Rostislav Oreshko Leiden University / Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard University;
[email protected] Ethnic Groups and Language Contact in Lycia (I): the ‘Maritime Interface’ The paper offers an overview of the ethnolinguistic and sociolinguistic contact in Lycia in the Late Bronze and the Early Iron Age (ca. 1400–330 BC) resulting from the sea-borne connec- tions of the region. Following a brief sketch of the Lycian geography and definition of its ‘ethnocultural interfaces’ (§1), the discussion concentrates in turn on the southern coasts of Caria and Rhodos, also touching upon the question of the ethnic names of the Lycians, Lukkā/Λύκιοι and Trm̃mile/i (§2), Pamphylia (§3), Rough Cilicia (§4), the Levant (§5) and the Aegean (§6). The section on the Aegean offers a revision of the evidence on Greek-Lycian contacts and suggests a new explanatory scenario accounting for the paradoxical situation where an insignificant number of lexical borrowings contrasts with evidence for a deep structural influence of Greek on Lycian. Keywords: Greek-Anatolian contact; language contact; ethnolinguistics; sociolinguistics; Aegean migrations; Anatolian languages; Lycian language; Luwian language; Greek language. Seen from the perspective of language contact, Lycia has received a fair amount of scholarly attention in recent years, at least in comparison to other regions of ancient Anatolia 1. As is of- ten the case, this is due first and foremost to the nature of the available evidence. Not only is the Lycian corpus, comprising at present more than 200 inscriptions, some of which are quite long and elaborate 2, more substantial than those available for other ‘alphabetic languages’ of the early 1st millennium BC Anatolia, such as Carian, Lydian or Phrygian, but the level of understanding of Lycian texts is in general also higher, allowing to focus even on minor de- tails.