Thracian language · Lablypedia

The modern understanding of Thracian is built on a massive corpus of personal names (onomastics), place names, and a few deeply obscure inscriptions that have defied clear interpretation.

Remnants of the Thracian language

Little is known for certain about the Thracian language, since no text has been satisfactorily deciphered. Some of the longer inscriptions may be Thracian in origin but they may simply reflect jumbles of names or magical formulas.

Enough Thracian lexical items have survived to show that Thracian was a member of the Indo-European language family.

Besides the aforementioned inscriptions, Thracian may be attested through personal names, toponyms, hydronyms, phytonyms, divine names, etc. and by a small number of words cited in Ancient Greek texts as being specifically Thracian.

There are 23 words mentioned by ancient sources considered explicitly of Thracian origin and known meaning. Of the words that are preserved in ancient glossaries, in particular by Hesychius, only three dozen can be considered "Thracian". However, Indo-European scholars have pointed out that "even the notion that what the ancients called "Thracian" was a single entity is unproven." The table below lists potential cognates from Indo-European languages, but most of them have not found general acceptance within Indo-European scholarship. Not all lexical items in Thracian are assumed to be from the Proto-Indo-European language, some non-IE lexical items in Thracian are to be expected.

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Inscriptions

The following are the longest inscriptions preserved. The remaining ones are mostly single words or names on vessels and other artifacts. No translation has been accepted by the larger Indo-European community of scholars.

Ezerovo inscription

Only four Thracian inscriptions of any length have been found. The first is a gold ring found in 1912 in the village of Ezerovo (Plovdiv Province of Bulgaria); the ring was dated to the 5th century BC. The ring features an inscription in a Greek script consisting of 8 lines, the eighth of which is located on the rim of the rotating disk; it reads without any spaces between: ΡΟΛΙΣΤΕΝΕΑΣΝ / ΕΡΕΝΕΑΤΙΛ / ΤΕΑΝΗΣΚΟΑ / ΡΑΖΕΑΔΟΜ / ΕΑΝΤΙΛΕΖΥ / ΠΤΑΜΙΗΕ / ΡΑΖ // ΗΛΤΑ

Dimitar Dechev (Germanised as D. Detschew) separates the words and proposes a translation as follows:

ΡΟΛΙΣΤΕΝΕΑΣ

Rolisteneas

ΝΕΡΕΝΕΑ

Nerenea

ΤΙΛΤΕΑΝ

tiltean

ΗΣΚΟ

ēsko

ΑΡΑΖΕΑ

Arazea

ΔΟΜΕΑΝ

domean

ΤΙΛΕΖΥΠΤΑ

Tilezypta

ΜΙΗ

miē

ΕΡΑ

era

ΖΗΛΤΑ

zēlta

I am Rolisteneas, a descendant of Nereneas; Tilezypta, an Arazian woman, delivered me to the ground.

Kyolmen inscription

A second inscription, hitherto undeciphered, was found in 1965 near the village of Kyolmen, Varbitsa Municipality, dating to the sixth century BC. Written in a Greek alphabet variant, it is possibly a tomb stele inscription similar to the Phrygian ones; Peter A. Dimitrov's transcription thereof is:

ΙΛΑΣΝΛΕΤΕΔΝΛΕΔΝΕΝΙΔΑΚΑΤΡΟΣΟ

ΕΒΑ·ΡΟΖΕΣΑΣΝΗΝΕΤΕΣΑΙΓΕΚΟΑ

ΝΒΛΑΒΑΗΓΝ

i.e.

ilasnletednlednenidakatroso

eba·rozesasnēnetesaigekoa

nblabaēgn

Duvanlii inscription

A third inscription is again on a ring, found in Duvanlii, Kaloyanovo Municipality, next to the left hand of a skeleton. It dates to the 5th century BC. The ring has the image of a horseman with the inscription surrounding the image. It is only partly legible (16 out of the initial 21):

ΗΥΖΙΗ

ēuziē

.....

ΔΕΛΕ

dele

ΜΕΖΗΝΑΙ

mezēnai

The word mezenai is interpreted to mean 'Horseman', and a cognate to Illyrian Menzanas (as in "Juppiter/Jove Menzanas" 'Juppiter of the foals' or 'Juppiter on a horse'); Albanian mëz 'foal'; Romanian mînz 'colt, foal'; Latin mannus 'small horse, pony'; Gaulish manduos 'pony' (as in tribe name Viromandui 'men who own ponies').

Stele from Samothrace

A damaged stele was found while excavating the Sanctuary of Great Gods in Samothrace. The stele carries an inscription dating to the late 5th or 4th centuries BC. The last two lines of the inscription could belong to a Greek postscript but the rest is clearly non-Greek. The preserved letters of the inscription read as follows:

.........

.....

ΛΕ

....

ΔΑΟΗΤΟ

daoēto

...

....

