Eteocypriot was a
pre-Indo-European language spoken in
Iron Age Cyprus. The name means "true" or "original Cyprian" parallel to
Eteocretan, both of which names are used by modern
scholarship to mean the pre-Greek languages of those places. Eteocypriot was written in the
Cypriot syllabary, a syllabic script derived from
Linear A (via the Cypro-Minoan variant
Linear C). The language was under pressure from
Arcadocypriot Greek from about the 10th century BC and finally became extinct in about the 4th century BC.