The Carian Language

Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2007. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Very good. xii. [2], 526 pages. Illustrations. Plates. Carian Glossary. Appendices. Abbreviations and Bibliography. Carian Alphabet. Carian signs in coin legends. Index. This is Volume 86 of the Handbook of Oriental Studies, Section One, The Near and Middle East. This handbook presents a complete and updated view of our current knowledge about Carian, one of the Indo-European languages spoken in ancient Anatolia. This handbook provides a complete and updated view of our current knowledge about Carian, one of the Indo-European languages spoken in ancient Anatolia. The decipherment of the Carian alphabet has only recently made it possible to analyze Carian inscriptions and to classify the Carian language linguistically. The book covers all major topics of research on Carian: the direct and indirect sources with an edition of the Carian inscriptions following a new classification system, the history of the decipherment, the Carian alphabet, and the phonological, morphological, lexical, and syntactic features of the language. It includes an annotated Carian glossary.
The volume concludes with a special appendix on Carian coins and legends by Koray Konuk that will be of particular interest to specialists in ancient numismatics. The field of Anatolian languages is one of the liveliest branches of Comparative Indo-European Linguistics and needless to say, one of the most important. Nowadays it is fairly rare to discover a new Indo-European language, but this is exactly what happened in the eighties and early nineties, when after some hundred years of vain research since the pioneering paper of Archibald Henry Sayce. Three scholars, John D. Ray, Diether Schürr and Ignacio J. Adiego managed to decipher the Carian script and to recognize Carian language as an Anatolian Indo-European language. Though our knowledge about Carian has remained and still remains very limited - on the one hand because of brevity of most of the inscriptions, and on the other hand because of the impenetrable texts of the longer ones -, the results of the last one and a half decade have reached the point when Carian research grew out of its infancy. Thus it seemed appropriate to summarize our knowledge of this language in a handbook available for a wider audience and for the purposes of scientific education, too. This volume written by I. J. Adiego, one of the decipherers, who publishes extensively on Carian, intends to fill this purpose.