Hittite language

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
"Old Hittite" redirects here. For the Old Hittite Kingdom, see Hittites § Old Kingdom.
Hittite
𒌷𒉌𒅆𒇷 nešili
RegionAnatolia
Eraattested 17th to 12th centuries BC
Hittite cuneiform
Language codes
ISO 639-2hit
ISO 639-3Variously:
hit – Hittite
oht – Old Hittite
htx – Middle Hittite
nei – New Hittite
hit Hittite
 oht Old Hittite
 htx Middle Hittite
 nei New Hittite
Glottologhitt1242
This article contains
cuneiform script. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols
instead of cuneiform script.

Hittite (natively: 𒌷𒉌𒅆𒇷, romanized: nešili

Anitta text) to the 13th centuries BC, with isolated Hittite loanwords and numerous personal names appearing in an Old Assyrian
context from as early as the 20th century BC, making it the earliest attested use of the Indo-European languages.

By the

Hittite New Kingdom during the more general Late Bronze Age collapse, Luwian emerged in the Early Iron Age as the main language of the so-called Syro-Hittite states, in southwestern Anatolia and northern Syria
.

Name

Indo-European family tree in order of first attestation. Hittite belongs to the family of Anatolian languages and is among the oldest written Indo-European languages.

Hittite is the modern scholarly name for the language, based on the identification of the Hatti (Ḫatti) kingdom with the

Biblical Hebrew: *חתים Ḥittim), although that name appears to have been applied incorrectly:[5] The term Hattian refers to the indigenous people who preceded the Hittites, speaking a non-Indo-European Hattic language
.

In multilingual texts found in Hittite locations, passages written in Hittite are preceded by the adverb nesili (or nasili, nisili), "in the [speech] of

Hittite Old Kingdom. In one case, the label is Kanisumnili, "in the [speech] of the people of Kaneš".[6]

Although the

endonymic term nešili, and its Anglicized variants (Nesite, Nessite, Neshite), have never caught on.[8]

Decipherment

The first substantive claim as to the affiliation of Hittite was made by

El-Amarna, Egypt. Knudtzon argued that Hittite was Indo-European, largely because of its morphology. Although he had no bilingual texts, he was able to provide a partial interpretation of the two letters because of the formulaic nature of the diplomatic correspondence of the period.[10] 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 also because the interpretation of the letters was justifiably regarded as uncertain.[citation needed
]

Knudtzon was definitively shown to have been correct when many tablets written in the familiar

Edgar H. Sturtevant, who authored the first scientifically acceptable Hittite grammar with a chrestomathy
and a glossary. The most up-to-date grammar of the Hittite language is currently Hoffner and Melchert (2008).

Classification

Hittite is one of the Anatolian languages and is known from

Cuneiform Luwian, Hieroglyphic Luwian, Palaic, Lycian, Milyan, Lydian, Carian, Pisidian, Sidetic and Isaurian.[13]

Unlike most other Indo-European languages, Hittite does not distinguish between masculine and feminine grammatical gender, and it lacks subjunctive and optative moods as well as aspect. Various hypotheses have been formulated to explain these differences.[14]

Some

Proto-Indo-European, rather than as a daughter language. Their Indo-Hittite
hypothesis is that the parent language (Indo-Hittite) lacked the features that are absent in Hittite as well, and that Proto-Indo-European later innovated them.

Other linguists, however, prefer the Schwund ("loss") Hypothesis in which Hittite (or Anatolian) came from Proto-Indo-European, with its full range of features, but the features became simplified in Hittite.

According to Craig Melchert, the current tendency (as of 2012) is to suppose that Proto-Indo-European evolved and that the "prehistoric speakers" of Anatolian became isolated "from the rest of the PIE speech community, so as not to share in some common innovations".[15] Hittite and the other Anatolian languages split off from Proto-Indo-European at an early stage. Hittite thus preserved archaisms that would be lost in the other Indo-European languages.[16]

Hittite has many loanwords, particularly religious vocabulary from the non-Indo-European

Hurrian and Luwian
even after Hittite had become the norm for other writings.

