By theLate Bronze Age, Hittite had started losing ground to its close relativeLuwian. It appears that Luwian was the most widely spoken language in the Hittite capital of Hattusa during the 13th century BC.[4] After the collapse of theHittite New Kingdom during the more generalLate Bronze Age collapse, Luwian emerged in the earlyIron Age as the main language of the so-calledSyro-Hittite states, in southwesternAnatolia and northernSyria.
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 theBiblical Hittites (Biblical Hebrew: *חתיםḤittim), although that name appears to have been applied incorrectly:[5] The termHattian refers to the indigenous people who preceded the Hittites, speaking a non-Indo-EuropeanHattic language.
In multilingual texts found in Hittite locations, passages written in Hittite are preceded by the adverbnesili (ornasili,nisili), "in the [speech] ofNeša (Kaneš)", an important city during the early stages of theHittite Old Kingdom. In one case, the label isKanisumnili, "in the [speech] of the people of Kaneš".[6]
Although theHittite New Kingdom had people from many diverse ethnic and linguistic backgrounds, the Hittite language was used in most secular written texts. In spite of various arguments over the appropriateness of the term,[7]Hittite remains the most current term because of convention and the strength of association with theBiblical Hittites. Theendonymic termnešili, and its Anglicized variants (Nesite,Nessite,Neshite), have never caught on.[8]
Unlike most other Indo-European languages, Hittite does not distinguish between masculine and feminine grammatical gender, and it lacks subjunctive andoptative moods as well as aspect. Various hypotheses have been formulated to explain these differences.[10]
Other linguists, however, prefer theSchwund ("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 toCraig 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".[11] Hittite and the otherAnatolian languages split off fromProto-Indo-European at an early stage. Hittite thus preserved archaisms that would be lost in the other Indo-European languages.[12]
Hittite has many loanwords, particularly religious vocabulary from the non-Indo-EuropeanHurrian andHattic languages. The latter was the language of theHattians, the local inhabitants of the land ofHatti before they were absorbed or displaced by theHittites. Sacred and magical texts fromHattusa were often written in Hattic,Hurrian andLuwian even after Hittite had become the norm for other writings.
The Dutch HittitologistAlwin Kloekhorst (2019) recognizes two dialectal variants of Hittite: one he calls "Kanišite Hittite", and a second he named "Ḫattuša Hittite" (or Hittite proper).[15] The first is attested in clay tablets from Kaniš/Neša (Kültepe), and is dated earlier than the findings from Ḫattuša.[16]
Hittite was written in an adapted form of Peripheral Akkadiancuneiform orthography from Northern Syria. The predominantly syllabic nature of the script makes it difficult to ascertain the precise phonetic qualities of some of theHittite sound inventory.
The syllabary distinguishes the following consonants (notably, the Akkadians series is dropped),
b, d, g, ḫ, k, l, m, n, p, r, š, t, z, combined with the vowelsa, e, i, u. Additionally,ya (= I.A :𒄿𒀀),wa (= PI :𒉿) andwi (=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).
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:
Hittite had two series of consonants, one which was written alwaysgeminate in the original script, and another that was always simple. Incuneiform, all consonant sounds except for glides could be geminate. It has long been noticed that the geminate series of plosives is the one descending fromProto-Indo-Europeanvoiceless stops, and the simple plosives come from both voiced and voiced aspirate stops, which is often referred asSturtevant's law. Because of the typological implications of Sturtevant's law, the distinction between the two series is commonly regarded as one of voice. However, there is no agreement over the subject among scholars since some view the series as if they were differenced bylength, which a literal interpretation of the cuneiform orthography would suggest.
Supporters of a length distinction usually point to the fact thatAkkadian, the language from which the Hittites borrowed the cuneiform script, had voicing, but Hittite scribes used voiced and voiceless signs interchangeably.Alwin Kloekhorst also argues that the absence of assimilatory voicing is also evidence for alength distinction. He points out that the word "e-ku-ud-du – [ɛ́kʷːtu]" does not show any voice assimilation. However, if the distinction were one of voice, agreement between the stops should be expected since thevelar and thealveolar plosives are known to be adjacent since that word's "u" represents not a vowel butlabialization.
