W dniu 2012-06-14 18:32, george knysh pisze:
> *****GK: I agree with this. It all depends on the context.
> And Herodotus was hardly always wrong. After all he did
> (correctly)note the similarity of the languages of Scythians and
> Sarmatians in his time even if his characterization of this was a
> bit dubious (I suspect a Scythian source :=))*****
It's hard to be ALWAYS wrong, but it's quite characteristic of Herodotus
to have been so often and so badly wrong about things linguistic (even
concerning a language whose speakers he regularly met). A typical Greek
from Halicarnassus, Caria, was monolingual and unlikely to have any
familiarity with Carian, let alone Persian or Aramaic.
Of course what we know today of either Dacian or Thracian today is
almost completely based on the analysis of a small number of proper
names and mangled glosses. They reveal different onomastic patterns and
probably different phonological developments. It seems clear that the
two languages were quite different from each other. I'm not saying that
Strabo was necessarily wrong about some degree of mutual
comprehensibility between Dacian and Thracian (come to think of it, a
significant proportion of the Balkan population may have been ethnically
mixed and bilingual or multilingual), but there is no reason to trust
him more than any other second-hand source.
Piotr