The Alarodian languages are a proposed language family that encompasses the Northeast Caucasian (Nakh–Dagestanian) languages and the extinct Hurro-Urartian languages .
48-558: The term Alarodian is derived from Greek Ἀλαρόδιοι ( Alarodioi ), the name of an ethnic group mentioned by Herodotus which has often been equated with the people of the kingdom of Urartu , although this equation is considered doubtful by modern scholars. A leading Urartologist, Paul Zimansky, rejects a connection between the Urartians and the Alarodians. Nearly nothing is known about the Alarodians except that they "were armed like
96-524: A Nakh substrate. In 2006, Robertson further developed the hypothesis for including Tyrsenian based on proposed Etruscan/Nakh sound correspondences and reconstructions for the numerals. The validity of the Alarodian hypothesis remains fairly controversial. Many scholars doubt that the Hurro-Urartian and Northeastern Caucasian languages are related, or believe that, while a connection is possible,
144-444: A Persian subject, and it may be that the young Herodotus heard local eyewitness accounts of events within the empire and of Persian preparations for the invasion of Greece , including the movements of the local fleet under the command of Artemisia I of Caria . Inscriptions recently discovered at Halicarnassus indicate that Artemesia's grandson Lygdamis negotiated with a local assembly to settle disputes over seized property, which
192-473: A boy living on the island of Samos, to which he had fled with his family from the oppressions of Lygdamis, tyrant of Halicarnassus and grandson of Artemisia. Panyassis , the epic poet related to Herodotus, is reported to have taken part in a failed uprising. The Suda also states that Herodotus later returned home to lead the revolt that eventually overthrew the tyrant. Due to recent discoveries of inscriptions at Halicarnassus dated to about Herodotus's time, it
240-473: A distinction between singular and plural , plurality itself may impact the class to which a noun belongs. In some cases, a grammatical collective is seen. Many languages distinguish local versus functional cases, and to some degree also casus rectus versus casus obliquus . The inflectional paradigms are often based on partially classifying productive stem extensions ( absolutive and oblique , ergative and genitive inflection.) Localization
288-664: A historical topic more in keeping with the Greek world-view: focused on the context of the polis or city-state. The interplay of civilizations was more relevant to Greeks living in Anatolia, such as Herodotus himself, for whom life within a foreign civilization was a recent memory. Before the Persian crisis, history had been represented among the Greeks only by local or family traditions. The "Wars of Liberation" had given to Herodotus
336-404: A literary critic of Augustan Rome , listed seven predecessors of Herodotus, describing their works as simple unadorned accounts of their own and other cities and people, Greek or foreign, including popular legends, sometimes melodramatic and naïve, often charming – all traits that can be found in the work of Herodotus himself. Modern historians regard the chronology as uncertain, but according to
384-653: A number of back consonants, including uvulars , pharyngeals , and glottal stops and fricatives. Northeast Caucasian phonology is also notable for its use of numerous secondary articulations as contrastive features. Whereas English consonant classes are divided into voiced and voiceless phonemes, Northeast Caucasian languages are known to contrast voiced, voiceless, ejective and tense phones , which contributes to their large phonemic inventories. Some languages also include palatalization and labialization as contrastive features. Most languages in this family contrast tense and weak consonants. Tense consonants are characterized by
432-419: A single grammatical case known as the absolutive. Subjects of transitive sentences, however, carry a different marking to indicate that they belong to a separate case, known as the ergative. This distinction can be seen in the following two Archi sentences. Objects and subjects of intransitive sentences carry no suffix, which is represented by the null suffix, - ∅ . Meanwhile, agents of transitive sentences take
480-432: A title conferred on him by the ancient Roman orator Cicero , and the " Father of Lies " by others. The Histories primarily cover the lives of prominent kings and famous battles such as Marathon , Thermopylae , Artemisium , Salamis , Plataea , and Mycale . His work deviates from the main topics to provide a cultural, ethnographical , geographical, and historiographical background that forms an essential part of
