Words

The Scythian Language

the SITH-ee-un LANG-gwij
A lost Eastern Iranian tongue, known only through glosses, names, and one living descendant, Ossetian.
Documented

The gloss evidence

Scythian was an Eastern Iranian language, kin to Sogdian and Bactrian. The corpus is thin: Herodotus's glosses, royal and tribal names in Greek and Assyrian texts, and place names across the steppe. Modern Ossetian, spoken in the Caucasus and descended from the Scythians' Sarmatian-Alan cousins, anchors the reconstruction.

Assessment: Documented: the Iranian classification and the Ossetian link are consensus; the corpus is the scarcity.
Stories

The mother tongue claims

Nationalist grammars from several modern nations claim Scythian as direct ancestor, Persian, Slavic, Turkic, and Caucasian traditions all bid. Linguistics keeps awarding the contract to the Iranian branch and the arguments keep reappearing in every election season.

Assessment: Stories: the bid war is real; the philology is not close.
Interesting claims

The vocal steppe

What the glosses preserve is texture: oros, great, in royal names; spu, dog, hidden in the tribe Sparapetes. The steppe that left no literature left fingerprints in other people's alphabets, a language audible only as interference patterns in Greek.

Assessment: Interesting: the gloss readings are technical philology; the poetry of it is free.
Sources and further reading
  1. Herodotus, Histories 4, Scythian glosses
  2. Encyclopaedia Iranica, 'Scythian Language'
  3. Mayrhofer and Lubotsky, on Iranian name reconstructions; Ossetian as Sarmatian-Alan descendant
Worth asking

Can you know a people who never wrote, through the spelling of those who fought them?

Open in the interactive archive
GR8YFILES · competing origin stories, labeled by the strength of their evidence · readers 14+