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 ...

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 ...

. The name means "true" or "original Cypriot" parallel to Eteocretan, 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 researche ...

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 civi ...

(via the Cypro-Minoan variant

Linear C 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 ...

). The language was under pressure from

Arcadocypriot Arcadocypriot, or southern Achaean, was an ancient Greek dialect spoken in Arcadia in the central Peloponnese and in Cyprus. Its resemblance to Mycenaean Greek, as it is known from the Linear B corpus, suggests that Arcadocypriot is its descen ...

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 ( constituenc ...

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 ...

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 la ...

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 and

Lemnian The Lemnian language was spoken on the island of Lemnos, Greece, in the second half of the 6th century BC. It is mainly attested by an inscription found on a funerary stele, termed the Lemnos stele, discovered in 1885 near Kaminia. Fragments of ...

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 Norther ...

, 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 in the Early Bronze Age. It is first attested in proper names identified as Amorite in the Middle Bronze A ...

. 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 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 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 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, ...

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 ...

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 pe ...

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 we ...

, 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 Cyrus Herzl Gordon (June 29, 1908 – March 30, 2001) was an American scholar of Near Eastern cultures and ancient languages. Biography Gordon was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of Lithuanian emigrant and physician Benjamin Gordon. H ...

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 ‘t ...

, 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''. Transiti ...

. 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...."

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

Corpus

Amathus bilingual

See also

References

Sources

External links