Carian

Carian is an extinct language of the Luwic branch of Anatolian, part of the Indo-European family, spoken in ancient Caria in southwestern Anatolia and also, through mercenary and expatriate communities, in Egypt, with inscriptions dated from about the seventh to the third century BC. It was written in a distinctive alphabetic script of around 34 characters that visually resembles Greek letters but represents entirely different sounds, which kept the language essentially unreadable until the 1980s. Decipherment finally succeeded through bilingual Carian-Egyptian funerary inscriptions studied by scholars including John D. Ray, which confirmed the language's Indo-European Anatolian character. Only about 170 inscriptions survive from Egypt and some 30 more from Caria itself, but they reveal grammatical patterns, including large consonant clusters, typical of the Anatolian branch despite the script's deceptive Greek appearance.