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''Scythian'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260904120411-00-⌔

Scythian - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Adjective

Scythian (comparative more Scythian, superlative most Scythian)

  • Of or relating to Scythia (a region of Central Eurasia in the classical era) or its inhabitants.
    • ✤ Synonym: Scythic
    • ✤ The Scythian collection is designed not just to echo a past civilization, recorded in the classical works of Herodotos and Pliny; it is also intended as a clarion call to the Russians to look to their jewelry heritage and their wealth of precious stones.1

Noun

Scythian (plural Scythians)

  • An inhabitant of Scythia.
    • ✤ Synonym: Scyth
    • ✤ How far he surpassed them all may be felt if we remember that no Scythian, although the Scythians are reckoned by their myriads, has ever succeeded in dominating a foreign nation […]2

Proper noun

Scythian

  • The Eastern Iranian language of Scythians.
    • ✤ Synonym: Scythic
  • (Indo-European studies, in the works of Markus van Boxhorn) The Proto-Indo-European language.
    • ✤ * Scythian was therefore not the same as modern Dutch, but the ancestral language of the Dutch as well as other neighbouring languages.*3
    • ✤ Though Boxhorn was working over a century before Sir William Jones, his ‘ Scythian ’ is not conceptually far off the later notion of Indo-European, and his choice of term ‘ Scythian ’ shows that Boxhorn was envisaging a cultural connection between the (northern) languages of the Near East and their Western European brethren, a perspicacious hypothesis that assumend some kind of ethnic drift between the two continents.4
    • ✤ From 1647 onwards, in several of his writings, Boxhorn elaborated the idea that Scythian was the original mother language of Persian, Greek, Latin, the Germanic languages, Turkish, Welsh, Lithuanian, Russian and Latvian (cf. Boxhorn 1647).5
  • (geology) An epoch from 251 ± 0.2 to 245 ± 1.5 million years ago, a subdivision of the Early Triassic.

Etymology

From Scythia + -an.

Pronunciation

  • IPA: /ˈsɪði.ən/, /ˈsɪθi.ən/
  • Audio (Southern England): 🔊

Printed 2026-09-04.

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Footnotes

  1. 1998 October 27, Suzy Menkes, “Russian Heritage:Inspiration in Gold, Humanity in Ivory”, in The New York Times ‎, New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 10 November 2025: ↩

  2. 1685, John Norris, (translator), The Institution and Life of Cyrus the Great [Cyropaedia] by Xenophon Book I ↩

  3. 1999, Cornelis Dekker, The Origins of Old Germanic Studies in the Low Countries, BRILL, page 210: ↩

  4. 2010, William Poole, The World Makers: Scientists of the Restoration and the Search for the Origins of the Earth, Peter Lang, page 81: ↩

  5. 2011, Gerda Haßler, Gesina Volkmann, History of Linguistics 2008: Selected Papers from the Eleventh International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences (ICHoLS XI), 28 August -2 September 2008, Potsdam, John Benjamins Publishing Company, page 159: ↩