Hittite, also known as Nesite, is an extinct Indo-European language formerly spoken in Anatolia during the Bronze Age. The language is attested in cuneiform texts, primarily from the archives of the city of Hattusa, between the 17th century BC to the 13th century BC. Isolated Hittite words and personal names appear in Old Assyrian documents in Kanesh from as early as the 20th century BC, making it the earliest attested use of the Indo-European languages.
By the Late Bronze Age, Hittite had started losing ground to its close relative Luwian. It appears that Luwian was the most widely spoken language in the Hittite capital of Hattusa during the 13th century BC.Yakubovich 2010, p. 307 After the collapse of the Hittite New Kingdom 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.
Name
Hittite is the modern scholarly name for the language, based on the identification of the Hatti (Ḫatti) kingdom with the Biblical Hittites ( ), although that name appears to have been applied incorrectly: The term Hattian refers to the indigenous people who preceded the Hittites, speaking a non-Indo-European Hattic language.
In multilingual texts found in Hittite locations, passages written in Hittite are preceded by the adverb (or , ), "in the [speech] of Neša (Kaneš)", an important city during the early stages of the Hittite Old Kingdom. In one case, the label is Kanisumnili, "in the [speech] of the people of Kaneš".
Although the Hittite 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, Hittite remains the most current term because of convention and the strength of association with the Biblical Hittites. The endonymic term , and its Anglicized variants (Nesite, Nessite, Neshite), have never caught on.
Classification 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, Sidetic and Isaurian.Kloekhorst, Alwin. "Anatolian". In: The Indo-European Language Family: A Phylogenetic Perspective. Edited by Thomas Olander. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. pp. 63–65. .
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..
Some linguists, most notably Edgar H. Sturtevant and Warren Cowgill, have argued that Hittite should be classified as a sister language to Proto-Indo-European, rather than as a daughter language. Their Indo-Hittite hypothesis is that the parent language (Indo-Hittite) lacked the features that are absent in Hittite as well, and that Proto-Indo-European later innovated them.
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".. 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.
Hittite has many loanwords, particularly religious vocabulary from the non-Indo-European Hurrian and Hattic languages. The latter was the language of the Hattians, the local inhabitants of the land of Hatti before they were absorbed or displaced by the Hittites. Sacred and magical texts from Hattusa were often written in Hattic, Hurrian and Luwian even after Hittite had become the norm for other writings.
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 polysemic use of "Neo-Hittite" label as a designation for the later period, which is actually post-Hittite), corresponding to the Old, Middle and New Kingdoms of the Hittite history (–1500 BC, 1500–1430 BC and 1430–1180 BC, respectively). The stages are differentiated on both linguistic and paleographic grounds.
The Dutch 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).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 The first is attested in clay tablets from Kaniš/Neša (Kültepe), and is dated earlier than the findings from Ḫattuša.Kloekhorst, Alwin. "Anatolian". In: The Indo-European Language Family: A Phylogenetic Perspective. Edited by Thomas Olander. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. pp. 63–64, 75.
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 : ), wa (= PI : ) and wi (= wi5 = GEŠTIN : ) 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).
Phonology
Since there are no longer any living speakers of Hittite, the precise sounds of the language are unknown. Scholars reconstruct the phonology of Hittite based on the written evidence of Hittite in cuneiform and indirect evidence from the transcription of Hittite words in other contemporary writing systems, such as Egyptian Hieroglyphs. Hittite's writing system is challenging to interpret phonologically because it was adapted from a system designed for the Akkadian language. The transliteration conventions of Hittite are also based on those used in Assyriology, parts of which may appear strange in the context of Hittite.
Consonants + Hittite consonants Labial Alveolar Palatal Velar Uvular Nasal Plosive Fricative Affricate Liquid Glide
Supporters of a length distinction usually point to the fact that Akkadian, 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 a length 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 the velar and the alveolar plosives are known to be adjacent since that word's "u" represents not a vowel but labialization.
Laryngeals Hittite has retained two of the three Proto-Indo-European laryngeals ( and word-initially), which evolved into the Hittite phoneme transcribed with the letter ḫ. The existence of Proto-Indo-European laryngeals had been hypothesized in 1879 by Ferdinand de Saussure, who suggested the presence of these phonemes on the basis of vowel quality as it supposedly developed from Proto-Indo-European into the languages that were known at the time. Hittite texts, which were recovered from 1906 onwards, confirmed Saussure's laryngeal theory by featuring direct reflexes of Proto-Indo-European and .
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.
Vowels
+Hittite vowels Front Central Back Close , iː , uː Mid , eː , oː Open aː
Hittite is now agreed to have had at least five vowels and a vowel length contrast. The practice of plene spelling, in which an extra identical vowel sign is added to mark vowels already represented by a CV or VC sign, is usually taken to signal vowel length. Although vowels with plene spelling are nearly always long, the usage of plene spelling is not consistent across all long vowels.
The distinction between /u/ and /o/, represented respectively by the signs transliterated and was not recognized until the 21st century. Unlike other pairs of vowels, the distribution of long /uː/ and /oː/ are mostly predictable, leading Alwin Kloekhorst to reject the postulation of the long /oː/ phoneme. However, Craig Melchert states that they contrast in some environments, identifying minimal pairs such as 'to fill' and 'to push, reject'.
Morphology
Hittite is the oldest attested Indo-European language,Coulson 1986, p. xiii yet it lacks several grammatical features that are exhibited by other early-attested Indo-European languages such as Vedic Sanskrit, Classical Latin, Ancient Greek, Old Persian and Old 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.
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). Adjectives and pronouns agree with nouns for animacy, number, and case.
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. 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