What Language Did The Trojans Speak?

Is it known what language the Trojans spoke? I understand that one of the conditions that Juno demanded in accepting Aeneas and the Trojan immigrants was that they give up their native tongue and speak Latin.

Who knows? Homer clearly thought they spoke Greek. Several
times he has Greeks and Trojans conversing without any
kind of difficulty whatever. And on the other hand, he's
clear about the Karians, "men of barbarous" speech".

(But IIRC, *only* the Karians.)
It's difficult to extract genuinely historical material from
anything written by Roman "historians" about Rome before the
establishment of the Republic. And as for the foundation myths,
forget it; they are just that: myths, pure fiction, even.

Fact is, Rome was founded in the seventh century BCE, not the
eighth, by the Etruscans, not the Latins or the Trojan exiles
(that notion is wildly anachronistic anyway), and depiste its
republicanism and its Latinisn it was still considered Etruscan
by the Estruscans in the fourth century when Caere hosted its
holy regalia during the Keltic invasion of Italy and sheltered
them while Rome was being sacked.

Ned

Whoa! No one ever said that Rome was founded by Trojan exiles. The story
is that Aeneas married into the royal family of the Latins, and that
Romulus was, consequently, his descendant.
--
John W. Kennedy
"The blind rulers of Logres
Nourished the land on a fallacy of rational virtue."
-- Charles Williams. "Taliessin through Logres: Prelude"

And there's the anachronism. Anachronistic fiction, actually.
And there's the "Trojan" founder.

Best guess, given timing and geography, is that they spoke something related to
late Luwian, probably similar to Lydian and Lycian (and Carian and Sidetic).

--
Rich Alderson ne...@alderson.users.panix.com
Audendum est, et veritas investiganda; quam etiamsi non assequamur,
omnino tamen proprius, quam nunc sumus, ad eam perveniemus.
--Galen

How the Hell is it “anachronistic” to claim that someone who lived
around the 12th century BC was an ancestor of someone who lived around
the 8th? It may or may not be true—that’s another question—but the
timeline has nothing remotely impossible to it.
George Washington was a descendant of John Lackland. Does that make King
John a “founder” of the US?

Thanks

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luwian_language

It isn't. If you're going to chuck a hissy fit over something,
make it the right thing.

> It may or may not be true (that's another question) but the
Wrong. There is some archaeologocal evidence of occupation of the
hills around Rome in the ninth and eighth centuries, but nothing
certain before then, either there or elsewhere in what later
became called Latium. What evidence has been found indicates
that the people had little; that they lived in mean, even squalid
huts; that their communities were tribal and small. Any talk of
Latin "royalty" in the twelfth century is wildly anachronistic.
The relevant perspective here is Roman.

Try addressing the points raised by the OP.

The ancient Greeks' scorn for other languages always amazes me. They're
all βαρβαροι, and they speak βαρβαρικῶς or βαρβαριστί. Latterly the
terms remained confined to Asians.
A typical example is Herodotus of Halicarnassus. He knows hardly any
Carian, and shows linguistic ignorance everywhere. And yet his travels
and researches should have given us some insight into who spoke what.
And he should have included the answers we're seeking her.
No wonder his book is full of tall stories. The priests in Egypt (and
people elsewhere) must have had a field-day spinning him yarns in
doubtful Greek.
http://research.ncl.ac.uk/histos/documents/1998.01HarrisonHerodotusConceptionForeignLanguages145.pdf


Ed

If you’re going to try to communicate in English, you might want to
start out by learning the language. I addressed what you actually wrote.

Such attributions of foundings to epic heroes was not confined to the
Romans. Geoffrey of Monmouth in his History of the Kings of England
traces the roots of English nobility back to the Trojans. Indeed, even
Robert Graves, in his The White Goddess, makes a similar speculation,
though he takes his founders as Thracian, not Trojan, claiming that the
Tuatha De Danann ("Peoples of the Goddess Danu") of Ireland were
descended from the Danaans or Danaoi of the Iliad.


Francis A. Miniter

----snup----
Been doing quite well with people who understand it.
Can't.
I didn't say otherwisae, nitwit. I said that you chose the wrong
bit of what I wrote.

I note that now you're addressing neither the OP's topic nor
your ownm. Have you finished wanking now?
Nothing to say about that, wanker?

----snip----

Yair. I never got that. Why were people so fixated of the Trojans?
I was very favourably impressed with his "The Greek Myths"; much
less so with "The White Goddess".

Ned

As late as the 18th century, you could be sent to the Bastille for
denying that the Franks were of Trojan ancestry.

Since the Germans and Celts couldn’t possibly be Romans, or even Latins,
casting the line further back was the best they could do to make
themselves “just as good as them”.

----snip----
> Since the Germans and Celts couldn?t possibly be Romans, or even
Wow. How pathetic is that.

----snip----

Holy moly! Politikal Korrektness has a longer history than I thought!

