We're turning back the clock for the fourth installment of our Five Fun Facts about Languages series to look at a very ancient language that is nevertheless linked to many in today's modern world. Not ancient Greek or Latin - that would be too obvious! No, today we're giving you our Five Fun Facts about Hittite! If you have any intresting facts of your own about this fascinating language, let us know @BloomsburyLing #5funfacts.
1) The Hittite civilisation flourished in Anatolia during the 2nd Millennium BCE. The language in which the Hittites spoke and kept written records is the earliest attested Indo-European language yet known, a language family that now includes Bengali, English, French, Hindi, Punjabi and Russian, among others.
2) Hittite preserves some very archaic features lost in other Indo-European languages, such as its retention of two of three laryngeals. The existence of these sounds had been hypothesized by Ferdinand de Saussure on the basis of vowel quality in Indo-European languages, but were unattested as separate sounds until the discovery of Hittite.
3) Hittite was written in a cuneiform script, adapted from the lingua franca of the ancient Near East, Akkadian cuneiform. Cuneiform means ‘wedge-shaped’, so named for the wedge shaped letters used to write the script, originally pressed into clay tablets using a blunt reed for a stylus.
4) Although neither Hittite nor any other ancient Anatolian language has survived into the modern era, its linguistic influence is still with us. The Hittite word for 'water', watar, and other Hittite linguistic artefacts are still recognizable if one scratches the surface.
5) In 1902, the Norwegian linguist Jørgen Alexander Knudtzon became the first person to make a link between Hittite and other Indo-European languages. However, it was not until 1915 that Knudtzon’s hypothesis was proved to be correct. Working from a large quantity of tablets discovered at the site of the Hittite capital, Hattusa, Czech linguist Bedrich Hrozný used his background in Semitic languages to realise that the (transliterated) phrase:
nu ninda en e-iz-za-te-ni
wa-a-tar-ma e-ku-ut-te-ni
Meant:
Now you will eat bread and drink water.
After this, deciphering the rest of the language was (comparatively) a piece of cake.
- If this post has inspired you to expand your knowledge of the Hittite language, why not check out the Bloomsbury Companion to Historical Linguistics? Covering aspects of a number of ancient languages, including Hittite, this is a complete resource for anybody studying or researching historical linguistics. Buy your copy here!
- To find out more about Saussure's linguistic theories, try Roy Harris's authoritative translation of Saussure's Course in General Linguistics (and use Saussure: A Guide for the Perplexed to help you make sense of it all!).
Come back next Thursday for five fun facts about Hebrew!
Andrew Wardell
Editorial Assistant | Linguistics
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