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The Lycian alphabet was used to write the
The Lycian alphabet was used to write the Lycian language
The Lycian language ( )Bryce (1986) page 30. was the language of the ancient Lycians who occupied the Anatolian region known during the Iron Age as Lycia. Most texts date back to the fifth and fourth century BC. Two languages are known as Lycian ...
of the Asia Minor
Anatolia (), also known as Asia Minor, is a peninsula in West Asia that makes up the majority of the land area of Turkey. It is the westernmost protrusion of Asia and is geographically bounded by the Mediterranean Sea to the south, the Aegean ...
region of Lycia
Lycia (; Lycian: ππππππ ''TrmΜmis''; , ; ) was a historical region in Anatolia from 15β14th centuries BC (as Lukka) to 546 BC. It bordered the Mediterranean Sea in what is today the provinces of Antalya and MuΔ ...
. It was an extension of the Greek alphabet, with half a dozen additional letters for sounds not found in Greek. It was largely similar to the Lydian and the Phrygian alphabets.
The alphabet
The Lycian alphabet contains letters for 29 sounds. Some sounds are represented by more than one symbol, which is considered one "letter". There are six vowel letters, one for each of the four oral vowels of Lycian, and separate letters for two of the four nasal vowels. Nine of the Lycian letters do not appear to derive from the Greek alphabet.Numbers
Lycian uses the following number symbols: I (vertical stroke) = 1, < ("less than" sign) (or, rarely, ''L'' or C or V or Y) = 5, O (circle) = 10; a horizontal stroke β is one half; a symbol somewhat like our letter H may mean 100. The number 128Β½ would therefore be expressed as HOOUnicode
The Lycian alphabet was added to theUnicode
Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...
Standard in April, 2008 with the release of version 5.1.
It is encoded in Plane 1 (Supplementary Multilingual Plane
In the Unicode standard, a plane is a contiguous group of 65,536 (216) code points. There are 17 planes, identified by the numbers 0 to 16, which corresponds with the possible values 00β1016 of the first two positions in six position hexadecimal ...
).
The Unicode block for Lycian is U+10280–U+1029F:
See also
*Letoon trilingual
The Letoon trilingual, or Xanthos trilingual, is an inscription in three languages: standard Lycian language, Lycian or Lycian A, Ancient Greek, Greek, and Imperial Aramaic, Aramaic covering the faces of a four-sided stone stele called the Letoon ...
*Lycian language
The Lycian language ( )Bryce (1986) page 30. was the language of the ancient Lycians who occupied the Anatolian region known during the Iron Age as Lycia. Most texts date back to the fifth and fourth century BC. Two languages are known as Lycian ...
Notes
References
* . Translator Chris Markham. * * Roger D. Woodard, 2007, ''The Ancient Languages of Asia Minor''.External links
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Lycian Script Writing systems Obsolete writing systems Lycian language