--- In cybalist@..., "Davius Sanctex" <davius_sanctex@...> wrote:
> 1) What was the language of "Regnum Ponticum" of Mithridates IV?
> 2) What was the language of the "Alani"?
> 2) Is Saka (khontanese) some form of Scythian?
> 3) Did Sarmatians and Scythians speak the same language?
> 4) Are yazigians and sarmatians the same people?
> 5) What was the historical end of cimerii?
> 4) Hasta q época sobrevivió el cimerio? que relación exite
entre
> esta lengua y el escita?
I hope that somebody more knowledgeable than myself
answers your questions, but in the meantime I can try to answer
some semi-competently.
The language of the Alani is usually called Alanic, which
doesn't clarify much, or Old Ossetic, which is disputed by some.
As far as I know Khotanese or Khotan Saka and Tumshuq Saka
are the only surviving dialects of Scythian.
The Sarmatian and Scythian languages were closely related but
not the same language. Compare these words for "son".
Avestic Scythic Sarmatic
puthra- purtha- *furta-
You can see that all are Iranian but that Scythian and Sarmatian
share the metathesis of -tr- > -rt- and therefore together consistute
a branch seperate from Avestan but that Iranian *p- and *-th-
become f- and -t- in Sarmatian therefore making it a distinct branch
of Scytho-Sarmatic.
The origin of the names Sarmatian and Sauromatian are obscure
but probably first designated just that tribe with which the Greeks
first came in contact and was thereafter applied by them to all
related tribes. Our modern use of the word is similar and so
Jazygian would be considered a sub-division within Sarmatian. I
favor the equation "Jaz-" in Jazygian = "Oss-" in Ossete = Hung.
Jász = Russ. Jassy = As/Asi/Asioi/Asianoi. Besides the formal
similarity the historical sources say that the ancestors of the
Hungarian Jász were Jazygians. I speculate that it could come
from adejctival derivatives of Yas- like *Yaz-æg, *Yaz-ig, or
*Yaz-ug. Also the Jász people's language is very close to Ossetic.
The Byzantine Greeks called the Ossetian's ancestors "Alans" and
their territory in the Caucasus "Alania" and several sources give
As or Yas as synonyms of Alan or as replacing the term Alan. So I
think that this not just proves the Alan/As identity, which is widely
recognized, but also the As/Yas/Jazygian (and therefore Sarmatian)
identity, which I'm not sure if scholars accept or not. In other
words I don't think that we should posit an East-Iranic branch
further subdivided into an Alanic and a Sarmatian branch. The
theory that I favor is that the Alans (< *aryana-) were a tribal
confederation of several tribes of East-Iranic nomads along with a
variety of Slavic, Tocharian and Altaic elements as well. Therefore
Alan wouldn't be a tribal name as such but the broader common ethnic
term for the majority Iranians who were divided into several tribes
under different names. I think that the Yas/As tribe must have
been a major component of the Alanic confederation from the beginning
and that over time as the various other components of the
confederation were assimilated to the Yassic culture and language
that the term Yas/As began to be used synonymously with Alan and then
eventually replaced it, hence the disappearance of the Sarmatians and
Alans and their replacement by the Oss-etes and Jász.
I can't answer your questions about the Regnum Ponticum's
language, the end of the Cimmerians, nor the Cimmerian language's
relation to Scythian.
My sources are old and incomplete and I have no formal training
in linguistics or history, so I would be very grateful for any
critiques of this scenario that better informed people could offer.
David