Abstract
Carian is an extinct language of the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European language family, which is attested in numerous inscriptions, graffiti, and coins written in the so-called Carian script. The Carian glosses cited by Byzantine writers, mainly by Stephan of Byzantium, are the main secondary source for the Carian language. Despite the hundred-year-long search for etymologies and the almost completed decipherment of the Carian inscriptions, these pseudo-glosses have not been fully explained. The present study links three of the seven most certain of these glosses, namely κόον/κῶν/κοῖον ‘sheep’, γίσσα ‘stone’, and ἄλα ‘horse’, to some Altaic and Xiongnu words and traces their origin back to a non-Indo-European language spoken among the Scythians. The language in question is assumed to be the donor of Proto-Turkic *kōńï̆ ‘sheep’, Proto-Bulgar Turkic *kïsa ‘rock, cliff’, and Early Common Turkic *halan ‘horse’. These forms also entered the Mongolic, Tungusic, and other neighboring languages. The parallelism between the Carian pseudo-glosses and these word forms is the result of the linguistic contact at the two opposite ends of the Scythic culture.
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