--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "gknysh" <gknysh@...> wrote:
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Francesco Brighenti" <frabrig@>
> wrote:
>
> > If Harmatta's hypothesis were true, that would be revolutionary:
> > this would be the first written inscription in a Scythian
> > language so far discovered west of Central Asia!
>
> I doubt very much there's anything to this. Scythians don't
> seem to have gone into any kind of literacy throughout most of
> their history.
I want to precise that in my message quoted above I had suggested
there may be some epigraphic evidence of Scythian languages from
Central Asia *solely* on the basis of another dubious "translation"
by Janos Harmatta, that of an inscribed cup recovered from the 4th-
3rd century BCE Issyk kurgan (a Scythian one) in S.E. Kazakhstan.
Here is a summary of Harmatta's "discovery":
http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Issyk-kurgan
<< The Issyk inscription is in an unidentified script and an
unidentified language. The script is at least superficially similar
to the various runic and runeiform scripts used in more recent times
by Turkic, Hungarian and Germanic peoples, but it is unclear if there
is any link between the Issyk inscription and any of those later
scripts. Others believe the Issyk inscription is related to the
Kharoshthi script, used in India and central Asia from around the 4th
century BC to the 3rd century AD, although the Issyk script is not
visually similar to the Kharoshthi script. The Issyk inscription is
probably too short for any identification of the language to gain
wide acceptance, unless more examples are found. Janos Harmatta
(1999) has attempted a translation based on a hypothesis that the
script is Kharoshthi and the language is a branch of Indo-Iranian,
which he names Khotanese Saka: "The vessel should hold wine of
grapes, added cooked food, so much, to the mortal, then added cooked
fresh butter on." (compare Nestor's Cup and Duenos inscription for
other ancient inscriptions on vessels that concern the vessel
itself). >>
The Wikipedia article on the Issyk kurgan acritically endorses
Harmatta's thesis (and his improbable "translation"!) and states
that "the inscription is in a variant of the Kharoshthi script, and
is probably in a Scythian dialect [Khotanese Saka -- FB],
constituting one of very few autochthonous epigraphic traces of that
language." See, however, the hot debate on the Wikipedia talk page
associated with that article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Issyk_kurgan
And there is, of course, the corpus of Khotanese Saka manuscripts
from the Tarin basin (c. 5th-10th century AD), which, however,
already reflects the Middle Iranian stage of the Scythian sub-branch
of Iranian languages.
All in all, it is difficult to take Harmatta's two "transcribed
inscriptions" mentioned in my recent posts as evidence of the Old
Iranian stage of Scythian -- which, as I have already observed, would
be kind of a "revolution" in Iranian philology.
Regards,
Francesco