in 1976 Phrygian completely lacking parallels in Thracian and concluded that the Thraco-Phrygian theory is debunked. Duridanov argued that the Thraco-Illyrian theory is a mistake of the past: "In the past it was regarded that Thracian together with the Phrygian and other vanished languages belonged to the Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. This mistake was corrected in the 80’s of the last century, but the ambiguities still persisted: the Thracian was combined in one group with the Phrygian (P. Kretschmer), and later – with the Illyrian (the language, spoken in the modern Dalmatia and Albania)."
]
Ancient Greek
Scholars have pointed out that the suffixes
In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns, adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Suffixes can carry g ...
of the few surviving Thracian words betray Greek linguistic features. Indeed, nearly all known Thracian personal names
A personal name, or full name, in onomastic terminology also known as prosoponym (from Ancient Greek πρόσωπον / ''prósōpon'' - person, and ὄνομα / ''onoma'' - name), is the set of names by which an individual person is known, ...
and toponyms
Toponymy, toponymics, or toponomastics is the study of '' toponyms'' (proper names of places, also known as place names and geographic names), including their origins, meanings, usage and types. Toponym is the general term for a proper name of ...
are Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
. There are also many close cognates between Thracian and ancient Greek.
Historian George Buchanan
George Buchanan ( gd, Seòras Bochanan; February 1506 – 28 September 1582) was a Scottish historian and humanist scholar. According to historian Keith Brown, Buchanan was "the most profound intellectual sixteenth century Scotland produced." ...
was the first author to draw a connection between Thracian and ancient Greek, writing that: Indeed the words of Homer
Homer (; grc, Ὅμηρος , ''Hómēros'') (born ) was a Greek poet who is credited as the author of the ''Iliad'' and the ''Odyssey'', two epic poems that are foundational works of ancient Greek literature. Homer is considered one of the ...
naturally lead us to conjecture that the Thracian language was a species of Greek, since he makes Thamyris
In Greek mythology, Thamyris (Ancient Greek: Θάμυρις, ''Thámuris'') was a Thracian singer. He is notable in Greek mythology for reportedly being a lover of Hyacinth and thus to have been the first male to have loved another male, but when ...
, a Thracian, contend with the nine Muses in singing, and it is not reasonable to suppose that his native language would allow him to conceive the Muses capable of using any language but Greek.
John Wilkes
John Wilkes (17 October 1725 – 26 December 1797) was an English radical journalist and politician, as well as a magistrate, essayist and soldier. He was first elected a Member of Parliament in 1757. In the Middlesex election dispute, he f ...
, too, wrote of Thracian as a dialect of Greek. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (; 21 October 177225 July 1834) was an English poet, literary critic, philosopher, and theologian who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake ...
considered a "necessary inference" that the Thracian language was a Greek dialect.
According to archaeologists Ioannis Liritzis
Ioannis Liritzis (GreekΙωάννης Λυριντζής born 2 November 1953) is professor of physics in archaeology ( archaeometry) and his field of specialization is the application of natural sciences to archaeology and cultural heritage. He ...
and Gregory N. Tsokas, the Thracians spoke the Greek language with particular idioms
An idiom is a phrase or expression that typically presents a figurative, non-literal meaning attached to the phrase; but some phrases become figurative idioms while retaining the literal meaning of the phrase. Categorized as formulaic language, ...
, solecisms
A solecism is a phrase that transgresses the rules of grammar. The term is often used in the context of linguistic prescription; it also occurs descriptively in the context of a lack of idiomaticness.
Etymology
The word originally was used by ...
and barbarisms. Linguist considered Thracian to be a sister language
In historical linguistics, sister languages are cognate languages; that is, languages that descend from a common ancestral language, their so-called proto-language. Every language in a language family that descends from the same language as the oth ...
to ancient Greek. Historian considered that the Thracian language was related to Greek as well, but that it was later alienated.
Sorin Mihai Olteanu, a Romanian
Romanian may refer to:
*anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Romania
**Romanians, an ethnic group
**Romanian language, a Romance language
*** Romanian dialects, variants of the Romanian language
** Romanian cuisine, tradition ...
linguist and Thracologist, proposed that the Thracian (as well as the Dacian) language was a centum language in its earlier period, and developed satem
Languages of the Indo-European family are classified as either centum languages or satem languages according to how the dorsal consonants (sounds of "K", "G" and "Y" type) of the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) developed. An ...
features over time.[Sorin Mihai Olteanu - The Thracian Palatal](_blank)
(Accessed: February 26, 2009). One of the arguments for this idea is that there are many close cognates between Thracian and 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 p ...
. There are also substratum words in the Romanian language that are cited as evidence of the genetic relationship of the Thracian language to ancient Greek. The Greek language
Greek ( el, label= Modern Greek, Ελληνικά, Elliniká, ; grc, Ἑλληνική, Hellēnikḗ) is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, native to Greece, Cyprus, southern Italy ( Calabria and Salento), southe ...
itself may be grouped with the Phrygian language
The Phrygian language () was the Indo-European language of the Phrygians, spoken in Anatolia (modern Turkey), during classical antiquity (c. 8th century BC to 5th century AD).
Phrygian ethno-linguistic homogeneity is debatable. Ancient Greek aut ...
and Armenian language
Armenian ( classical: , reformed: , , ) is an Indo-European language and an independent branch of that family of languages. It is the official language of Armenia. Historically spoken in the Armenian Highlands, today Armenian is widely spoken th ...
, both of which have been grouped with Thracian (see: Graeco-Phrygian
Graeco-Phrygian () is a proposed subgroup of the Indo-European language family which comprises the Hellenic and Phrygian languages.
Modern consensus views Greek as the closest relative of Phrygian, a position that is supported by Brixhe, N ...
, Graeco-Armenian
Graeco-Armenian (or Helleno-Armenian) is the hypothetical common ancestor of Greek and Armenian that postdates Proto-Indo-European. Its status is somewhat similar to that of the Italo-Celtic grouping: each is widely considered plausible without b ...
and the section " Thraco-Phrygian or Thraco-Armenian hypothesis" below.
See also
* Balkan sprachbund
* Romanian words of possible Dacian origin (and comparison with Albanian words)
*Venetic language
Venetic is an extinct Indo-European language, usually classified into the Italic subgroup, that was spoken by the Veneti people in ancient times in northeast Italy (Veneto and Friuli) and part of modern Slovenia, between the Po Delta and ...
References
Works cited
*
*
Bibliography
*
* {{cite book, last=Polomé , first=Edgar Charles, title=Cambridge Ancient History, volume=III.1, chapter=Balkan Languages (Illyrian, Thracian and Daco-Moesian), year=1982, pages=866–888
Further reading
* Duridanov, Ivan (1969). ''Die Thrakisch- und Dakisch-Baltischen Sprachbeziehungen'' hracian and Dacian Baltic Language Contacts Other. Verlag der Bulgarischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Sofia.
Thracian language
Dacian language
Indo-European linguistics
Thraco-Illyrian
Thracian
The Thracians (; grc, Θρᾷκες ''Thrāikes''; la, Thraci) were an Indo-European speaking people who inhabited large parts of Eastern and Southeastern Europe in ancient history.. "The Thracians were an Indo-European people who occupied ...