Hittite language

Hittite (natively ??? nešili ' of Neša'), also known as Nesite and Neshite, was an Indo-European language that was spoken by the Hittites, a people of Bronze Age Anatolia who created an empire, centred on Hattusa, as well as parts of the northern Levant and Upper Mesopotamia. The language, long extinct now, is attested in cuneiform, in records dating from the 16th (Anitta text) to the 13th centuries BCE, with isolated Hittite loanwords and numerous personal names appearing in an Old Assyrian context from as early as the 20th century BCE. Hittite (natively ??? nešili ' of Neša'), also known as Nesite and Neshite, was an Indo-European language that was spoken by the Hittites, a people of Bronze Age Anatolia who created an empire, centred on Hattusa, as well as parts of the northern Levant and Upper Mesopotamia. The language, long extinct now, is attested in cuneiform, in records dating from the 16th (Anitta text) to the 13th centuries BCE, with isolated Hittite loanwords and numerous personal names appearing in an Old Assyrian context from as early as the 20th century BCE. By the Late Bronze Age, Hittite had started losing ground to its close relative Luwian. It appears that in the 13th century BCE, Luwian was the most-widely spoken language in the Hittite capital, Hattusa. After the collapse of the Hittite Empire 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. Hittite is the earliest-attested of the Indo-European languages and is the best-known of the Anatolian languages. Hittite is the modern name for the language because of the identification of the Hatti (Ḫatti) kingdom with the Biblical Hittites (Hebrew:*חתים Ḥettim), but that identification was later challenged. The terms Hattian and Hattic, by contrast, refer respectively to the indigenous people who preceded them and to their 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 of Neša (Kaneš)', an important city before the rise of the Hittite Empire. In one case, the label is Kanisumnili, 'in the of the people of Kaneš'. Although the Hittite Empire 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, Hittite remains the most current term because of convention and the strength of association with the Biblical Hittites. The alternative term Nesite, derived from nesili, never caught on. The first substantive claim as to the affiliation of Hittite was made by Jørgen Alexander Knudtzon in 1902 in a book devoted to two letters found at El-Amarna, Egypt, between the king of Egypt and a Hittite ruler. Knudtzon argued that Hittite was Indo-European, largely because of its morphology. Although he had no bilingual texts, he was able to give a partial interpretation to the two letters because of the formulaic nature of the diplomatic correspondence 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 also because the interpretation of the letters was justifiably regarded as uncertain. Knudtzon was definitively shown to have been correct when many tablets written in the familiar Akkadian cuneiform script but in an unknown language were discovered by Hugo Winckler in what is now the village of Boğazköy, which was the former site of Hattusa, the capital of the Hittite Empire. 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 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. They included the r/n alternation in some noun stems (the heteroclitics) and vocalic ablaut, which are both seen in the alternation in the word for water 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 the First 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 as 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). Hittite is one of the Anatolian languages and is known from cuneiform tablets and inscriptions that were erected by the Hittite kings. The script formerly known as 'Hieroglyphic Hittite' is now termed Hieroglyphic Luwian. The Anatolian branch also includes Cuneiform Luwian, Hieroglyphic Luwian, Palaic, Lycian, Milyan, Lydian, Carian, Pisidian and Sidetic.