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Bartomeu Obrador-Cursach: The Phrygian Language. (Handbook of Oriental Studies. Section 1 The Near and Middle East, Vol. 139.) xvi, 681 pp. Leiden: Brill, 2020. ISBN 978 90 04 41998 8 (hardback), ISBN 978 90 04 41999 5 (e-book).
Phrygian is an Indo-European language of Anatolia, known for its distribution of fragmentary texts attested from circa the eighth century
Chapter 1 summarizes the volume's purposes and methodology. Chapter 2 elucidates the dating, writing material, archaeological contexts, provenances, and typology of Phrygian texts. Chapter 3 tackles details and problems of the Phrygian and Greek alphabets used for Phrygian inscriptions, with discussions of Old Phrygian letter-forms 18, 19, 21, 22, 24 listed in CIPPh (C. Brixhe and M. Lejeune, Corpus des inscriptions paleo-phrygiennes, Paris, 1984). Obrador-Cursach treats the problematic CIPPh letter-forms no. 20 and 23 as variants of <k>. The author addresses the difficulties in ascertaining the value of certain letter-forms and also discusses the problems in assessing the Greek script for New Phrygian inscriptions. Most of them are known today from their earliest hand-copies and only...