Talk:Scythians - Wikipedia

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In the 1880s and 90s, when German philologists were combing through Crimea and the Ukraine, looking for various Germanic people--Goths or otherwise--that may have survived the ages, came across a few settlements in Crimea where the folks were using mysterious language(s) that at a closer examination, proved to be the modern-time survivors of the ancient Scytho-Sarmatian. Their records show that the language(s) were close to those of modern Ossetians (the only related people to Scythians/Sarmatians to survive into the present day). There were much Slavic and Turkic importation, but clearly these/this surviving language(s) was Scytho-Sarmatian Aryan/Iranic. in grammar and structure. Seemingly, that is that last time anyone encountered Scytho-Sarmatians in their ancient Crimean habitat...

An exhaustive, scientific article about this appeared about 20 years ago in the US. Would anyone has more information on this? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2604:2000:c6a5:1700:21f:5bff:fee9:91aa (talk • contribs) 23:42, 26 July 2015‎

(Old Persian: Sakā; New Persian: ساکا Saka; Greek: Σάκαι Sakai; Armenian: սկյութները Skyout'nerə; Latin: Sacae, Sanskrit: शक Śaka), and Sai (Chinese: 塞; Old Chinese: *sˤək), respectively.[8]

I have a source that provides many Circassian and Ubykh cognates for a few components of names of warrior women of Scythian tribes in the Caucasus. The source claims that while most of the Scythian tribes spoke Eastern Iranian languages (related to Ossetian and Saka languages), a few spoke Northwest Caucasian languages (the book says "Caucasian", I found so far only etymologies from Circassian and Ubykh). Scythian tribes were a very diverse group of culturally and somewhat linguistically related tribes. The book is by a Stanford professor of comparative mythology and religions, Adrienne Mayor, called "The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women Across the Ancient World" which draws from a lot of existing research on Scythians as well as new archaeological evidence compared with various Nart sagas, Siberian shamanisms, and Herodotus's and Strabo's (among others) accounts. https://www.amazon.com/Amazons-Legends-Warrior-across-Ancient/dp/0691170274

Above all, thanks for adding these excerpts. However, they urgently need some logical and grammatical corrections. What, e.g., is this, "various peoples belonging to the Scythian cultures, including the Scythians, ". Further, avoid the passive voice, and instead of extensive journal citations (into the reference section), name author and year INSTEAD. Thank you. 2A02:8108:9640:AC3:A1E8:AB30:4C27:C0DC (talk) 15:20, 6 January 2021 (UTC)Reply

There is a new (very recent) paper on the genetic ancestry of the Scythians. For anyone interested, it is this one: 189.122.57.144 (talk) 23:22, 29 March 2021 (UTC)Reply

https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/7/13/eabe4414

Weren't the Sakas and Scythians different people? The Scythians were in Eastern Europe and Parts of Central Asia, but the Sakas were Iranian. The Sakas also derived from the earlier Andronovo culture and the Scythians were not. That is why I want to remove Sakas from the list. Cupcake547 (talk) 18:33, 1 April 2021 (UTC)Reply

In the section on the physical appearance of the Scythians, please change the sentence "Pliny the Elder characterises the Seres, sometimes identified as Saka or Tocharians, as red-haired..." to "Pliny the Elder characterises the Seres, sometimes identified as Saka or Tocharians, as flaxen-haired..." The reason for the change is that Pliny's text explicitely says so, and there is no mention of red-haired Seres in Pliny's account. Hansalbertsson (talk) 00:30, 3 April 2021 (UTC)Reply

  Not done: please provide reliable sources that support the change you want to be made. Pliny's original text is not in English (quite confident of that one); so this might be an issue of which translation is being used. Please specify which translation it is... RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 01:12, 3 April 2021 (UTC)Reply

Yes, we should have the original Latin. Johnbod (talk) 02:39, 3 April 2021 (UTC)Reply

wikisource:la:Naturalis_Historia/Liber_VI#XXIV (in paragraph 88). To be fair the translation cited in the article is here, and it does read "flaxen-haired". Whether that is the only possible translation of the Latin is another question (we all know translation is, at best, an inexact science, especially when we're two millenia removed from the context of the original writer. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 03:35, 3 April 2021 (UTC)Reply