History

The Hittite language has traditionally been stratified into Old Hittite (OH), Middle Hittite (MH) and New Hittite or Neo-Hittite (NH, not to be confused with the

Neo-Hittite" label as a designation for the later period, which is actually post-Hittite), corresponding to the Old, Middle and New Kingdoms of the Hittite history (c. 1750–1500 BC, 1500–1430 BC and 1430–1180 BC, respectively). The stages are differentiated on both linguistic and paleographic grounds.[17][18]

Hittitologist Alwin Kloekhorst (2019) recognizes two dialectal variants of Hittite: one he calls "Kanišite Hittite", and a second he named "Ḫattuša Hittite" (or Hittite proper).[19] The first is attested in clay tablets from Kaniš/Neša (Kültepe), and is dated earlier than the findings from Ḫattuša.[20]

Script

Main article: Hittite cuneiform

Hittite was written in an adapted form of Peripheral Akkadian cuneiform orthography from Northern Syria. The predominantly syllabic nature of the script makes it difficult to ascertain the precise phonetic qualities of some of the Hittite sound inventory.

The syllabary distinguishes the following consonants (notably, the Akkadian s series is dropped),

b, d, g, ḫ, k, l, m, n, p, r, š, t, z, combined with the vowels a, e, i, u. Additionally, ya (= I.A : 𒄿𒀀), wa (= PI : 𒉿) and wi (= wi5 = GEŠTIN : 𒃾) signs are introduced.

The Akkadian unvoiced/voiced series (k/g, p/b, t/d) do not express the voiced/unvoiced contrast in writing, but double spellings in intervocalic positions represent voiceless consonants in Indo-European (

Sturtevant's law
).

Phonology

Main article: Hittite phonology

The limitations of the syllabic script in helping to determine the nature of Hittite phonology have been more or less overcome by means of comparative etymology and an examination of Hittite spelling conventions. Accordingly, scholars have surmised that Hittite possessed the following phonemes:

Vowels

Vowels
Front Central Back
Close i   u
Mid e   (o)
Open   a  
  • Long vowels appear as alternates to their corresponding short vowels when they are so conditioned by the accent.
  • Phonemically distinct long vowels occur infrequently.

Consonants

Consonant phonemes
Labial Alveolar Palatal Velar Uvular
plain
labial
 		plain
labial
Nasal lenis m
n
fortis mː
nː
Plosive lenis p
t
 		k kʷ
fortis pː
tː
 		kː kʷː
Fricative lenis s (ʃ) χ χʷ
fortis sː (ʃː) χː χʷː
Affricate t͡s
Liquid lenis
r
l
fortis
rː
lː
Glide j w

Plosives

Hittite had two series of consonants, one which was written always

length
, which a literal interpretation of the cuneiform orthography would suggest.

Supporters of a length distinction usually point to the fact that

velar and the alveolar plosives are known to be adjacent since that word's "u" represents not a vowel but labialization
.

Laryngeals

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

Both the preservation of the laryngeals and the lack of evidence that Hittite shared certain grammatical features in the other early Indo-European languages have 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. See #Classification above for more details.

Morphology

Main article: Hittite grammar

Hittite is the oldest attested Indo-European language,

Old Avestan
. Notably, Hittite did not have a masculine-feminine gender system. Instead, it had a rudimentary noun-class system that was based on an older animate–inanimate opposition.

Nouns

Hittite inflects for nine cases: nominative, vocative, accusative, genitive, dative-locative, ablative, ergative, allative, and instrumental; two numbers: singular, and plural; and two animacy classes: animate (common), and inanimate (neuter).[22] Adjectives and pronouns agree with nouns for animacy, number, and case. The general absence of animacy classes from Uralic languages means that if the Indo-Uralic hypothesis is supported, Indo-Hittite split from Uralic by innovating them and ablaut, splitting the Proto-Indo-Uralic *x into*h₁, *h₂ and *h₃.[citation needed]

The distinction in animacy is rudimentary and generally occurs in the nominative case, and the same noun is sometimes attested in both animacy classes. There is a trend towards distinguishing fewer cases in the plural than in the singular and a trend towards distinguishing the plural in fewer cases. The ergative case is used when an inanimate noun is the subject of a transitive verb. Early Hittite texts have a vocative case for a few nouns with -u, but it ceased to be productive by the time of the earliest discovered sources and was subsumed by the nominative in most documents. The allative was subsumed in the later stages of the language by the dative-locative. An archaic genitive plural -an is found irregularly in earlier texts, as is an instrumental plural in -it. A few nouns also form a distinct locative, which had no case ending at all.

