Phrygian language


The Phrygian language was the Indo-European language of the Phrygians, spoken in Asia Minor during Classical Antiquity.
Phrygian is considered by some linguists to have been closely related to Greek and/or Armenian. The similarity of some Phrygian words to Greek ones was observed by Plato in his Cratylus.

Inscriptions

Phrygian is attested by two corpora, one dated to between about the 8th and the 4th century BC, and then after a period of several centuries from between the 1st and 3rd centuries AD. The Paleo-Phrygian corpus is further divided into inscriptions of Midas City, Gordion, Central, Bithynia, Pteria, Tyana, Daskyleion, Bayindir, and "various". The Mysian inscriptions seem to be in a separate dialect.
The last mentions of the language date to the 5th century AD, and it was likely extinct by the 7th century AD.
Paleo-Phrygian used a Phoenician-derived script, while Neo-Phrygian used the Greek script.

Grammar

Its structure, what can be recovered of it, was typically Indo-European, with nouns declined for case, gender, and number, while the verbs are conjugated for tense, voice, mood, person, and number. No single word is attested in all its inflectional forms.
Phrygian seems to exhibit an augment, like Greek, Indo-Iranian, and Armenian; cf. eberet, probably corresponding to Proto-Indo-European *e-bher-e-t , although comparison to examples like ios... addaket 'who does... to', which is not a past tense form, shows that -et'' may be from the Proto-Indo-European primary ending *-eti.

Phonology

It has long been claimed that Phrygian exhibits a sound change of stop consonants, similar to Grimm's Law in Germanic and, more to the point, sound laws found in Proto-Armenian; i.e., voicing of PIE aspirates, devoicing of PIE voiced stops and aspiration of voiceless stops. This hypothesis was rejected by Lejeune and Brixhe but revived by Lubotsky and Woodhouse, who argue that there is evidence of a partial shift of obstruent series; i.e., voicing of PIE aspirates and devoicing of PIE voiced stops.
The affricates ts and dz developed from velars before front vowels.

Vocabulary