HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

Lycian was the autochthonous language of the land of Lycia at least during the middle and late first millennium BC. Recent evidence from the Hieroglyphic Luvian inscription of Yalburt – specifically, forms of the place names for Tlos, Pinara, and Xanthos – has now proven that the “Lukka-Lands” of the second-millennium Hittite cuneiform texts do refer to historical Lycia, that is, roughly the mountainous peninsula on the southwest coast of Anatolia lying between the Gulf of Telmessos and the Bay of Attaleia (modern Gulf of Fethiye and Gulf of Antalya; see Poetto 1993). Obviously, without direct textual evidence from Lycia itself during the second millennium it is quite impossible to characterize with any precision the language of “Lukka” in that era.

Lycian shares a number of specific features, including innovations, with Luvian, and it is widely held that Lycian and Luvian form a subgroup within the Anatolian family; in other words, that they reflect a prehistoric “Proto-Luvian” language which had developed out of Proto-Anatolian along different lines from Hittite, Palaic, and Lydian, the other assured members of the Anatolian group (see, inter alios, Oettinger 1978). One may even read that Lycian is a later form of Luvian, though not necessarily of that form of Luvian which is directly attested in the second millennium.

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

The Epi-Olmec language is the most ancient attested member of the Mije-Sokean family (c. 300 BCE to at least 533 CE). This family and its internal relationships are presented in Figure 10.1. In the sixteenth century, this family occupied a continuous area of southern Mesoamerica, extending from southern Veracruz to the border of present-day Guatemala, and with no trace of other native languages apart from islands of Nawa. The region seems to have been exclusively Mije-Sokean until the invasion of these Nawas, sometime between 600 and 900 CE; they influenced the vocabularies of individual Mije-Sokean languages but not that of Proto-Sokean or Proto-Mijean.

This region included the entire heartland of the Olmec civilization (1500–500 BCE), and the above circumstances provide a prima facie case that the Olmecs were Mije-Sokeans. Olmecs had widespread influence, diffusing innovations that would become distinctively Mesoamerican cultural characteristics. Evidence from associated linguistic diffusion con-firms that at least some Olmecs spoke an early Mije-Sokean language (Campbell and Kaufman 1976); further analysis suggests to us that they were Sokean specifically.

Olmec civilization was originally defined by its distinctive art style, which developed in situ in the Olmec heartland, and whose classic form ended after the abandonment of La Venta (c. 500 BCE).

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

Avestan is a member of the Indo-European language family. It is the most richly attested ancient member of the Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian subgroup of that family. As such, it is closely related to the Sanskrit language (which represents the most archaic member of the Indic subgroup of Indo-Iranian; see Ch. 2). For those who hold that the centum–satem division (fundamentally an east/west bifurcation in the Indo-European language family) is a matter of subgrouping, Indo-Iranian (and therefore Avestan) is a member of the satem group (indeed, it is the Avestan word for “100,” satәm, which gives that group its name).

There are uncertainties regarding both the dating and the geographical provenance of the surviving Avestan texts. The oldest manuscript is quite young (manuscript K7a, dating from AD 1278) and therefore of little assistance in resolving these matters. The issue of chronology is usually linked to the problems surrounding the dates of the founder of Zoroastrianism, the prophet Zarathuštra.Current scholarly consensus places his life considerably earlier than the traditional Zoroastrian sources are thought to, favoring a birth date before 1000 BC. Since the Gāθās are recognized as being the work of Zarathuštra, these Old Avestan texts appear to date fromaround that time. Precise dating of the Young Avestan texts, many of which appear to have a long oral transmission history, is in most cases impossible.

In the following pages, the reader will discover what is, in effect, a linguistic description of all known ancient languages. Never before in the history of language study has such a collection appeared within the covers of a single work. This volume brings to student and to scholar convenient, systematic presentations of grammars which, in the best of cases, were heretofore accessible only by consulting multiple sources, and which in all too many instances could only be retrieved from scattered, out-of-the-way, disparate treatments. For some languages, the only existing comprehensive grammatical description is to be found herein.

This work has come to fruition through the efforts and encouragement of many, to all of whom the editor wishes to express his heartfelt gratitude. To attempt to list all – colleagues, students, friends – would, however, certainly result in the unintentional and unhappy neglect of some, and so only a much more modest attempt at acknowledgments will be made. Among those to whom special thanks are due are first and foremost the contributors to this volume, scholars who have devoted their lives to the study of the languages of ancient humanity, without whose expertise and dedication this work would still be only a desideratum. Very special thanks also go to Dr. Kate Brett of Cambridge University Press for her professionalism, her wise and expert guidance, and her unending patience, also to her predecessor, Judith Ayling, for permitting me to persuade her of the project's importance.

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXTS

History of the language and its speakers

Hurrian is an ancient Near Eastern language widely spoken in the northern parts of the Fertile Crescent (present-day northern Iraq, northern Syria, southeast Turkey) from at least the last quarter of the third millennium BC on until the end of the second millennium BC. It survived for another half millennium in small pockets in the mountainous areas north of ancient Assyria.

A cognate language of Hurrian is Urartian (see Ch. 10) which is attested in texts from the late ninth to the late seventh century BC. Apart from Urartian, Hurrian is an isolated language without a genetic relation to any other known ancient Near Eastern language. A genetic relation between (reconstructed) Proto-Urarto-Hurrian and (reconstructed) Northeast Caucasian has been argued for, but it is not generally accepted. If the connection could be demonstrated, it would be a rather distant one.

Hurrian is first attested in a few words and personal or place names mentioned in Akkadian texts of the Akkade period (twenty-third to twenty-second centuries BC). The term Old Hurrian (herein abbreviated OH) has been coined for the language of a royal inscription most likely to be dated to the Ur III period (twenty-first to twentieth centuries BC), but it is also used for the more archaic dialect(s) of the second millennium.

Preliminary remarks

What makes a language ancient? The term conjures up images, often romantic, of archeologists feverishly copying hieroglyphs by torchlight in a freshly discovered burial chamber; of philologists dangling over a precipice in some remote corner of the earth, taking impressions of an inscription carved in a cliff-face; of a solitary scholar working far into the night, puzzling out some ancient secret, long forgotten by humankind, from a brittle-leafed manuscript or patina-encrusted tablet. The allure is undeniable, and the literary and film worlds have made full use of it.

An ancient language is indeed a thing of wonder – but so is every other language, all remarkable systems of conveying thoughts and ideas across time and space. And ancient languages, as far back as the very earliest attested, operate just like those to which the linguist has more immediate access, all with the same familiar elements – phonological, morphological, syntactic – and no perceptible vestiges of Neanderthal oddities. If there was a time when human language was characterized by features and strategies fundamentally unlike those we presently know, it was a time prior to the development of any attested or reconstructed language of antiquity. Perhaps, then, what makes an ancient language different is our awareness that it has outlived those for whom it was an intimate element of the psyche, not so unlike those rays of light now reaching our eyes that were emitted by their long-extinguished source when dinosaurs still roamed across the earth (or earlier) – both phantasms of energy flying to our senses from distant sources, long gone out.

Introduction

The third diaspora of Asian Indians (see Chapter 25) involves migration to the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia, to mention just a few countries. This chapter concentrates on South Asian diaspora in the United Kingdom and United States. Detailed studies of South Asian languages in diaspora, as discussed in Chapter 25 are nonexistent for Asian Indian communities in these countries, except for some data on language use in select Asian Indian linguistic communities in the United States that this author has collected over the years. What we have is attitudinal surveys that discuss the users and uses of South Asian languages, primarily in the United States and United Kingdom. Two brief profiles of South Asian diasporic communities are presented here with special emphasis on the efforts being made to maintain the languages and cultures by the various ethnic groups.

The term “South Asian” needs some clarification, especially with reference to how these communities are identified in the censuses of these two countries:

1. In the United Kingdom, most of the earlier immigrants (from British India) were identified as “Overseas Indians.” Finer distinctions between South Asian communities did not start until 1947 when, after the formation of Pakistan, Pakistanis were identified as a distinct group. What was earlier East Pakistan became Bangladesh in 1971, and the Bangladeshis were listed in subsequent census reports (Mishra and Mohapatra 2001: i).

2. […]