Any idea on how mutually intelligible phrygian was with ionian greek?
Give me a minor second, and I’ll figure it out.
Given how cheek-by-jowl speakers of different languages tended to live, and how much humans appear to have always engaged in commerce, there was probably a lot more bilingual and multilingual speakers in the ancient world. Both are in the I-E tree, but on different branches. Anatolia also had speakers of Carian (Herodotus grew up with that and Ionian Greek), Luwian, Lycian, Lydian, etc.
https://omniglot.com/writing/phrygian.htm
[snip] Phrygian was an Indo-European language related to Dacian and Thracian and belonging to the Paleo-Balkan branch of languages. It was spoken in Central Asia Minor until about the 5th century AD.
The earliest known inscriptions in Phyrgian date from the 8th century BC and were written in an alphabet derived from Phoenician. The language of these inscriptions is known as Paleo-Phrygian. Later inscriptions, in Neo-Phrygian, were written in a version of the Greek alphabet. [/snip]
https://omniglot.com/writing/greek.htm
[snip] Greek belongs to the Hellenic branch of the Indo-European language family... Today the Greek alphabet is used only to write Greek, however at various times in the past it has been used to write such languages as Lydian, Phrygian, Thracian, Gaulish, Hebrew, Arabic, Old Ossetic, Albanian, Turkish, Aromanian, Gagauz, Surguch and Urum. [/snip]