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 somewhat damaged stele was "rediscovered" in museum inventory, after having been donated in 1878 from a private collector and collected dust for 133 years. The somewhat illegible 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.