528-696: A version of the Histories written by "Herodotus of Thurium", and some passages in the Histories have been interpreted as proof that he wrote about Magna Graecia from personal experience there (IV, 15,99; VI, 127). According to Ptolemaeus Chennus , a late source summarized in the Library of Photius , Plesirrhous the Thessalian, the hymnographer, was the eromenos of Herodotus and his heir. This account has also led some historians to assume Herodotus died childless. Intimate knowledge of some events in
SECTION 10
#1732772093500576-520: A young Thucydides happened to be in the assembly with his father, and burst into tears during the recital. Herodotus observed prophetically to the boy's father: "Your son's soul yearns for knowledge." Eventually, Thucydides and Herodotus became close enough for both to be interred in Thucydides's tomb in Athens. Such at least was the opinion of Marcellinus in his Life of Thucydides . According to
624-663: Is considered the most promising, more so than the attempts to link Northeast and Northwest Caucasian, let alone attempts to link Northeast Caucasian to Indo-European, Kartvelian, Etruscan, Burushaski, or "Dene-Caucasian". A major obstacle to progress on the question (and any other questions about relationships with or within Northeast Caucasian) is the lack of consensus about the reconstruction of Proto-Northeast-Caucasian itself. Herodotus Herodotus ( Ancient Greek : Ἡρόδοτος , romanized : Hēródotos ; c. 484 – c. 425 BC)
672-640: Is consistent with a tyrant under pressure. His name is not mentioned later in the tribute list of the Athenian Delian League , indicating that there might well have been a successful uprising against him some time before 454 BC. Herodotus wrote his Histories in the Ionian dialect , in spite of being born in a Dorian settlement. According to the Suda , Herodotus learned the Ionian dialect as
720-491: Is generally assumed that he died not long afterwards, possibly before his sixtieth year. Herodotus would have made his researches known to the larger world through oral recitations to a public crowd. John Marincola writes in his introduction to the Penguin edition of the Histories that there are certain identifiable pieces in the early books of Herodotus's work which could be labeled as "performance pieces". These portions of
768-538: Is generally considered a reliable source of ancient history, many present-day historians believe that his accounts are at least partially inaccurate, attributing the observed inconsistencies in the Histories to exaggeration. Several English translations of Herodotus's Histories are available in multiple editions, including: Northeast Caucasian languages The Northeast Caucasian languages , also called East Caucasian , Nakh-Daghestani or Vainakh-Daghestani , or sometimes Caspian languages (from
816-433: Is mostly conveyed by postpositions , but it can be also partly based on preverbs . Noun phrases exhibit incomplete class agreement , group inflection (on the noun) with partial attributive oblique marking, which may, in turn, carry a partially determining function. Verbs do not agree with person , with a few exceptions like Lak , in which first and second persons are marked with the same suffix and verbs agree with
864-809: Is now known that the Ionic dialect was used in Halicarnassus in some official documents, so there is no need to assume (like the Suda ) that he must have learned the dialect elsewhere. The Suda is the only source placing Herodotus as the heroic liberator of his birthplace, casting doubt upon the veracity of that romantic account. As Herodotus himself reveals, Halicarnassus, though a Dorian city, had ended its close relations with its Dorian neighbours after an unseemly quarrel (I, 144), and it had helped pioneer Greek trade with Egypt (II, 178). It was, therefore, an outward-looking, international-minded port within
912-609: Is on account of the many strange stories and the folk-tales he reported that his critics have branded him "The Father of Lies". Even his own contemporaries found reason to scoff at his achievement. In fact, one modern scholar has wondered whether Herodotus left his home in Greek Anatolia , migrating westwards to Athens and beyond, because his own countrymen had ridiculed his work, a circumstance possibly hinted at in an epitaph said to have been dedicated to Herodotus at one of his three supposed resting places, Thuria : Herodotus
