Book Description

Before one embarks upon reading Thracian Language and Greek and Thracian Epigraphy, one should keep in mind that one should be facing an extremely complex situation.There is a methodological problem, originating in the past, which caused various misunderstandings. It is due to the volume of different entries assembled in the goal to compose a thesaurus of the Thracian language. Somehow, over the years during the last two centuries, there was a whole set of methods applied that were not in accordance to the progress made by linguistics. For example, the choice made in assembling the two main corpora so far, that of Tomaschek and Detschew, present data from literary and epigraphic sources. These data combined were not at all times convincing. Sometimes controversial entries were included whose interpretation provoked long discussions. More attention was paid to details, which in most of the cases were not concerned with the discussion of the whole body of evidence. There was one other issue: whilst modern linguistics made a huge progress, Thracian scholars stayed within the general Indo-European theory of the Neogrammarians. The method the author used rests on the description of Thracian onomastics obtained after phonological analysis, because he is concerned with the fact that every single phonologically attested form of phonemes and morphs is relevant. For, it helps to list all possible forms of names thus showing all of the graphemes independently.