Ethnic groups and language contact in Lycia (I): the "Maritime Interface"

The second phase is the `Lycian-Greek' language contact proper. In the 6th and 5th centuries the contact was probably rather slight, while the Persian influence played a more important role. In the 4th century BC, Lycians became probably much more exposed to Greek, both through the increased presence of the Greeks in Lycia and through the Hellenizing policy of the Hekatomnid dynasty. However, it is not clear whether even on this phase the Lycian- Greek contact led to a wide-spread bilingualism in Lycia. It is quite obvious that the Lycians has a very strong sense of `national' identity, expressed inter alia in a highly developed written culture, and it is ba far not obvious that Greek was perceived as a `prestige language' outside the class of Lycian elite connected first of all with the cities of the Xanthos valley. Thus, the switch from Lycian to Greek after the Macedonian conquest might have been rather abrupt, induced both by the loss of the political independence and the integration of Lycia in the wider Hellenistic world, although more epigraphical material of the 4th century BC is needed to clarify the details.

The proposed scenario has important implications both for the Lycian language and the ethnolinguistic identity of the Lycians, since it presupposes a deep Aegean layer in both. There is no place here to discuss the issue in full. However, three linguistic features may be mentioned which agree well with the proposed scenario lending it further support. The first is connected with the problem of the verb stta-. As already mentioned above, its status in Lycian represent a crux: on the one hand, it is clearly connected with sttala, which is a borrowing, and its specific phonetic form supports its foreign origin; on the other hand, the root has a basic meaning, and in the absence of evidence for a heavy influence of Greek on Lycian in the early period, its adoption from Greek seems strange. An attempt by Schurr (2014 [2016]) to explain the adoption of the verb as a term specifically connected with installation of stone monuments and in general with Greek written culture, does not look very convincing: as far as one can see, the verb is not used transitively, and there is absolutely nothing specific in the meaning `stand, be placed' to justify a borrowing in the usual contact scenario. As mentioned, the Lycian verb has no exclusive association with standing stone monuments. Now, the paradox can be plausibly explained, if one interprets both stta- and sttala as early Greek borrowings in Lycian going back to the 12th-11th centuries BC, resulting from the situation of a high-level Greek-Lycian bilingualism.

The second lexical item for which the explanatory model is immediately relevant is the verb tti- `pay (as a fine)' and its possible derivative tija- `penalty, amends' (cf. Melchert 2003: s.v.v.). Two factors in combination suggest that it may well be an early Aegean/Greek borrowing. First, the verb seems to find a nearly exact semantic doublet in ttl(e)i- `pay', which is apparently a specifically Anatolian term. Second, tti- closely corresponds to Greek tlvu> `pay' which is connected with tlw `punish, avenge', both verbs being based on PIE *kuei- `fine, exact payment'. The verb is absent in other Anatolian languages and, besides Greek, has a secure reflex only in Indo-Iranian (cf., e.g. Beekes 2010: s.v. with further refs.). Given these factors, it would be more natural to interpret Lycian tti- as an Aegean borrowing, rather than an independent IE reflex. Its preservation as a doublet of Anatolia ttl(e)i- is possibly due to some specific legal regulations related to fines/payments connected with the Aegean settlers The issue of the meaning of `Lycian B' kiki- (TL 55: 5) remains open, since the context does not make it possible to verify its meaning..

The third feature concerns Lycian phonetics. There are two innovative phonetic peculiarities in Lycian, which separate it from Luwian and `Lycian B' (and possibly all other Luwic languages), but are shared with Greek. The first is the development ku > t before front vowels (e/i) (cf. Melchert 1994: 303), which resulted, for instance, in that both Greek and Lycian have identical pronominal forms tl and ti (nom.acc.neutr.sg.) developed from the PIE relative pronoun *kui-. The development is quite non-trivial, and is not found (at least in exactly this form) in any other IE language. The second is the change *s > h, shared by Lycian and Greek (as well as its close relative Phrygian). The feature is cross-linguistically more common, but its presence, from all the languages of the Anatolian branch, only in Lycian is remarkable. As peculiarities of articulation of the first language may well affect the phonetics of the second language, one can now naturally interpret these two Lycian sound changes as having been introduced by the early Aegean settlers in the region.

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