Dhannuá

Background

Descending from a central Proto-Indo-European dialect spoken thousands of years ago Dhannuá is the sole member of the Dannic sub-group. Various attempts to classify it as Celtic, Italic or even as a variant of Scythian have proven unsuccessful. Having performed the merger of palatal/plain stops, Dhannuá is categorised as a Centum language.

Early History

The oldest preserved text in a language that can be ascribed with certainty to an early form of Dhannuá is the Samarkand stele, 300 BCE. The stele was found in a museum inventory, after having been donated in 1878 from a private collector. The text on the stele reads:

DOMAN•SEWANT•EWEN•REIDA•DEPOT•SEPT•KLUNIWAD•KAPTOD

doman sewant(i) ewen(s) reida(nti) depot(es) klu(sa)ni(a)wad kaptod

'Home they seek, horses they ride, lords seven, Klusaniawa taken.'

The name Klusaniawa (tentatively traced to *ḱlewos-ni-akwa) has been deemed most probable to correspond to the city Lúsania from Old Dhannic myths. If this is true, this would mean that at least one motif of Dhannic story-telling is over 2300 years old.

The actual place name might even be older and in fact it might even be a compound dating back to the Proto-Indo-European era, which would shift the time frame to ca 3700 BCE.

The name has been analysed as a compound word of *ḱlewos and *ni-akwa. Thus literally carrying the meaning 'Fame-place-of-water'.

One thing that is certain from analysing the sample of Early Dhannua given by the Samarkand stele is that already at this stage the accusative marker had become -n, PIE *septḿ̥ has become septan and a coda-final voicing of the dative –ōt > -ōd. The third person plural is still present in its entirety. There is also a formation of a verbal adjective with -to as seen in kaptod.