The Phrygian language was spoken in Greek and Roman times in the western part of what is now Turkey. It was probably extinct by the 7th or 8th century A.D., at the latest. Its closest living relatives today appear to be Armenian  and Albanian. The Phrygians were famous for a curved pointed cap they wore called a "Phrygian cap" which was later worn even in the French Revolution by the revolutionaries.

Linguist Eric Hamp mentions in one of his articles that their word for "The Big Dipper" was "kiklên" (pronounced keek-leen). This is interesting since we know little about the Phrygian language. The word also apparently meant "cart" or "wagon" however it is also a cognate with our English word "wheel" as well as the Russian words for wheel "koleso;koleisko" and the Greek word for "wheel or circle" "kuklos" (The source of Ku Klux Klan). Mr. Ham reconstructs the original Proto-Indo-European word as *KwetKwlo-.

The Big Dipper has been seen by various cultures as an ox cart, a wagon, a   beaver, a bear, a sieve and a dipper; to the Hindus it was sapta rishi "The seven Wise Men."  8)

Hi,

Thanks for the mail!

A corpus of Phrygian texts can be found on http://titus.uni-frankfurt.de/ (> textdatabase (right) > Indogermanicarum Dialectorum Reliquiae: [Albanica] [Phrygica] [Cetera]).

Funny in connection with Phrygian is the story told by Herodotos:
"One famous Phrygian word is bekos, meaning "bread". According to Herodotus (Histories 2.9) Pharaoh Psammetichus II wanted to establish the original language. For this purpose, he ordered two children to be reared by a shepherd, forbidding him to let them hear a single word, and charging him to report the children’s first utterance. After two years, the shepherd reported that on entering their chamber, the children came up to him, extending their hands, calling bekos. Upon enquiry, the pharaoh discovered that this was the Phrygian word for "wheat bread", after which the Egyptians conceded that the Phrygian nation was older than theirs. The word bekos is also attested several times in Palaeo-Phrygian inscriptions on funerary stelae. It was suggested that it is cognate to English bake." (Wikipedia)

Hi,

<<<Its [Phrygian’s] closest living relatives today appear to be Armenian  and Albanian.<<<

Albanian? This is new to me. How can this be accounted for?

All the best.

Frank

Frank,

Thanks for having an interest in the topic. The prevailing belief, even among Albanian linguists, is that in the Indo-European language family Albanian and  Armenian are the nearest relatives of Greek and of each other.

Illyrian or Thracian, the ancestor of Albanian and Phrygian, an ancestor (or at least,  very close relative) of Armenian, both belong to a sufamily of Indo-European variously called Thraco-Illyrian, Thraco-Phrygian, Daco-Phrygian and Daco-Mysian. The original Macedonian language (pre-Hellenic) probably belonged to this group of languages too.

Greek (Hellenic) is not a member of this subfamily but is  one of its closer relatives; closer than Italic, Celtic or Germanic.

Hi,

Thanks for the clarifications. As far as i knew, Ilyrian, Thracian, Dacian etc. were very blurry notions, because hardly anything is attested.

You have been lucky, you: a lot of Albanian linguists i read (on line) seem to think that the zero meridian runs through their… through Tirana…

Groetjes,

Frank

Add Kurdish nationalism/chauvinism to the Illyrian/Albanian question, and you’ll be busy for the rest of your life.

Anders,

I’ve heard that nobody really knows what the ethnology of the Kurds is even though they speak and Indo-Iranian language. Some genetic studies indicate that they may be closer related to the Jews than the Arabs are but nobody is really saying that they are Semitic either. So it’s kind of confusing; kind of a big unknown.

The Albanian language appears to be the tattered remnants of ancient Illyrian or Thracian but whether the Albanians are the genetic descendants of the Illyrians is a different story. There were a people called Pelasgians living there  (and in parts of Greece - they supposedly built the original acropolis) even earlier than the Illyrians but nobody really knows what their ethnicity was or what they looked like. I would like to think that they were just a very early Indo-European people, asplinter group different from the main drift which includes Indo-Iranian, Hellenic, Italic, Celtic, Germanic and Balto-Slavic but that’s just a hunch.  

Another thing which confuses the study of ethnicity in the Mediteranean was the big slave trade that existed there among both the Greeks and Romans. Slaves often came from foreign tribes and nationalities.  :)