Online Encyclopedia
Hittite language
The Hittite language is the dead language once spoken by the Hittites, a people who once created an empire centered on ancient Hattusa (modern Boğazköy) in north-central Turkey. The language was used from approximately 1600 BC (and probably before) to 1100 BC.
Hittite is one of the earliest known Indo-European languages, although marked differences in its structure and phonology have lead some philologists to argue that it should be classified as a sister language to the Indo-European languages, rather than a daughter language.
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The language's 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), "in the tongue of the city of Nesa ." In one case, the label is Kanisumnili, interpreted as "that which is spoken in Kanesh", a city in the core of the Hittite kingdom and presumably the same as Nesa.
Decipherment
Hittite began to be deciphered during the early 20th century. In 1902 Jørgen A. Knudtzon pointed out that a number of cuneiform tablets discovered in Hittite territory were written in the standard Akkadian cuneiform script. The syllabary signs of this script enabled the text to be read in the sense of being sounded out, and in 1916 Bedřich Hrozný concluded that the language of the tablets was indeed related to the Indo-European languages. Etymological reconstructions enabled the successful decipherment of the language.
Classification and relatives
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 "Hittite hieroglyphics" 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 are likely descended from Hittite or Luwian.
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.
Features of the language
As one of the oldest attested Indo-European languages, Hittite is interesting largely because it lacks many of the complications exhibited by other "old" Indo-European languages such as Lithuanian, Sanskrit, and Greek.
Genders and cases
There are only two genders in Hittite, a common gender and a neuter gender. Nouns have only five cases, as opposed to the eight of Sanskrit and Lithuanian; moreover, some of the five Hittite cases seem instead to be suffixes added to a general oblique case stem. The Hittite verb also fails to exhibit some of the complexities of the Sanskrit or Greek verb. These grammatical simplifications make Hittite seem like a much younger Indo-European language than it in fact is. (Alternatively, the grammatical "simplifications" found in Hittite and the Tocharian languages may preserve an archaic layer of Indo-European grammar, with latter innovations showing up in the more familiar languages.)
Laryngeals
Hittite preserves some very archaic features lost in other Indo-European languages. In Hittite, laryngeals still appear. 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, at least some of the laryngeals are written, usually as h. Hittite 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.
External links
- Hethitologie Portal Mainz (in German)
- ABZU - a guide to information related to the study of the Ancient Near East on the Web