Type Alphabet Time period 500-330 BC Sister systems Lydian, Phrygian | Languages Lycian language Parent systems Greek alphabet
Lycian Direction Left-to-right | |
The Lycian alphabet was used to write the Lycian language. It was an extension of the Greek alphabet, with half a dozen additional letters for sounds not found in Greek. It was largely similar to the Lydian and the Phrygian alphabets.
Contents
The alphabet
The Lycian alphabet contains letters for 29 sounds. Some sounds are represented by more than one symbol, which is considered one "letter". There are six vowel letters, one for each of the four oral vowels of Lycian, and separate letters for two of the four nasal vowels. Nine of the Lycian letters do not appear to derive from the Greek alphabet.
Unicode
The Lycian alphabet was added to the Unicode Standard in April, 2008 with the release of version 5.1. It is encoded in Plane 1 (Supplementary Multilingual Plane).
The Unicode block for Lycian is U+10280–U+1029F: