CHAT Anatolian groups (was Re: question - Turco-Japanese)

On Tuesday, November 23, 2004, at 09:29 , Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:

> Roger Mills wrote:
>
>> Something that has always intrigued me about Anatolia-- what happened to
>> all
>> the Greek- (and perhaps other-)speaking people who were there before the
>> Turks came? Did their languages have no effect on Turkish??Only the
>> Armenians seem to have survived.
>
> They probably converted to Islam and hence to Turkish.
No. As Rodlox correctly observes.....

On Tuesday, November 23, 2004, at 08:29 , Rodlox wrote:
[snip]
>   Cappadocia (central) and Pontus (north coast) regions of Anatolia had
> sizable Greek Orthodox populations throughout the Ottoman era (and Seljuk
Yep - right up till the 19th century/early 20th cent. The de-hellenizing
of Anatolia was not completed till the upheavals  & 'ethnic cleansing'
following WW1. As I have observed elsewhere, AFAIK the last of the Greeks
were expelled from the Smyrna region in 1922.
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On Tuesday, November 23, 2004, at 08:33 , Roger Mills wrote:
[snip]
> .......................I was thinking more of the much
> earlier groups-- the Phrygians, Lydians, Lycians-- some of whom did
> survive
> at least into the early Christian Era, and whose languages _might_ have
> survived in enclaves for a little longer. But it's probably true that
> they'd
> been assimilated to Greek language by, say, 10-1100 C.E.,
Yes - all the evidence is that these languages were moribund by the early
Christian era and had probably all given way to Greek by the middle of the
first millennium CE.

> and certainly by 1453.
Most certainly.

> Looking back even further, one might ask, Whatever became of the Hittites
> (linguistically)?  AFAIK, there's great doubt about whether Phrygian,
> Lydian
> et al. and/or Armenian, in any way represent descendants or relatives of
> Hittite. Was Hittite a total dead-end?
There is indeed. AFAIK Phrygian and Armenian are not normally considered
to be directly related to the ancient Anatolian IE langs. There are
considered to be part of the Thraco-Phrygian group. The ancient pre-Greek
languages of Bithynia & Mysia are thought to be members of this group.

There are IIRC reasons to suppose there might have been an earlier link
between the Thraco-Phrygian languages & Proto-Greek.

As for Hittite, my information is that it was one of three related IE
derived langs spoken in Anatolia at the beginning of 2nd millennium BCE -
Palaic in the north, Hittite (aka Nesite) in the center and Luwian in the
south. These languages appear to have survived at least to the last
quarter of the 2nd millennium, but Luwian had bt this time generated
another variant called Tabalic by the middle of the millennium.

Palaic seems to have died out before the end of the second millennium.
Lydian is considered by some to be derived from Hittite rather than its
sister languages; but this is not certain. Lycian, Carian, Cilician,
Pisidian, Lycaonian, Isaurian, Pamphylian and Sidetic are all considered
to be derived from Luwian and/or Tabalic - but too little is preserved of
these languages to make it at all clear exactly what the relationships are.

All these languages were giving way to Koine Greek before the end of the
first millennium BCE and had probably completely disappeared before 500 CE,
  having been replaced by Greek, as I noted above.

Ray
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