Featured Article Summary #285

Ancient Cappadocian was a language once spoken in Cappadocia in central Anatolia, in what is now Turkey. No written texts from Cappadocian are known, but classical Greek writers said it was different from Greek and a few Greek words were thought to come from it. Cappadocians also shaped the accent of the Greek they spoke, which was widely criticized by ancient authors, though there’s no sign they changed Greek grammar or vocabulary. Cappadocian is not securely classified, but it likely belonged to the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European languages, possibly related to or descending from Luwian, and this idea is supported by Anatolian elements in local names and its history under the Hittite Empire. By the sixth century AD, it was replaced by Greek, and later Greek was replaced by Turkish. Claims from the 1800s that Cappadocian influenced Modern Greek dialects are not supported by evidence. Cappadocia is a historical region in central Anatolia, now in Turkey. In the Bronze Age it was dominated by the Hittites, whose languages included Hittite and Luwian, and later in the Iron Age the Syro-Anatolian culture in the area was associated with Tabal and Hieroglyphic Luwian inscriptions. Over time, control shifted from Phrygia and the Assyrians to Persian rule under the Achaemenids, then to the Kingdom of Cappadocia founded by Ariarathes, whose rulers promoted Greek culture. By Strabo’s description in the 1st century BC, most people in Cappadocia spoke a common language, and Cappadocian continued into the first millennium AD alongside Greek, with many speakers becoming bilingual. Cappadocian is an unattested language, so there are no surviving texts to prove what it was like or to classify it confidently. Strabo is the only clear source, saying Cappadocian was related to Cataonian, but that by his time the Cataonians had already been fully absorbed into Cappadocian culture and no longer used a separate language. It is also known to have been different from Greek, and linguistic evidence suggests it was unlikely to be closely related to Aramaic, since the Cappadocian Fathers do not seem to recognize Aramaic parallels for basic words like “heaven,” and modern Cappadocian Greek shows little Aramaic influence. In the 1700s, Paul Ernst Jablonski was the first to study the Cappadocian language by comparing classical texts, mainly trying to show that Lycaonian was a dialect of Cappadocian, but he could not prove it with linguistic evidence. Later scholars disagreed: some argued Cappadocian was Semitic (pointing to classical descriptions of Cappadocians), while others said it was Iranian within the Indo-European family (citing Iranian names and a calendar). In 1885 Pavlos Karolidis claimed some Cappadocian words survived in modern Cappadocian Greek, but this was criticized as guesswork, and in 1896 Paul Kretschmer suggested most of Anatolia shared a single, broader language family, which his contemporaries generally accepted. Kretschmer’s idea that Anatolian languages were a single, non–Indo-European family was disproved once these languages were deciphered in the early 1900s. Hittite (1917) was shown to be Indo-European, Lycian in first-millennium-BC inscriptions was also shown to be Indo-European, and by the mid-1900s many shared naming patterns and word origins matched Indo-European explanations across the region. Linguist Günter Neumann argues that similar personal and place names across Anatolia strongly suggests the languages there were closely related; since Lycian is securely Indo-European, other less documented languages such as Cappadocian were likely also Anatolian. Mark Janse further suggests Cappadocian was a descendant or relative of Luwian from the Tabal region, and he links the Greek name for Cappadocians to Hittite influence, while Zsolt Simon connects the place-name “sura” in Hieroglyphic Luwian sources with Cappadocia.