Diakonoff I.M., Neroznak V.P. Phrygian

Caravan Books, 1985. — 149 p. — (Anatolian and Caucasian studies).Until a short time ago in serious general linguistic works on Indo-European, and even in works specially on Phrygian, it was usual to operate with a very limited repertory of samples. Mostly one quoted the beginning of the standard curse formulae of the Phrygian funeral inscriptions: ios semoun “whoever to this... ”, ios ni semoun “but whoever to this...’’In comparative studies of verbal forms one also especially cited the forms addaket, addaketor, edaes, estaes . Here one always pointed out the existence of the variants addaket, addaketo, addaketor, addaketai which obviously called for explanation. Recently papers have been devoted specially to the analysis of the pronominal form semou - or to the word-form a(k)kalos . Not entering into details which we shall take up later, we would like to note that in both cases the results at which the authors had arrived cannot be said to have been convincing. The reason for this is that up to the present the entire Phrygian corpus of texts had not been analyzed systematically, nor, indeed, arranged systematically. Thus the texts have not been subdivided into blocks or stable sequences that can with more or less objectivity be identified as words, with an awareness of the reasons why the word-boundaries may be assumed in some places of the letter-sequence but not in the others. Thus the contexts remained obscure, and the sense of the word-forms could not be established with any reliability. The scholars have mostly limited themselves to a discussion of isolated phrases, glosses, or even letter sequences which sometimes had been selected out of the context supposedly as “words” without good reasons.