960-535: The Alcmaeonids , a clan whose history is featured frequently in his writing. According to Plutarch , Herodotus was granted a financial reward by the Athenian assembly in recognition of his work. Plutarch, using Diyllus as a source, says this was 10 talents . In 443 BC or shortly afterwards, he migrated to Thurii , in modern Calabria , as part of an Athenian-sponsored colony . Aristotle refers to
1008-569: The Byzantine Suda , an 11th-century encyclopedia which possibly took its information from traditional accounts. Still, the challenge is great: The data are so few – they rest upon such late and slight authority; they are so improbable or so contradictory, that to compile them into a biography is like building a house of cards, which the first breath of criticism will blow to the ground. Still, certain points may be approximately fixed ... Herodotus was, according to his own statement, at
SECTION 20
#17327720935001056-935: The Caspian Sea , in contrast to Pontic languages for the Northwest Caucasian languages ), is a family of languages spoken in the Russian republics of Dagestan , Chechnya and Ingushetia and in Northern Azerbaijan as well as in Georgia and diaspora populations in Western Europe and the Middle East . According to Glottolog , there are currently 36 Nakh-Dagestanian languages. Several names have been in use for this family. The most common term, Northeast Caucasian , contrasts
1104-559: The Colchians and Saspeires ," according to Herodotus . The Colchians and Saspeires are generally associated with the Kartvelians and/or Scythians , neither of whom spoke a Hurro-Urartian or Northeast Caucasian language Historically, the term "Alarodian languages" was employed for several language family proposals of various size. Sayce (1880) employed the name for a small group that comprised Urartian (then called "Vannic") and
1152-559: The Cushitic and Berber languages. The historical Alarodian proposal – especially Oštir's maximal extension – was however not well-received by the majority of scholars ("Ce petit livre donne le vertige"—"This little book makes one dizzy", A. Meillet ), and eventually abandoned. The term "Alarodian languages" was revived by I. M. Diakonoff for the proposed language family that unites the Hurro-Urartian and Northeast Caucasian languages. Work by I. M. Diakonoff and Starostin (1986) asserted
1200-491: The Euphrates to Babylon . For some reason, possibly associated with local politics, he subsequently found himself unpopular in Halicarnassus, and sometime around 447 BC, migrated to Periclean Athens – a city whose people and democratic institutions he openly admired (V, 78). Athens was also the place where he came to know the local topography (VI, 137; VIII, 52–55), as well as leading citizens such as
1248-818: The Kartvelian languages ( Georgian , Laz , Mingrelian , and Svan ). In 1884, the German orientalist Fritz Hommel further included all languages of the Caucasus and the ancient Near East which did not belong to the Indo-European , Semitic , and the now obsolete Ural–Altaic language families, e.g. Elamite , Kassite . Later, he extended the Alarodian family to include the pre-Indo-European languages of Europe, e.g. Lemnian , Etruscan , Ligurian . Karel Oštir's (1921) version of Alarodian included all aforementioned languages, further Basque , Sumerian , Egyptian ,
1296-429: The P argument , and Hunzib in which verbs agree with A argument . Evidentiality is prominent, with reported, sensory and epistemic moods all appearing as a way of conveying the evidence. Epistemic modality is often tied to the tense. Most Northeast Caucasian languages exhibit an ergative–absolutive morphology . This means that objects of transitive sentences and subjects of intransitive sentences both fall into
1344-772: The Peloponnesian War on the abduction of some prostitutes – a mocking reference to Herodotus, who reported the Persians' account of their wars with Greece , beginning with the rapes of the mythical heroines Io , Europa , Medea , and Helen . Similarly, the Athenian historian Thucydides dismissed Herodotus as a story-teller. Thucydides, who had been trained in rhetoric , became the model for subsequent prose-writers as an author who seeks to appear firmly in control of his material, whereas with his frequent digressions Herodotus appeared to minimize (or possibly disguise) his authorial control. Moreover, Thucydides developed
1392-576: The Persian Empire , and the historian's family could well have had contacts in other countries under Persian rule, facilitating his travels and his researches. Herodotus's eyewitness accounts indicate that he traveled in Egypt in association with Athenians, probably sometime after 454 BC or possibly earlier, after an Athenian fleet had assisted the uprising against Persian rule in 460–454 BC. He probably traveled to Tyre next and then down
