Hittite language

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{{Infobox Language |name=Hittite |nativename=nesili |familycolor=Indo-European |region=Anatolia |extinct=around 1100 BC |fam2=Anatolian languages |iso2=hit |iso3=hit |notice=nonotice }}

The Hittite language is the dead language once spoken by the Hittites, a people who once created an empire centered on ancient Hattusas (modern Boğazköy) in north-central Anatolia (modern Turkey). The language was used from approximately 1600 BC (and probably before) to 1100 BC. There is some attestation that Hittite and related languages were still spoken for a few hundred years after that.

Hittite is one of the earliest attested Indo-European languages. Due to marked differences in its structure and phonology some early philologists, most notably Warren Cowgill argued that it should be classified as a sister language to the Indo-European languages, rather than a daughter language. Recently, however, most scholars have come to accept Hittite as a traditional daughter language of Proto-Indo-European and some studies have shown that its unusal features are mainly due to later innovation.

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Name

"Hittite" is a modern name, chosen after the (still disputed) identification of the Hattusa kingdom with the Hittites mentioned in the Old Testament.

In multi-lingual texts found in Hittite locations, passages written in the Hittite language are preceded by the adverb nesili (or nasili), "(speech) of Nesa", an important city before the rise of the Empire. In one case, the label is Kanisumnili, "that which is spoken in Kanes", an alternative name for the same city. Although the Hittite empire was composed of people from many diverse ethnic and linguistic backgrounds, the Hittite language was used in most of their secular written texts. Though scholars are now unanimous that the term "Hittite" is incorrect, they reckon that too much water has passed under the bridge to allow for a correction to "Nesite" at this late date.

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Decipherment

The first substantive claim as to the affiliation of the Hittite language was made by J. A. Knudtzon (1902) in a book devoted to two letters between the king of Egypt and a Hittite ruler, found at Tell-El-Amarna in Egypt. Knudtzon argued that Hittite was Indo-European, largely on the basis of the morphology. Although he had no bilingual, he was able to give a partial interpretation to the two letters because of the formulaic nature of the diplomatic correspondance of the period. His argument was not generally accepted, partly because the morphological similarities he observed between Hittite and Indo-European can be found outside of Indo-European, and partly because the interpretation of the letters was justifiably regarded as uncertain.

Knudtzon was shown definitively to have been correct when a large quantity of tablets written in the familiar Akkadian cuneiform script but in an unknown language was discovered by Hugo Winckler at the modern village of Boğazköy, the former site of Hattusas, the Hittite capital. Based on a study of this extensive material, Bedřich Hrozný succeeded in analyzing the language. He presented his argument that the language is Indo-European in a paper published in 1915 (Hrozný 1915), which was soon followed by a grammar of the language (Hrozný 1917). Hrozný's argument for the Indo-European affiliation of Hittite was thoroughly modern. He focussed on the striking similarities in idiosyncratic aspects of the morphology, unlikely to occur independently by chance and unlikely to be borrowed. These included the r/n alternation in some noun stems and vocalic ablaut, both seen in the stunning alternation in the word for water between nominative singular [wadar] and genitive singular [wedenas]. He also presented a set of regular sound correspondances. After a brief initial delay due to the disruption caused by the First World War, Hrozný's decipherment, grammatical analysis, and demonstration of the Indo-European affiliation of Hittite were rapidly accepted.

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Classification

Hittite is one of the Anatolian languages. The closely related Luwian language was also in use in the Hittite empire, as a monumental language. Hittite proper is known from cuneiform tablets and inscriptions erected by the Hittite kings. The script known as "Hieroglyphic Hittite" has now been shown to have been used for writing Luwian, rather than Hittite proper. Later Anatolian languages such as Lydian and Lycian are attested in former Hittite territory. These tongues may be descended from Luwian. The Anatolian branch also includes Carian, Palaic, Pisidian, and Sidetic.

In the Hittite and Luwian languages there are many loan words, particularly religious vocabulary, from the non-Indo-European Hurrian and Hattic languages. Hattic was the language of the Hattians, the local inhabitants of the land of Hatti before being absorbed or displaced by the Hittites. Sacred and magical Hittite texts were often written in Hattic, Hurrian, and Akkadian, even after Hittite became the norm for other writings.

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Features of the language

As one of the oldest attested Indo-European languages, Hittite is interesting largely because it lacks several features exhibited by other "old" Indo-European languages such as Lithuanian, Sanskrit, and Greek.

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Genders and cases

There are only two genders in Hittite, a common gender and a neuter gender. The Hittite nominal system consists of the following cases: Nominative, Vocative, Accusative, Genitive, Directive or Allative, Dative/Locative, Instrumental and Ablative.

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Laryngeals

Hittite preserves some very archaic features lost in other Indo-European languages. For example, Hittite has retained two of three laryngeals (h2 and h3 word-initially). These sounds, whose existence had been hypothesized by Ferdinand de Saussure on the basis of vowel quality in other Indo-European languages in 1879, were not preserved as separate sounds in any attested Indo-European language until the discovery of Hittite. In Hittite, this phoneme is written as ḫ. Hittite, as well as most other Anatolian languages, differs in this respect from any other Indo-European language, and the discovery of laryngeals in Hittite was a remarkable confirmation of de Saussure's hypothesis.

The preservation of the laryngeals, and the lack of any evidence that Hittite shared grammatical features possessed by the other early Indo-European languages, has led some philologists to believe that the Anatolian languages split from the rest of Proto-Indo-European much earlier than the other divisions of the proto-language. Some have proposed an "Indo-Hittite" language family or superfamily, that includes the rest of Indo-European on one side of a dividing line and Anatolian on the other. The vast majority of scholars continue to reconstruct a Proto-Indo-European, but all believe that Anatolian was the first branch of Indo-European to leave the fold.

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Corpus

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External links

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References

de:Hethitische Sprache el:Χεττιτική γλώσσα fr:Hittite (langue) gl:Lingua hitita id:Bahasa Hitit it:Lingua nesiana he:נשילי la:Lingua Hetthaea nl:Hettitisch ja:ヒッタイト語 pl:Język hetycki sv:Hettitiska th:ภาษาฮิตไตต์

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