Mystery Languages
Not every historical language even made it into the written record. There are plenty of languages that have been dead for centuries, with little or no record of their having ever existed. Often, linguists are left with a few words and a scattering of place names to try and decipher some of a language’s characteristics from. Today, I’m going to go over some of extinct and little-known languages from the Indo-European family tree.
Our first stop is the Ligurian language, which was spoken in northwest Italy and southeast France roughly between 300 BC and 100 CE. It was probably spoken before that, but these are the rough dates we have records of it from. Most of what we know about Ligurian is from Roman sources and a few reconstructed place names. From this, Xavier Delamarre concludes that the Ligurians spoke a language similar to, but different from the Gaulish and Italic languages spoken by the people around them. He believes the language was Celtic in origin, although this entire argument is based off of two places names and one word, so take it with a grain of salt. However, ancient sources state that the Ligurians, while similar to the Celtic peoples around them, were distinct in some ways, namely their appearance (they were said to be smaller than their neighbors, and apparently many of them had auburn hair. Despite their smaller stature they were also said to be very physically strong and were prized mercenaries.) There is also a modern Ligurian language that is not related to the ancient one, but is spoken in the same area.
Our next dead friend is the Phrygian language, which was spoken by people who initially lived in the Balkans and later migrated to Anatolia (modern-day Turkey). Several classical sources describe it as being similar to Greek, and the surviving inscriptions in the language use Phoenician and Greek alphabets. Because there are some written records of this language, linguists have been able to determine that it had several noun cases and conjugated verbs for voice and mood in addition to tense, person, and number. We know a fair amount about the Phrygians, especially their music, which influenced early Greek music and led to the development of the Phrygian mode, a type of scale used in quite a lot of the extant ancient music. It was also revamped and used in Medieval European music and is still used today. I can’t really explain it without getting very into theory, but it sounded sort of minor. (Google it if you really want to know.)
Finally, we’re going to look at the Cimmerian language, from the Caucuses, attested from around the 8th century BC. This language is a good bit older than the other two, and the only evidence of the language has come from two Assyrian inscriptions (that’s right, Assyrian. This is old school.) The language appears to be similar both to early Iranian languages and early Greek languages. The Cimmerians themselves seem to have gotten around the ancient world; they conquered the kingdom of Lydia around the year 650 BC, and sacked the capital, Sardis. (This was apparently a pretty big deal, ancient Greek historians note that it caused concern in the Greek colonies near Lydia. Lydia, in case anyone was wondering, was in Anatolia, which is Turkey.) The Cimmerians may have also conquered the Phrygians at some point, which would make some sense, since Phrygia was also in Anatolia. (Though to be quite honest, everything was in Anatolia to the Greeks, so who knows.) The name Cimmerian is thought by some to have developed into the modern place-name Crimea, which would make some sense, since the Cimmerians were said to come from somewhere near the Black Sea, but no one has quite been able to figure out where. (The number of groups of people said to come from “somewhere around the Black Sea” is pretty staggering. It is one of the least helpful place descriptions possible.)