Hittite preserves some very archaic features lost in other Indo-European languages. For example, Hittite has retained two of the threelaryngeals (*h₂ and*h₃ word-initially). Those sounds, whose existence had been hypothesized in 1879 byFerdinand 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 asḫ. 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 certaingrammatical 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 theproto-language. See#Classification above for more details.
Hittite is the oldest attested Indo-European language,[17] yet it lacks several grammatical features that are exhibited by other early-attestedIndo-European languages such asVedic Sanskrit,Classical Latin,Ancient Greek,Old Persian andOld 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.
The distinction inanimacy is rudimentary and generally occurs in thenominative 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. Theergative case is used when an inanimate noun is thesubject of atransitive verb. Early Hittite texts have avocative 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. Theallative was subsumed in the later stages of the language by thedative-locative. An archaicgenitive plural-an is found irregularly in earlier texts, as is aninstrumental plural in-it. A few nouns also form a distinctlocative, which had no case ending at all.
The examples ofpišna- ("man") for animate andpēda- ("place") for inanimate are used here to show the Hittite noun declension's most basic form:
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-orderclitics is then appended.
The first substantive claim as to the affiliation of Hittite was made byJørgen Alexander Knudtzon[20] in 1902, in a book devoted to two letters between the king of Egypt and a Hittite ruler, found atEl-Amarna,Egypt. Knudtzon argued that Hittite was Indo-European, largely because of itsmorphology. 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.[21]
Knudtzon was definitively shown to have been correct when many tablets written in the familiarAkkadiancuneiform script but in an unknown language were discovered byHugo Winckler in what is now the village ofBoğazköy, Turkey, which was the former site ofHattusa, the capital of the Hittite state.[22] Based on a study of this extensivematerial,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 followed by a grammar of the language (Hrozný 1917).[23]
Hrozný's argument for the Indo-European affiliation of Hittite was thoroughly modern although poorly substantiated. He focused on the striking similarities in idiosyncratic aspects of the morphology that are unlikely to occur independently by chance or to be borrowed.[24] They included ther/nalternation in some noun stems (theheteroclitics) and vocalicablaut, which are both seen in the alternation in the word forwater between the nominative singular,wadar, and the genitive singular,wedenas. He also presented a set of regular sound correspondences.
After a brief initial delay because of disruption during theFirst World War, Hrozný's decipherment, tentative grammatical analysis and demonstration of the Indo-European affiliation of Hittite were rapidly accepted and more broadly substantiated by contemporary scholars such asEdgar H. Sturtevant, who authored the first scientifically acceptable Hittite grammar with achrestomathy and a glossary. The most up-to-date grammar of the Hittite language is currently Hoffner and Melchert (2008).
More than 30,000 tablets or fragments have been excavated from the royal archives of the capital of the Hittite KingdomHattusa, close to the modern town of Boğazkale or Boğazköy. While Hattusa has yielded the majority of tablets, other sites where they have been found include:Maşat Höyük, Ortaköy, Kuşaklı or Kayalıpınar in Turkey,Alalakh,Ugarit andEmar inSyria,Amarna inEgypt.
The tablets are mostly conserved in the Turkish museums of Ankara, Istanbul, Boğazkale and Çorum (Ortaköy) as well as in international museums such as thePergamonmuseum in Berlin, theBritish Museum in London and theMusée du Louvre in Paris.[25]
This text has been found in three versions, the earliest of which is considered the oldest known of all Hittite language texts, dated from between the end of the 17th century BCE and the middle of the 16th century BCE.
^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..."
^Beckman, Gary (2011). S.R. Steadman; G. McMahon (eds.). "The Hittite Language: Recovery and Grammatical Sketch".The Oxford Handbook of Ancient Anatolia 10,000-323 B.C.E.:518–519.hdl:2027.42/86652.
^Silvia Alaura: "Nach Boghasköi!" Zur Vorgeschichte der Ausgrabungen in Boğazköy-Ḫattuša und zu den archäologischen Forschungen bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg, Benedict Press 2006.ISBN3-00-019295-6
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Hoffner, Harry A.; Melchert, H. Craig (2008).A Grammar of the Hittite Language. Winona: Eisenbrauns.ISBN978-1-57506-119-1. 2nd Edition, 2024ISBN9781646023066
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