Trojan language

The language spoken by the Trojans in the Iliad is Homeric Greek. However, there has been some scholarly debate on what language the historical Trojans would have spoken at the time of the Trojan War, identified with the site Troy VIIa, is identified with the Troy of the Greek epics to a greater or lesser degree, depending on judgements regarding the historicity of the Iliad. The language likely to have been prevalent in the historical city is Luwian, although there are no direct records.

The cultural context in which the lost Trojan language existed was described by Jaan Puhvel, Homer and Hittite (1991).

Greek epics

The Trojans in the Iliad have no difficulty in speaking to their Greek opponents. However, this may merely be evidence that a fictional convention frequently used in narratives in later times had already been adopted by the poet of the Iliad: for example, Jason finds no language barrier with Medea in Colchis, and Trojan Aeneas converses without difficulty both with Punic Dido and with Latin Turnus.

Greek legend gives further indications on the subject of language at Troy. For one thing, the allies of Troy, listed at length in the Trojan Battle Order which closes book 2 of the Iliad, are depicted as speaking various languages and thus needing to have orders translated to them by their commanders (2.802-6). Elsewhere in the poem (4.433–38) they are compared to sheep and lambs bleating in a field as they talk together in their different languages. The inference is that, from the Greek point of view, the languages of Trojans and their allied neighbors were not as unified as those of the Achaeans.

Hilary Mackie has detected in the Iliad a consistent differentiation between representations in Greek of Achaean and Trojan speech;^[1] in simplest terms, Trojans speak poetically, with the aim of avoiding conflict, whereas Achaeans repeatedly engage in public, ritualized abuse that linguists term (from another source) flyting: "Achaeans are proficient at blame, while Trojans perform praise poetry" (Mackie 1998:83).

Luwian theory

There was not enough evidence to fruitfully speculate upon the language of Troy until 1995, when a late Hittite seal was found in the excavations at Troy, probably dating from about 1275 BC. Not considered a locally made object, this item from the Trojan "state chancellery" was inscribed in Luwian and to date provides the only archaeological evidence for any language at Troy at this period. It indicates that Luwian was known at Troy, which is not surprising since it was a lingua franca of the Hittite empire, of which Troy was probably in some form of dependency.

Another sphere of research concerns a handful of Trojan personal names mentioned in the Iliad. Among sixteen recorded names of Priam's relatives, at least nine (including Anchises and Aeneas) are not Greek and may be traced to "pre-Greek Asia Minor".^[2] On this basis Calvert Watkins in 1986 argued that the Trojans may have been Luwian-speaking. For instance, the name Priam is connected to the Luwian compound Pariya-muwa, which means "exceptionally courageous".^[3]

Additionally, the Alaksandu treaty describes Mira, Haballa, Seha and Wilusa (usually identified with Troy) as the lands of Arzawa, although this "has no historical or political basis",^[4] suggesting that it was the language that they had in common. Frank Starke of the University of Tübingen concludes that "the certainty is growing that Wilusa/Troy belonged to the greater Luwian-speaking community".^[5] Joachim Latacz also regards Luwian as the official language of Homeric Troy, but he finds it highly probable that another language was in daily use.^[6] Ilya Yakubovich provides a critical evaluation of the arguments by Watkins and Starke in his University of Chicago dissertation and concludes that the ethnicity of the Trojans remains completely unknown.^[7]

Several tablets found in Troad and inscribed in Minoan Linear A signs may be nothing else than imported objects, as there is no evidence of Minoan presence in Troad. Classification of these signs as a unique Trojan script (proposed by Nikolai Kazansky) is not accepted by other linguists.

References

General

• Dalby, Andrew (2006), Rediscovering Homer, New York, London: Norton, ISBN 0-393-05788-7 , pp. 129–133.
• Latacz, Joachim (2004), Troy and Homer: towards a solution of an old mystery, Oxford: Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-926308-6 , pp. 49–72.
• Ross, Shawn A., "Barbarophonos: Language and Panhellenism in the Iliad," Classical Philology 100 (2005), pp. 299–316.
• Watkins, Calvert (1986), "The language of the Trojans" in Troy and the Trojan War: a symposium held at Bryn Mawr College, October 1984 ed. M. J. Mellink. Bryn Mawr.