PseudoCarian

The Carian language is ancient but its dictionary is very recent, like about two decades old. You'd think its inscriptions would have been deciphered earlier, given its obvious-to-us derivation from Luwian. One stumblingblock appears to be false etymologies dumped upon us by Late Antique grammarians.

Usually the grammarians have been more helpful than this. I understand that Phrygian, for instance, was fairly accurately brought to us. Also Lycian and some other Carian words; but the mix of good and bad in Carian just made people suspicious of the good too.

Which inspires the question - where the "Carian" words aren't Carian, then whence? A couple years ago Orçun Ünal pondered the classical Scythia. For Greeks (and Assyrians) that means the wider steppe. Ünal picks up three words: κόον "sheep", γίσσα "stone", and ἄλα "horse". Words that sound like this can be found in the odd IndoEuropean language, but are not protoIndoEuropean for which all three have famous derivates. None of them are Anatolian.

Ünal thinks they're Altaic. In some cases, other languages had borrowed them from Altaic: kwn appears in old Mongolic, the Mongols not being much for raising sheep so presumably trading for their pelts.

As a Turk himself he has an interest, to stretch the Turkic connexion to southwest Anatolia into Classical times. But if we nonTurks force him to acknowledge that, we must acknowledge our own interests. We are left to view the paper itself. Which actually looks good, at least to my amateurish eyes.

I would point out that the γίσσα soundalikes in Altaic trend not to stone in the general, but to stony badland in the specific. That is the stone which poses a barrier to the wandering shepherd.

Ünal raises the three words might be real loans into Carian, but cannot find them in the graffiti. He concludes the later Greeks simply erred. Like I said: Ünal is not to be dismissed as a nationalist. As to why they erred, we can only speculate.

This is a blog; let us speculate. Perhaps some barbarians brought along some Turkish shepherds: Slavs would be a good Late Antique suspect. These shepherds would, perhaps, identify themselves as never-Slavic; on settlement, they interfaced with the local Carian shepherds directly. Those latter shepherds had quit speaking Carian, themselves. So these three words because Carian-by-geography. When the Byzantines found these shepherds, they immediately recognised these three words as not Greek nor anything they'd seen in the region. "Carian" it was, then.