A RetroSearch Logo

Home - News ( United States | United Kingdom | Italy | Germany ) - Football scores

Search Query:

Showing content from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scythian_languages below:

Scythian languages - Wikipedia

Checked

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Group of Eastern Iranic languages

The Scythian languages ( or or ) are a group of Eastern Iranic languages of the classical and late antique period (the Middle Iranic period), spoken in a vast region of Eurasia by the populations belonging to the Scythian cultures and their descendants. The dominant ethnic groups among the Scythian-speakers were nomadic pastoralists of Central Asia and the Pontic–Caspian steppe. Fragments of their speech known from inscriptions and words quoted in ancient authors as well as analysis of their names indicate that it was an Indo-European language, more specifically from the Iranic group of Indo-Iranic languages.

Most of the Scythian languages eventually became extinct, except for modern Ossetian (which descends from the Alanic dialect of Scytho-Sarmatian), Wakhi (which descends from the Khotanese and Tumshuqese forms of Scytho-Khotanese), and Yaghnobi (which descends from Sogdian). Alexander Lubotsky summarizes the known linguistic landscape as follows:[2]

Unfortunately, we know next to nothing about the Scythian of that period [Old Iranian] – we have only a couple of personal and tribal names in Greek and Persian sources at our disposal – and cannot even determine with any degree of certainty whether it was a single language.

Ossetian is an Eastern Iranic language. The vast majority of Scythological scholars agree in considering the Scythian languages a part of the Eastern Iranic languages too. This relies principally on the fact that the Greek inscriptions of the Northern Black Sea Coast contain several hundreds of Sarmatian names showing a close affinity to the Ossetian language.[3][4]

Some scholars detect a division of Scythian into two dialects: a western, more conservative dialect, and an eastern, more innovative one.[5] The Scythian languages may have formed a dialect continuum:

A document from Khotan written in Khotanese Saka, part of the Eastern Iranic branch of the Indo-European languages, listing the animals of the Chinese zodiac in the cycle of predictions for people born in that year; ink on paper, early 9th century

It is highly probable that already in the Old Iranic period, there were some eastern Scythian dialects which gave rise to the ancestor(s) of the Sogdian and Yaghnobi languages, although data required to test this hypothesis is presently lacking.

The Scythian languages shared some features with other Eastern Iranic languages, such as the use of the suffix -ta to denote the plural form, which is also present in Sogdian, Chorasmian, Ossetian, and Yaghnobi.

Early Eastern Iranic peoples originated in the Yaz culture (ca. 1500–1100 BC) in Central Asia.[9] The Scythians migrated from Central Asia toward Eastern Europe in the 8th and 7th century BC, occupying today's Southern Russia and Ukraine and the Carpathian Basin and parts of Moldova and Dobruja. They disappeared from history after the Hunnish invasion of Europe in the 5th century AD, and Turkic (Avar, Batsange, etc.) and Slavic peoples probably assimilated most people speaking Scythian.[citation needed] However, in the Caucasus, the Ossetian language belonging to the Scythian linguistic continuum remains in use today[update], while in Central Asia, some languages belonging to Eastern Iranic group are still spoken, namely Pashto, the Pamir languages and Yaghnobi.


RetroSearch is an open source project built by @garambo | Open a GitHub Issue

Search and Browse the WWW like it's 1997 | Search results from DuckDuckGo

HTML: 3.2 | Encoding: UTF-8 | Version: 0.7.4