1440-581: The Suda , he was buried in Macedonian Pella and in the agora in Thurii. Herodotus announced the purpose and scope of his work at the beginning of his Histories: Here are presented the results of the inquiry carried out by Herodotus of Halicarnassus. The purpose is to prevent the traces of human events from being erased by time, and to preserve the fame of the important and remarkable achievements produced by both Greeks and non-Greeks; among
1488-407: The ancient account, these predecessors included Dionysius of Miletus , Charon of Lampsacus, Hellanicus of Lesbos , Xanthus of Lydia and, the best attested of them all, Hecataeus of Miletus . Of these, only fragments of Hecataeus's works survived, and the authenticity of these is debatable, but they provide a glimpse into the kind of tradition within which Herodotus wrote his own Histories . It
Alarodian languages - Misplaced Pages Continue
1536-591: The audience. It was conventional in Herodotus's day for authors to "publish" their works by reciting them at popular festivals. According to Lucian , Herodotus took his finished work straight from Anatolia to the Olympic Games and read the entire Histories to the assembled spectators in one sitting, receiving rapturous applause at the end of it. According to a very different account by an ancient grammarian, Herodotus refused to begin reading his work at
1584-458: The beginning of his work, a native of Halicarnassus in Anatolia , and it is generally accepted that he was born there around 485 BC. The Suda says his family was influential, that he was the son of Lyxes and Dryo and the brother of Theodorus, and that he was also related to Panyassis – an epic poet of the time. Halicarnassus was then within the Persian Empire , making Herodotus
1632-411: The burden of proof and discuss whether the incidence of resemblances exceeds chance expectation, nor do they present examples of the kind of shared morphological paradigmaticity that would strongly support genetic relatedness". Nevertheless, Petri Kallio, a Uralicist and Indo-Europeanist, argues that from the perspective of what relationships are most likely for Northeast Caucasian , the Alarodian theory
1680-505: The connection between "Nakh-Dagestanian" (NE Caucasian) and Hurro-Urartian on the basis of comparison of their reconstruction to Proto-Nakh-Dagestanian, later published in 1994 with Nikolayev . The inclusion of Etruscan and the related Tyrsenian languages has also been proposed, first by Orel and Starostin in 1990, on the basis of sound correspondences. Facchetti has argued that there is a "curious" set of isoglosses between Etruscan and Hurrian, while Pliev proposed instead that Etruscan had
1728-829: The entire family. The rare term North Caspian (as in bordering the Caspian Sea) is only used in opposition to the use of North Pontic (as in bordering the Black Sea) for the Northwest Caucasian languages. Historically, Northeast Caucasian phonemic inventories were thought to be smaller than those of the neighboring Northwest Caucasian family . However, more recent research has revealed that many Northeast Caucasian languages are much more phoneme-rich than previously believed, with some languages containing as many as 70 consonants. In addition to numerous front obstruents, many Northeast Caucasian languages also possess
1776-700: The ergative suffix, -mu. buwa-∅ Mother-∅ d-irxːin II . SG -work buwa-∅ d-irxːin Mother-∅ II.SG-work Mother works. buwa-mu mother- ERG xːalli-∅ bread-∅ b-ar-ši III . SG -bake- PROG b-i II . SG - AUX buwa-mu xːalli-∅ b-ar-ši b-i mother-ERG bread-∅ III.SG-bake-PROG II.SG-AUX Mother is baking the bread. Northeast Caucasian languages have between two and eight noun classes. In these languages, nouns are grouped into grammatical categories depending on certain semantic qualities, such as animacy and gender. Each noun class has
1824-482: The evidence is far from conclusive. The Indo-Europeanist Allan R. Bomhard argues instead for a genetic relationship between Hurro-Urartian and Indo-European (most experts exclude a close genetic relationship between Northeast Caucasian and Indo-European, making the two hypotheses probably exclusive). The Caucasian language specialist Johanna Nichols grounds her scepticism in the Alarodian theory in that "neither Diakonoff and Starostin, nor Nikolayev and Starostin, take on
1872-439: The festival of Olympia until some clouds offered him a bit of shade – by which time the assembly had dispersed. (Hence the proverbial expression "Herodotus and his shade" to describe someone who misses an opportunity through delay.) Herodotus's recitation at Olympia was a favourite theme among ancient writers, and there is another interesting variation on the story to be found in the Suda : that of Photius and Tzetzes , in which
