Carian script

Carian script

Infobox Writing system
name=Carian
type=Alphabet
time=7th to 1st centuries BCE
style="background:lightblue;"
languages=Carian language
fam1=Greek alphabet
children=None
sisters=Lycian script
iso15924=CariThe Carian script was used to write the Carian language. The script consisted of some 45 alphabetic letters. Carian inscriptions have been found in both Caria proper (south-west Anatolia) and in the Nile delta, where Carian mercenaries fought for the Egyptian pharaohs.

Many signs of the Carian alphabet resemble Greek characters, but their phonetic values are generally very different:

So far, the phonetic values of 27 out of the 45 signs are considered secure.

Decipherment

Numerous attempts at deciphering the Carian inscriptions were made during the 20th century. In the 1960s the Russian researcher Vitaly Shevoroshkin showed that earlier assumptions that the script was a syllabic or semisyllabic writing system was false. However, he failed to decipher the script because he took the values of letters resembling those of the Greek alphabet for granted.

The script was finally deciphered in the 1980s by Egyptologist John D. Ray, who used Carian-Egyptian bilingual inscriptions that had been neglected until then. The radically different values he assigned to the letters met with scepticism, but after refinements by Ignacio-Javier Adiego and Diether Schürr in the early 1990s the readings gained acceptance. The discovery of a new bilingual inscription in 1996 confirmed the essential validity of their decipherment.

Carian in Unicode

Carian is included in version 5.1 of the Unicode standard. It is encoded in Plane 1 (Supplementary Multilingual Plane), range U+102A0 - U+102DF. Grey areas indicate non-assigned code points.

References

* Adiego, I.J. "The Carian Language". Leiden: Brill, 2006.
* Davies, Anna Morpurgo, "Decipherment" in "International Encyclopedia of Linguistics", William J. Frawley, ed., 2nd ed. (Oxford, 2003) I:421.
* Michael Everson, "Proposal to encode the Carian script in the SMP of the UCS", ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 N3020R, 2006-01-12. [http://std.dkuug.dk/jtc1/sc2/wg2/docs/n3020.pdf full text] . Contains many useful illustrations and tables.
* Schürr, Diether, "Zur Bestimmung der Lautwerte des karischen Alphabets 1971-1991", "Kadmos" 31:127-156 (1992).
* Swiggers & Jenniges, in: P.T. Daniels & W. Bright (eds.), "The World's Writing Systems" (New York/Oxford, 1996), pp. 285-286.


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