ΥΕΛΑ

uela

ΕΒΛΟΣΕΗΟ

ebloseēo

ΡΑΙΑΝΕ

paiane

ΟΝ‧ΒΕΚΑ

on‧beka

ΟΛΕΙΤΡΑ

oleitra

ΝΤΟΛΑ

ntola

ΕΨΕΝΤ

epsent

ΟΝΟΣ

onos

Zone inscriptions

The largest corpus of inscriptions by far comes from the sanctuary of Apollo in Ancient Zone. After examining over 200 graffiti and short inscriptions on pottery fragments (potsherds) from the 6th and early 5th centuries BC, Claude Brixhe concluded (in 2006) that a Thracian language of these inscriptions shared much closer lexical and structural commonalities with ancient Greek and Phrygian than previous academic models had assumed. His opponents argue that, instead of witnessing an independent Paleo-Balkan language, the corpus reflects broken, heavily accent-marked, or poorly written Greek used by partially Hellenized natives, or a specialized regional trade jargon (a contact-pidgin).

Geographic distribution

The Thracian language or languages were spoken in what is now Bulgaria, Romania, North Macedonia, Northern Greece, European Turkey and in parts of Bithynia (North-Western Asiatic Turkey).

Toponymy

Many names of cities, towns, villages, and fortresses in and around ancient Thrace and Dacia were composed of an initial lexical element affixed to -dava, -daua, -deva, -deba, -daba, or -dova, which meant "city" or "town". Endings on more southern regions are exclusively -bria ("town, city"), -disza, -diza, -dizos ("fortress, walled settlement"), -para, -paron, -pera, -phara ("town, village"). Strabo translated -bria as polis, but that may not be accurate. Thracian -disza, -diza, and -dizos are derived from Proto-Indo-European *dheigh-, "to knead clay", hence to "make bricks", "build walls", "wall", "walls", and so on. These Thracian lexical items show a satemization of PIE *gh-. Cognates include Ancient Greek teichos ("wall, fort, fortified town", as in the town of Didymoteicho) and Avestan da?za ("wall").

It is suggested that the -dava endings are from the Dacian language, while the rest from the Thracian language. However -dava towns can be found as south as Sandanski and Plovdiv. Some -dava toponyms contain the same linguistic features as -diza toponyms, e.g. Pirodiza and Pirodava. The first written mention of the name "Dacians" is in Roman sources. Strabo specified that the Daci are the Getae, identified as a Thracian tribe. The Dacians, Getae and their kings were always considered as Thracians by the ancients (Dio Cassius, Trogus Pompeius, Appian, Strabo, Herodotus and Pliny the Elder) and were said to speak the same language. The Dacian language is considered a variety of the Thracian language. Such lexical differentiation -dava vs. -para, would be hardly enough evidence to separate Dacian from Thracian, thus they are classified as dialects. It is also possible that -dava and -bria mean two different things in the same language, rather than meaning the same thing in two different languages. Thus -bria could have been used for urbanized settlements, similar in scale and design to those of the "civilised" peoples like Greeks and Romans, whereas -dava could mean a settlement which is rural, being situated in the steppe-like part of the Thracian lands.

Classification

Due to a paucity of evidence required to establish a linguistic connection, the Thracian language, in modern linguistic textbooks, is usually treated either as its own branch of Indo-European, or is grouped with Dacian, together forming a Daco-Thracian branch of IE. Older textbooks often grouped it also with Illyrian or Phrygian. The idea that Thracian was close to Phrygian is no longer popular and has mostly been discarded.

There is a fringe idea that Thraco-Dacian forms a branch of Indo-European along with Baltic. In 1992, Harvey Mayer suggested that Thracian (and Dacian) belonged to the Baltic branch of Indo-European, or at least is closer to Baltic than any other Indo-European branch. However, a Balto-Slavic linguistic unity is so overwhelmingly accepted by the Indo-European linguistic community that this hypothesis does not pass muster.

The Russian linguist Alexei S. Kassian considers the Indo-European identity of the Thracian language to be unverifiable and questions the parallels usually drawn between the known Thracian words and other Indo-European languages.

Decline of the Thracians and their language

According to the 19th-century Greek educator Vlasios Skordelis, when Thracians were subjugated by Alexander the Great they finally assimilated to Greek culture and became as Greek as Spartans and Athenians, although he considered the Thracian language as a form of Greek. According to Crampton (1997) most Thracians were eventually Hellenized or Romanized, with the last remnants surviving in remote areas until the 5th century. According to Marinov (2015) the Thracians were likely completely Romanized and Hellenized after the last contemporary references to them of the 6th century.

Another author believes that the interior of Thrace was never Romanized or Hellenized (Trever, 1939). This was followed also by Slavonization. According to Weithmann (1978) when the Slavs migrated, they encountered only a very superficially Romanized Thracian and Dacian population, which had not strongly identified itself with Imperial Rome, while Greek and Roman populations (mostly soldiers, officials, merchants) abandoned the land or were killed. Because Pulpudeva survived as Plovdiv in Slavic languages, not under Philippopolis, some authors suggest that Thracian was not completely obliterated in the 7th century.

The point at which Thracian became extinct is a matter of dispute. It is generally accepted that Thracian was still in use in the 6th century AD: Antoninus of Piacenza wrote in 570 that there was a monastery in the Sinai, at which the monks spoke Greek, Latin, Syriac, Egyptian, and Bessian – a Thracian dialect.

General references

Beekes, Robert S. P. (2009). Etymological Dictionary of Greek. Brill Academic Publishers. ISBN 978-90-04-17418-4.
Brixhe, Claude (2018). "XVI Languages of fragmentary attestation, 104. Thracian". In Klein, Jared; Joseph, Brian; Fritz, Matthias (eds.). Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics. De Gruyter. pp. 1850–1854.