Trojan language

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A "Trojan language" denotes the language spoken in the ancient city of Troy VIIa, which was probably destroyed violently c. 1200 BC, possibly in a Trojan War. The assumption has been that there was a single Trojan language at Troy, though it is completely unrecorded, save through Greek interpretation. The cultural context in which the lost Trojan language existed was described by Jaan Puhvel, Homer and Hittite (1991).

Contents 1 In Greek legend 2 Etruscan theory 3 Luwian theory 4 References

[edit] In Greek legend

The Trojans in the Iliad have no difficulty in speaking to their Greek opponents. However, this may merely be evidence that a fictional convention frequently used in narratives in later times had already been adopted by the poet of the Iliad: for example, Jason finds no language barrier with Medea in Colchis, and Trojan Aeneas converses without difficulty both with Punic Dido and with Latin Turnus.

Greek legend gives further indications on the subject of language at Troy. For one thing, the allies of Troy, listed at length in the Trojan Battle Order which closes book 2 of the Iliad, are depicted as speaking various languages and thus needing to have orders translated to them by their commanders (2.802-6). Elsewhere in the poem (4.433–38) they are compared to sheep and lambs bleating in a field as they talk together in their different languages. The inference is that, from the Greek point-of-view, the languages of Trojans and their allied neighbors were not as unified as those of the Achaeans.

A second view surfaces in the later Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite: the goddess Aphrodite, inventing a human history for herself when seducing the Trojan prince Anchises, claims to come from neighbouring Phrygia but to be bilingual, speaking his language as well as Phrygian because she was brought up by a Trojan nurse.

Hilary Mackie has detected in the Iliad a consistent differentiation between representations in Greek of Achaean and Trojan speech;^[1] in simplest terms, Trojans speak poetically, with the aim of avoiding conflict, whereas Achaeans repeatedly engage in public, ritualized abuse that linguists term (from another source) flyting: "Achaeans are proficient at blame, while Trojans perform praise poetry" (Mackie 1998:83).

[edit] Etruscan theory

Herodotus reported a Lydian assertion of a Lydian origin for the Etruscans, and Virgil and Horace refer poetically to Etruscans as Lydians.^[2] According to Herodotus these people, led by a Tarquin, abandoned Asia Minor after a series of famines in the eighth century, migrating to Italy at that time. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, citing language and custom like a modern ethnologist, found an autochthonous rather than Lydian origin:

"And I do not believe either that the Tyrrhenians were a colony of the Lydians; for they do not use the same language as the latter nor can it be alleged that, though they no longer speak a similar tongue they still retain some other indications of their mother country. For they neither worship the same gods as the Lydians, nor make use of similar laws or institutions"

Some modern linguists,^{[attribution needed]} following Herodotus rather than Dionysius and convinced that Etruscan and Lydian are both Indo-European languages, have sought traces of an original Trojan language in that of the Etruscans.

The Greeks referred to these people as Tyrrhenoi, from which modern linguists have posited a hypothetical primitive form *Tyrsenoi. Etruscans referred to themselves as "Rasena", possibly a later corruption of "Trasena", even "Tlasena"; possibly the ethnonym is related to thalassa, a pre-Greek or "Pelasgian" word for "sea": the word is preserved with the same meaning in Modern Greek.

[edit] Luwian theory

There was not enough evidence fruitfully to speculate upon the language of Troy until 1995, when a late Hittite seal was found in the excavations at Troy, probably dating from about 1275 BC. Not considered a locally-made object, this item from the Trojan "state chancellery" was inscribed in Luwian and to date provides the only archaeological evidence for any language at Troy at this period. It indicates that Luwian was known at Troy, which is not surprising since it was a lingua franca of the Hittite empire, of which Troy was probably in some form of dependency.

Another sphere of research concerns a handful of Trojan personal names mentioned in the Iliad. Among sixteen recorded names of Priam's relatives, at least nine (including Anchises and Aeneas) are not Greek and may be traced to "pre-Greek Asia Minor".^[3] On this basis Calvert Watkins in 1986 argued that the Trojans had been Luwian-speaking. For instance, the name Priam is connected to the Luwian compound Priimuua, which means "exceptionally courageous".^[4]

Additionally, the Alaksandu treaty describes Mira, Haballa, Seha and Wilusa (usually identified with Troy) as the lands of Arzawa, although this "has no historical or political basis"^[5], suggesting that it was the language that they had in common. Frank Starke of the University of Tübingen concludes that "the certainty is growing that Wilusa/Troy belonged to the greater Luwian-speaking community".^[6] Joachim Latacz also regards Luwian as the official language of Homeric Troy, but he finds it highly probable that another language was in daily use.^[7]

[edit] References

Inline

General

• Dalby, Andrew (2006), written at New York, London, Rediscovering Homer, Norton, ISBN 0393057887, pp. 129-133.
• Latacz, Joachim (2004), written at Oxford, Troy and Homer: towards a solution of an old mystery, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0199263086, pp. 49-72.
• Ross, Shawn A., "Barbaraphonos: Language and Panhellenism in the Iliad," Classical Philology 100 (2005), pp. 299–316.
• Watkins, Calvert (1986), "The language of the Trojans" in Troy and the Trojan War: a symposium held at Bryn Mawr College, October 1984 ed. M. J. Mellink. Bryn Mawr.