The examples of pišna- ("man") for animate and pēda- ("place") for inanimate are used here to show the Hittite noun declension's most basic form:

  Animate   Inanimate
Singular Plural Singular Plural
Nominative pišnaš pišnēš pēdan pēda
Accusative pišnan pišnuš
Ergative pišnanza pišnantēš pēdanza pēdantēš
Vocative pišne – –
Genitive pišnaš pēdaš
Dative/Locative pišni pišnaš pēdi pēdaš
Ablative pišnaz pēdaz
Allative pišna – pēda –
Instrumental pišnit pēdit

Verbs

The verbal morphology is less complicated than for other early-attested

indicative mood and imperative), two aspects (perfective and imperfective), and two tenses (present and preterite). Verbs have two infinitive forms, a verbal noun, a supine, and a participle
. Rose (2006) lists 132 hi verbs and interprets the hi/mi oppositions as vestiges of a system of grammatical voice ("centripetal voice" vs. "centrifugal voice").

Mi-conjugation

The mi-conjugation is similar to the general verbal conjugation paradigm in Sanskrit and can also be compared to the class of mi-verbs in Ancient Greek. The following example uses the verb ēš-/aš- "to be".

Active voice
Indicative Imperative
Present ēšmi
ēšši
ēšzi
ešuwani
*eštani
ašanzi 		ašallu
ēšt
eštu
ēšuwani
ēšten
ašantu
Preterite ešun
ēšt
ēšt
ēšuwen
ēšten
ešer

Syntax

Hittite is a

adpositions follow their complement, adjectives and genitives precede the nouns that they modify, adverbs precede verbs, and subordinate clauses precede main clauses
.

Hittite syntax shows one noteworthy feature that is typical of Anatolian languages: commonly, the beginning of a sentence or clause is composed of either a sentence-connecting particle or otherwise a fronted or topicalized form, and a "chain" of fixed-order clitics is then appended.

Corpus

Main article: Hittite inscriptions

See also

References

  1. ^ Hoffner & Melchert (2008), p. 2)
  2. ^ Yakubovich 2020, p. 221–237.
  3. ^ van den Hout, Theo, (2020). A History of Hittite Literacy: Writing and Reading in Late Bronze-Age Anatolia (1650–1200 BC), Published online: 18 December 2020, Print publication: 07 January 2021, "Introduction": "...The hero of this book is literacy, writing and reading, in the Hittite kingdom in ancient Anatolia, or modern-day Turkey, from roughly 1650 to 1200 bc, give or take several years or perhaps even a decade or two..."
  4. ^ Yakubovich 2010, p. 307
  5. ^ Bryce 2012, p. 73.
  6. ISBN 9781885923042
    .
  7. ^ Glatz 2020, p. 35.
  8. ^ Hout 2011, p. 2.
  9. ^ J. D. Hawkins (2009). "The Arzawa Letters in Recent Perspective" (PDF). British Museum Studies in Ancient Egypt and Sudan. 14: 73–83.
  10. hdl:2027.42/86652
    .
  11. ISBN 3-00-019295-6
  12. ^ Fortson (2004:154)
  13. doi:10.1017/9781108758666.005
    .
  14. ^ Melchert 2012, pp. 2–5.
  15. ^ Melchert 2012, p. 7.
  16. ^ Jasanoff 2003, p. 20 with footnote 41
  17. ^ Hout 2011, p. 2-3.
  18. ^ Inglese 2020, p. 61.
  19. ^ Kloekhorst, Alwin. Kanišite Hittite: The Earliest Attested Record of Indo-European. Leiden, The Netherlands, Boston: Brill, 2019. p. 246. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004382107
  20. doi:10.1017/9781108758666.005
  21. ^ Coulson 1986, p. xiii
  22. ^ "Hittite Grammar" (PDF). Assyrianlanguages.org. Retrieved 2017-01-17.
  23. ^ "The Telepenus "Vanishing God" Myth (Anatolian mythology)". Utexas.edu. Archived from the original on 2016-07-03. Retrieved 2017-01-17.

Sources

Introductions and overviews

Dictionaries

  • Goetze, Albrecht (1954). "Review of: Johannes Friedrich, Hethitisches Wörterbuch (Heidelberg: Winter)", Language 30, pp. 401–5.
  • Kloekhorst, Alwin. Etymological Dictionary of the Hittite Inherited Lexicon. Leiden–Boston: Brill, 2008.
  • Puhvel, Jaan (1984–). Hittite Etymological Dictionary. 10 vols. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
  • Sturtevant, Edgar H. (1931). "Hittite glossary: words of known or conjectured meaning, with Sumerian ideograms and Accadian words common in Hittite texts", Language 7, no. 2, pp. 3–82., Language Monograph No. 9.
  • The Chicago Hittite Dictionary

Grammar

Text editions

Articles

External links

Look up Appendix:Hittite Swadesh list in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
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