(I was gonna say fuck, but I decided not to say fuck, because I heard
fuck's obscene. So I said moly instead of fuck.)

Ned

Good choice. "Moly" is a good Greek word, so more suitable for this
newsgroup.

--
Will

μῶλυ δέ μιν καλέουσι θεοί, χαλεπὸν δέ τ' ὀρύσσειν
ἀνδράσι γε θνητοῖσι· θεοὶ δέ τε πάντα δύνανται.
(Odyssey 10)
The gods call it "moly", but it's difficult for mortal men to dig up.
The gods, however, can do anything.

Ed

Ed Cryer wrote:
> Will Parsons wrote:

----snip----
> ????????? ???? ?????? ???????????????? ????????,
> ??????????????? ???? ??' ?????????????????
> ??????????????? ???? ??????????????????? ?????????
> ???? ???? ?????????? ????????????????.
Er ... what *is* that string of question amrks?

Ned

The original passage in Greek. It‘s in UTF-8 and correctly labeled as
such, so you probably need a more modern newsreader.

Rich Alderson <ne...@alderson.users.panix.com> schreef:
Trojan territory extended into Thrace and Macedonia, no evidence of
Anatolian languages ever spoken there.
IMO, Luwian arrived in western Asia Minor with the Hittite conquest
(Tudhaliya I, ca. 1400 bce)








--

b o y c o t t a m e r i c a n p r o d u c t s

Ned Latham <nedl...@woden.valhalla.oz> schreef:
The lower ground at the Forum Romanum was also occupied. The oldest
foundations of the Carcer Tullianum (with two sacrificial burials)
date to that time. Recently a wall of the same age was excavated at
the site of the Lapis Niger.

I think most products now sold in the USA are made in other countries

And every Usenet server in the path needs "more modern" news server
software. Can you refer me to a RFC authorising a change to UTF-8?

Ned

----snup----
Didn't know that. I take it that your information came from relatively
recent digs?
----snip----

Ned

UTF-8 is normally end-to-end ASCII-transparent, unless there’s actually
a 7-bit stage in there. I can read Ed’s original message just fine.

> UTF-8 is normally end-to-end ASCII-transparent, unless there???s actually
> a 7-bit stage in there. I can read Ed???s original message just fine.

I can't. And as I expect you can see, I can't read all of your characters,
either. That means There's ay least one 7-bit stage in the way.

No RFC, huh? That means that even 8-bit ASCII is unsafe.

Ned
>
>

You use slrn/1.0.1 (Linux)
Version 1.0.3 was released October 23rd, 2016, but I doubt it'll solve
your problem. The source of that appears to be in s-lang2;
http://www.slrn.org/docs/slrn-FAQ-1.html#ss1.6

Ed

----snip----
> > > there's actually a 7-bit stage in there. I can read Ed's
Never did like slang. Would have been better to redo (n)curses
and leave the scripting to python or ruby or some such.

Ned

I have no idea whether there is an RFC, but, in this day and age, 7-bit
text processing, except, perhaps, at a 7-bit end point, is barbarous.

And we haven’t established that this is the case, anyway. From all the
information I possess, the problem can still be entirely on your end.

Your best bet is to simply install Thunderbird;
http://www.tecmint.com/install-thunderbird-in-ubuntu-fedora-linux/

Ed

Absolutely not. I want easy access to my archive. Thunderbird hides
everything and overlays it with garbage. Kind of like Google did
with the public archive.

Ned

Looking at Ed's post, I see in the headers these lines:

Date: Fri, 24 Feb 2017 22:42:25 +0000
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Injection-Date: Fri, 24 Feb 2017 22:41:51 -0000 (UTC)
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:45.0) Gecko/20100101
Thunderbird/45.5.0

-----
From *his* headers I see:

User-Agent: slrn/1.0.1 (Linux)
Date: Sat, 25 Feb 2017 22:35:07 GMT

Note that unlike Ed's post, there is no indication of encoding.

-----
Yes.
Hold on there, *I'm* using slrn, and *I* don't have a problem!

-----
As can I (using slrn).

-----
There is no such thing as "8-bit ASCII".

-----
I don't think so. The long-delayed support for Unicode in slrn (or
rather the slang library that it uses ) was IIRC fixed in version 1.0.
Admittedly, I'm using slrn 1.0.3, rather than Ned's slrn 1.0.1, but I
seriously don't think that's the problem.

-----
As far as I know, the only justification for slang is that it's used by
slrn. But, I *really* like slrn.

-----
No thank you. "slrn" works just fine for me, and it's a real newsreader
(which I don't think Thunderbird really is).

-----
No argument there.

-----
I rather expect it is.

Looking at one of my own previous posts (using slrn), I notice the
following in my headers:

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
User-Agent: slrn/1.0.2 (FreeBSD)

Could the difference between Ned's experience and mine be the editor we use?

