Hittite language
Hittite is the
extinct 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 spoken from approximately
1600 BC (and probably before) to
1100 BC. There is some attestation that Hittite and related languages continued to be spoken in Anatolia for a few hundred years following the collapse of the Hittite empire and the last of the Hittite texts.
Hittite is the earliest attested
Indo-European language. 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 unusual features are mainly due to later innovation.
"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,
nisili), "in the [speech] of
Nesa (Kanes)", an important city before the rise of the Empire. In one case, the label is
Kanisumnili, "in the [speech] of the people of Kanes".
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. In spite of various arguments over the appropriateness of the term,
Hittite remains the most current term by convention, although some authors make a point of using "Nesite".
The first substantive claim as to the affiliation of the Hittitelanguage was made by
Jørgen Alexander Knudtzon (1902)in a book devoted to two letters between the king ofEgypt and a Hittite ruler, found at
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 partialinterpretation to the two letters because of the formulaic nature of the diplomaticcorrespondance 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 (see
rhotacism) 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 correspondences. 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.
Hittite is one of the
Anatolian languages. 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 the closely related
Luwian language, rather than Hittite proper. The later languages
Lycian and
Lydian are also attested in Hittite territory. Lycian is a descendant of Luwian. Lydian, on the other hand, is quite distinct and cannot be a descendant of either Hittite or Luwian.
Palaic, also spoken in Hittite territory, is attested only in ritual texts quoted in Hittite documents. The Anatolian branch also includes
Carian,
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.
Hittite was written in an adapted form of the Mesopotamian cuneiform script. Owing to the predominantly syllabic nature of the script, it is difficult to ascertain the precise phonetic qualities of a portion of the Hittite sound inventory. However, the limitations of the syllabic script have been more or less overcome by means of comparative etymology and an examination of Hittite spelling conventions, and accordingly, scholars have surmised the following phonemes as belonging to Hittite.
Vowels
*Long vowels appear as alternates to their corresponding short vowels when they are so conditioned by the accent.
*Phonemically distinct long vowels occur infrequently.
*All vowels may occur word-initially and word-finally, except /e/.
Consonants
*The cuneiform script, as employed by Hittite scribes, did not distinguish voice, except in cases where the spelling of voiceless stops was geminated intervocalically. See
Edgar Sturtevant.
*All voiceless obstruents and all sonorants except /r/ appear word-initially. This is true of all Anatolian languages.
*Word-finally, the following tendencies emerge:
**Among the stops, only voiced appear word-finally. /-d/, /-g/ are common, /-b/ rare.
**/-s/ occurs frequently; /-h₂/, /-h₃/, /-r/, /-l/, /-n/ less often; and /-m/ never.
**The glides /w/, /j/ appear in diphthongs with /a/, /aː/.
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
. 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.
As one of the oldest attested Indo-European languages, Hittite is interesting largely because it
lacks several grammatical features exhibited by other "old" Indo-European languages such as
Lithuanian,
Sanskrit, and
Greek.
Morphology
The Hittite nominal system consists of the following
cases:
Nominative,
Vocative,
Accusative,
Genitive,
Allative,
Dative-
Locative,
Instrumental and
Ablative. However, the recorded history attests to fewer cases in the plural than in the singular, and later stages of the language indicate a loss of certain cases in the singular as well. It has two grammatical
genders, common and neuter, and two grammatical
numbers, singular and plural.
Hittite verbs are inflected according to two general
verbal classes, the
mi-conjugation and the
hi-conjugation. There are two
voices (active and medio-passive), two
moods (indicative and imperative), and two
tenses (present and preterit). Additionally, the verbal system displays two
infinitive forms, one
verbal substantive, a
supine, and a
participle.
Syntax
Hittite syntax exhibits one noteworthy feature 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, to which a "chain" of fixed-order clitics are appended.
*
Bedřich Hrozný*
Craig Melchert*
*
Hittite online - The University of Texas at Austin
*
The Hittite Grammar Homepage*
Hethitologie Portal Mainz (in German)
*
ABZU - a guide to information related to the study of the Ancient Near East on the Web
*
Hittite Dictionary
