Historical Onomastics
100 Historical Things, Number 17
OK, to start with, just to clarify: onomastics is the study of names.
Now, I enjoy onomastics. It's useful in what I do, because I don't only study scripts and languages, I'm also very much invested in studying the people writing and speaking those scripts and languages. (I did talk a little bit about this already, but it's the only one of my 100 Things posts so far that hasn't received any comments!)
There's a reason why I'm suddenly bringing up the discipline of onomastics. I just saw a link to an article about the discovery of a lost language, the basis for the discovery of which is purely onomastic (that is, it involves a cuneiform inscription featuring women's names of unknown derivation).
(You'll notice that that is a University of Cambridge news link, but let me just add a disclaimer that I don't know the person who made the discovery and didn't know anything about it until I read the article! I'm not any kind of Assyriologist anyway. If I get curious and have a chance I might ask my colleague Nicholas Postgate about it - NB, not to be confused with the blessed Nicholas Postgate... but my Nicholas Postgate is in fact a relative of the famous Oliver Postgate, who created The Clangers and Bagpuss among other things.)
Back to lost languages! Now, my first reaction to the news story is that it doesn't seem like terribly big news. In fact there are lots of names floating around that can't be pinned down to particular languages very easily, and especially place names (which linguists tend to call 'toponyms', alongside 'anthroponyms' for people's names). A nice example is the appearance of pre-Greek toponyms throughout Greece, whose linguistic derivation we have no idea about - a considerable subset of which are the words in -inthos (including 'labyrinth' and 'Corinth', plus other words not in the toponym category, like 'terebinth'). We call them pre-Greek because they seem to belong to a period before etymologically Greek names get applied to places. Do they prove the existence of a non-Greek language? Well yes, very probably![1] Are we surprised? No!
Why aren't we surprised? Well, the world is full of languages, and if you consider the rate at which known languages are dying out today[3] then it's not surprising at all that there may have been lots of languages floating around at some point of which no trace has survived. But this isn't really a criticism of the discovery mentioned in that article, because without understanding the data myself I simply can't judge it. Really I just wanted to bring it up as a way of thinking about how names might differ from other types of linguistic data.
I'll stop there for today, but I might post more about this in future if people find it interesting?
[1] Note that on Crete we have very direct evidence of non-Greek languages, namely that/those written in Linear A and Cretan Hieroglyphics, but these are not necessarily the pre-Greek language we're looking for. You do get 'labyrinth' on Crete (in Linear B - i.e. in Greek, but written on Crete not long after the Linear A writings - you get the word da-pu2-ri-to-jo, which is direct evidence of the labyrinth word[2]), but there are various reasons why we don't think these names are necessarily associated with the 'Minoan' language or similar.
[2] Yes, I know it begins with what looks like a [d] there. This is complicated - trust me, I just wrote an article on it. Would take quite a long time to explain the complications!
[3] If you're interested and want to follow that up, you may want to have a look at Wikipedia's lists of endangered languages and extinct languages, and maybe their stuff on language death too.
OK, to start with, just to clarify: onomastics is the study of names.
Now, I enjoy onomastics. It's useful in what I do, because I don't only study scripts and languages, I'm also very much invested in studying the people writing and speaking those scripts and languages. (I did talk a little bit about this already, but it's the only one of my 100 Things posts so far that hasn't received any comments!)
There's a reason why I'm suddenly bringing up the discipline of onomastics. I just saw a link to an article about the discovery of a lost language, the basis for the discovery of which is purely onomastic (that is, it involves a cuneiform inscription featuring women's names of unknown derivation).
(You'll notice that that is a University of Cambridge news link, but let me just add a disclaimer that I don't know the person who made the discovery and didn't know anything about it until I read the article! I'm not any kind of Assyriologist anyway. If I get curious and have a chance I might ask my colleague Nicholas Postgate about it - NB, not to be confused with the blessed Nicholas Postgate... but my Nicholas Postgate is in fact a relative of the famous Oliver Postgate, who created The Clangers and Bagpuss among other things.)
Back to lost languages! Now, my first reaction to the news story is that it doesn't seem like terribly big news. In fact there are lots of names floating around that can't be pinned down to particular languages very easily, and especially place names (which linguists tend to call 'toponyms', alongside 'anthroponyms' for people's names). A nice example is the appearance of pre-Greek toponyms throughout Greece, whose linguistic derivation we have no idea about - a considerable subset of which are the words in -inthos (including 'labyrinth' and 'Corinth', plus other words not in the toponym category, like 'terebinth'). We call them pre-Greek because they seem to belong to a period before etymologically Greek names get applied to places. Do they prove the existence of a non-Greek language? Well yes, very probably![1] Are we surprised? No!
Why aren't we surprised? Well, the world is full of languages, and if you consider the rate at which known languages are dying out today[3] then it's not surprising at all that there may have been lots of languages floating around at some point of which no trace has survived. But this isn't really a criticism of the discovery mentioned in that article, because without understanding the data myself I simply can't judge it. Really I just wanted to bring it up as a way of thinking about how names might differ from other types of linguistic data.
I'll stop there for today, but I might post more about this in future if people find it interesting?
[1] Note that on Crete we have very direct evidence of non-Greek languages, namely that/those written in Linear A and Cretan Hieroglyphics, but these are not necessarily the pre-Greek language we're looking for. You do get 'labyrinth' on Crete (in Linear B - i.e. in Greek, but written on Crete not long after the Linear A writings - you get the word da-pu2-ri-to-jo, which is direct evidence of the labyrinth word[2]), but there are various reasons why we don't think these names are necessarily associated with the 'Minoan' language or similar.
[2] Yes, I know it begins with what looks like a [d] there. This is complicated - trust me, I just wrote an article on it. Would take quite a long time to explain the complications!
[3] If you're interested and want to follow that up, you may want to have a look at Wikipedia's lists of endangered languages and extinct languages, and maybe their stuff on language death too.