Hittite language
Hittite | |
---|---|
𒌷𒉌𒅆𒇷 nešili | |
Region | Anatolia |
Era | attested 17th to 12th centuries BC |
Indo-European
| |
Hittite cuneiform | |
Language codes | |
ISO 639-2 | hit |
ISO 639-3 | Variously:hit – Hittiteoht – Old Hittitehtx – Middle Hittitenei – New Hittite |
hit Hittite | |
oht Old Hittite | |
htx Middle Hittite | |
nei New Hittite | |
Glottolog | hitt1242 |
Hittite (natively: 𒌷𒉌𒅆𒇷, romanized: nešili
By the
Name
Hittite is the modern scholarly name for the language, based on the identification of the Hatti (Ḫatti) kingdom with the
In multilingual texts found in Hittite locations, passages written in Hittite are preceded by the adverb nesili (or nasili, nisili), "in the [speech] of
Although the
Decipherment
The first substantive claim as to the affiliation of Hittite was made by
Knudtzon was definitively shown to have been correct when many tablets written in the familiar
Classification
Hittite is one of the Anatolian languages and is known from
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
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
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
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
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 (
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
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
Supporters of a length distinction usually point to the fact that
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
Hittite is the oldest attested Indo-European language,
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
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
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
See also
References
- ^ Hoffner & Melchert (2008), p. 2)
- ^ Yakubovich 2020, p. 221–237.
- ^ 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..."
- ^ Yakubovich 2010, p. 307
- ^ Bryce 2012, p. 73.
- ISBN 9781885923042.
- ^ Glatz 2020, p. 35.
- ^ Hout 2011, p. 2.
- ^ J. D. Hawkins (2009). "The Arzawa Letters in Recent Perspective" (PDF). British Museum Studies in Ancient Egypt and Sudan. 14: 73–83.
- hdl:2027.42/86652.
- ISBN 3-00-019295-6
- ^ Fortson (2004:154)
- .
- ^ Melchert 2012, pp. 2–5.
- ^ Melchert 2012, p. 7.
- ^ Jasanoff 2003, p. 20 with footnote 41
- ^ Hout 2011, p. 2-3.
- ^ Inglese 2020, p. 61.
- ^ 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
- ^ Coulson 1986, p. xiii
- ^ "Hittite Grammar" (PDF). Assyrianlanguages.org. Retrieved 2017-01-17.
- ^ "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
- ISBN 9780199241705.
- ISBN 9780199279081.
- ISBN 9780191505027.
- Fortson, Benjamin W. (2004). Indo-European Language and Culture : an Introduction. Malden: Blackwell. ISBN 1-4051-0316-7.
- ISBN 9781108491105.
- Melchert, H. Craig (2012). "The Position of Anatolian" (PDF).
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
- Hoffner, Harry A.; Melchert, H. Craig (2008). A Grammar of the Hittite Language. Winona: Eisenbrauns. ISBN 978-1-57506-119-1.
- Hout, Theo van den (2011). The Elements of Hittite. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9781139501781.
- Hrozný, Bedřich (1917). Die Sprache der Hethiter: ihr Bau und ihre Zugehörigkeit zum indogermanischen Sprachstamm. Leipzig: Hinrichs.
- Inglese, Guglielmo (2020). The Hittite Middle Voice: Synchrony, Diachrony, Typology. Leiden-Boston: Brill. ISBN 9789004432307.
- ISBN 0-19-924905-9.
- Luraghi, Silvia (1997). Hittite. Munich: Lincom Europa. ISBN 3-89586-076-X.
- ISBN 90-5183-697-X.
- Patri, Sylvain (2007). L'alignement syntaxique dans les langues indo-européennes d'Anatolie. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. ISBN 978-3-447-05612-0.
- Rose, S. R. (2006). The Hittite -hi/-mi conjugations. Innsbruck: Institut für Sprachen und Literaturen der Universität Innsbruck. ISBN 3-85124-704-3.
- Sturtevant, Edgar H. A. (1933, 1951). Comparative Grammar of the Hittite Language. Rev. ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951. First edition: 1933.
- Sturtevant, Edgar H. A. (1940). The Indo-Hittite laryngeals. Baltimore: Linguistic Society of America.
- Watkins, Calvert (2004). "Hittite". The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages: 551–575. ISBN 0-521-56256-2.
- Yakubovich, Ilya (2010). Sociolinguistics of the Luwian Language. Leiden: Brill. ISBN 9789004177918.
Text editions
- Goetze, Albrecht & Edgar H. Sturtevant (1938). The Hittite Ritual of Tunnawi. New Haven: American Oriental Society.
- Sturtevant, Edgar H. A., & George Bechtel (1935). A Hittite Chrestomathy. Baltimore: Linguistic Society of America.
- Knudtzon, J. A. (1902). Die Zwei Arzawa-Briefe: Die ältesten Urkunden in indogermanischer Sprache. Leipzig: Hinrichs.
Articles
- Archi, Alfonso (2010). "When Did the Hittites Begin to Write in Hittite?". Pax Hethitica: Studies on the Hittites and Their Neighbours in Honour of Itamar Singer. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. pp. 37–46. ISBN 9783447061193.
- Giusfredi, Federico; Pisaniello, Valerio; Matessi, Alvise (2023). Contacts of Languages and Peoples in the Hittite and Post-Hittite World: The Bronze Age and Hatti. Brill. ISBN 9789004548602.
- Hrozný, Bedřich (1915). "Die Lösung des hethitischen Problems". Mitteilungen der Deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft. 56: 17–50.
- ISBN 9781119193296.
- Sturtevant, Edgar H. (1932). "The Development of the Stops in Hittite". Journal of the American Oriental Society. 52 (1). American Oriental Society: 1–12. JSTOR 593573.
- Sturtevant, Edgar H. (1940). "Evidence for voicing in Hittite g". Language. 16 (2). Linguistic Society of America: 81–87. JSTOR 408942.
- Wittmann, Henri (1969). "A note on the linguistic form of Hittite sheep". Revue hittite et asianique. 22: 117–118.
- Wittmann, Henri (1973) [1964]. "Some Hittite etymologies". Die Sprache. 10, 19: 144–148, 39–43.
- Wittmann, Henri (1969). "The development of K in Hittite". Glossa. 3: 22–26.
- Wittmann, Henri (1969). "The Indo-European drift and the position of Hittite". International Journal of American Linguistics. 35 (3): 266–268. S2CID 106405518.
- Yakubovich, Ilya (2020). "Hittite". A Companion to Ancient Near Eastern Languages. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons. pp. 221–237. ISBN 9781119193296.
External links
- Hittite Online by Winfred P. Lehmann and Jonathan Slocum, free online lessons at the Linguistics Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin
- Lauffenburger, Olivier (2006). "The Hittite Grammar Homepage".
- Portal Mainz (in German; includes text corpora of Hittite texts in various genres with German translations)
- "Digital etymological-philological Dictionary of the Ancient Anatolian Corpus Languages (eDiAna)". Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Archived from the originalon 25 February 2017. Retrieved 18 February 2017.
- The Electronic Edition of the Chicago Hittite Dictionary Archived 2011-06-05 at the Wayback Machine – The University of Chicago
- ABZU – a guide to information related to the study of the Ancient Near East on the Web
- Hittite Dictionary
- Hittite basic lexicon at the Global Lexicostatistical Database
- Hittite in the wiki Glossing Ancient Languages (recommendations for the Interlinear Morphemic Glossing of Hittite texts)
- glottothèque – Ancient Indo-European Grammars online, an online collection of introductory videos to Ancient Indo-European languages produced by the University of Göttingen