I specify Emacs in my ~/.slrnrc file:

set editor_command "emacs +%d %s"

Don't know, but I *don't* think that slrn is the culprit here.

--
Will

On thinking about this a little more, I *don't* think this is matter
of the editors we use, after all, Ned was only looking at Ed's post,
not replying to it. But slrn is after all a *text* mode newsreader,
and perhaps that's the key. Ned runs slrn under Linux using
(presumably) some sort of terminal emulator - I do the same under
FreeBSD. My guess is now that it's an environmental issue: I have
set:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8

for myself; perhaps a similar setting might fix Ned's issues?

--
Will

U-sothis\william wrote:
> Will Parsons, John W Kennedy and Ed Cryer also contributed:

----snip----
Yep: xterm.
Could be. Slackware gives the installer a choice of installing
a utf-8 environment or not, and warns about "certain braindead
programs" that can't handle it, saying that "No" is a safe
choice. I've always chosen "No", and this is the only issue
that's ever emerged.

I'll have to think aboiut it. Do a bit of research.

Thatnks for all the help guys. Much appreciated.

Nedf

For whatever it’s worth, that’s the setting (as installed) on macOS
Sierra, and I get correct results from:

echo "αβγ"

in bash and from:

#include <stdio.h>
int main (void) {
puts("αβγ");
return 0;
}

in C and from:

print("αβγ")

in Swift.

Using the way you just did is okay, because that is a metalanguage usage
not an actual usage. (I wonder if the FCC would agree.)

Francis A. Miniter

Thank moly for that.
I've seen it censored out of live-recorded TV programs.

Ned

There is this french linguist and albanologist who studied old languages all his life his name is Robert D'Angely wrote a book called Enigma he explains how all the greek gods names can easily be translated and have meaning in albanian language which is one of the oldest indo-european languages, God Zeus (Zëës - in albanian) meaning the highest voice sound or noise, which explains the fact that zeus was a god that appeared through Thunderbolt which is always the highest voice pitch.
King Priam has meaning in albanian which means (i am the leader - Pri : Lead - am (jam): i am )
Achilles ( Aq-i-lehtë : Meaning : Too Fast) and there is many more but no one looks in to sounds they are focused in goddamn written things which are in Greek language which is too new to be considered as the language of Trojans or old Greeks. Learn albanian and i promise you a lot of these old names and spoken old
Languages will make much more sense.

http://www.balkaninsight.com/en/article/claims-about-old-albanian-leave-scholars-lost-for-words

I would have thought that taking Greek names into account would have
muddied the picture.
"Priam", OTOH, is crucial. Add to that Aeneas, Hector, Cassandra etc and
you have a good game.

Ed

Thanks for posting this, isa. Yes, I'd have thought that Albania has a huge connection with Ancient Greece and its language. Isn't former Dodona, one of the most important cities in the Ancient world (according to Herodotus)? And didn't the 'king' that won the first Olympics with four horses come from present day Albania? Anyway, with reference to the origin of Greek names, have you read Martin Bernal's Black Athena (vol. 1)? It opens up many interesting possibilities. Thanks to Ed Cryer for his continuing support in this group.

Dear isa,
Has anyone translated Robert D'Angely's Enigma into English?

> hills around Rome in the ninth and eighth centuries, but nothing
It would be easily possible for an 8th century BC person to have a 12th century BC ancestor if there was no 'phantom' Greek Dark Age. Recent research is placing the Trojan War at 875-865 BC. Robert

On Tuesday, 21 February 2017 15:00:34 UTC, Ed Cryer wrote:
> Rich Alderson wrote:
> > David Amicus <davida...@gmail.com> writes:
> >
> >> Is it known what language the Trojans spoke? I understand that one of the
> The ancient Greeks' scorn for other languages always amazes me. They're
> all βαρβαροι, and they speak βαρβαρικῶς or βαρβαριστί. Latterly the
> terms remained confined to Asians.
> A typical example is Herodotus of Halicarnassus. He knows hardly any
> Carian, and shows linguistic ignorance everywhere. And yet his travels
> and researches should have given us some insight into who spoke what.
> And he should have included the answers we're seeking her.
> No wonder his book is full of tall stories. The priests in Egypt (and
> people elsewhere) must have had a field-day spinning him yarns in
> doubtful Greek.
> http://research.ncl.ac.uk/histos/documents/1998.01HarrisonHerodotusConceptionForeignLanguages145.pdf
>
>
> Ed

Herodotus portrayed as liar? Bernal has already tackled this one, Ed. Each year that passes reveals more and more out of the ground and suggests that Herodotus' 'tall stories' were often amazingly true. (I'm thinking of the Scythian (Kurgan) archaeological discoveries). Robert

Everybody knows that the Iliad was written by the 17th Earl of Oxford in
the original Modern English by the light of the comet Venus, under
orders from the Jesuits, to conceal the fact that the “Trojans” (who
were actually Russians) really won the war.