1920-422: The first genuinely historical inspiration felt by a Greek. These wars showed him that there was a corporate life, higher than that of the city, of which the story might be told; and they offered to him as a subject the drama of the collision between East and West. With him, the spirit of history was born into Greece; and his work, called after the nine Muses, was indeed the first utterance of Clio . Though Herodotus
1968-505: The first years of the Peloponnesian War (VI, 91; VII, 133, 233; IX, 73) suggests that he returned to Athens, in which case it is possible that he died there during an outbreak of the plague. It is also possible he died in Macedonia instead, after obtaining the patronage of the court there; or else he died back in Thurii. There is nothing in the Histories that can be dated to later than 430 BC with any certainty, and it
Alarodian languages - Misplaced Pages Continue
2016-880: The intensiveness of articulation, which naturally leads to a lengthening of these consonants. In contrast to the generally large consonant inventories of Northeast Caucasian languages, most languages in the family have relatively few vowels, although more on average than the Northwest Caucasian languages. However, there are some exceptions to this trend, such as Chechen , which has at least twenty-eight vowels, diphthongs and triphthongs. Percentage of Northeast Caucasian languages by speakers These languages can be characterized by strong suffixal agglutination . Weak tendencies towards inflection may be noted as well. Nouns display covert nominal classification , but partially overt cases of secondary origin can be observed too. The number of noun classes in individual languages range from two to eight. Regarding grammatical number , there may be
2064-424: The matters covered is, in particular, the cause of the hostilities between Greeks and non-Greeks. His record of the achievements of others was an achievement in itself, though the extent of it has been debated. Herodotus's place in history and his significance may be understood according to the traditions within which he worked. His work is the earliest Greek prose to have survived intact. Dionysius of Halicarnassus ,
2112-612: The narrative and provides readers with a wellspring of additional information. Herodotus was criticized in ancient times for his inclusion of "legends and fanciful accounts" in his work. The contemporaneous historian Thucydides accused him of making up stories for entertainment. He retorted that he reported what he could see and was told. A sizable portion of the Histories has since been confirmed by modern historians and archaeologists . Modern scholars generally turn to Herodotus's own writing for reliable information about his life, supplemented with ancient yet much later sources, such as
2160-468: The research seem independent and "almost detachable", so that they might have been set aside by the author for the purposes of an oral performance. The intellectual matrix of the 5th century, Marincola suggests, comprised many oral performances in which philosophers would dramatically recite such detachable pieces of their work. The idea was to criticize previous arguments on a topic and emphatically and enthusiastically insert their own in order to win over
2208-474: The son of Sphynx lies; in Ionic history without peer; a Dorian born, who fled from slander's brand and made in Thuria his new native land. Yet it was in Athens where his most formidable contemporary critics could be found. In 425 BC, which is about the time that Herodotus is thought by many scholars to have died, the Athenian comic dramatist Aristophanes created The Acharnians , in which he blames
2256-457: The three established families of the Caucasian languages: Northeast Caucasian , Northwest Caucasian (Abkhaz–Adyghean) and South Caucasian ( Kartvelian ). This may be shortened to East Caucasian . The term Nakh(o)-Dagestanian can be taken to reflect a primary division of the family into Nakh and Dagestanian branches, a view which is no longer widely accepted, or Dagestanian can subsume
2304-575: Was a Greek historian and geographer from the Greek city of Halicarnassus , part of the Persian Empire (now Bodrum , Turkey) and a later citizen of Thurii in modern Calabria , Italy. He wrote the Histories , a detailed account of the Greco-Persian Wars , and was the first writer to apply a scientific method to historical events. He has been described as " The Father of History ",
#499500