ayearinlanguage: A Year in Language, Day 29: Hittite Hittite is an ancient Indo-European language sp
ayearinlanguage: A Year in Language, Day 29: Hittite Hittite is an ancient Indo-European language spoken in Anatolia (modern day Turkey) between the 16th and 13th centuries BCE. Though the language was preserved on cuneiform tablets it was not deciphered until the early 20th century. The decipherment of Hittite came with the discovery of tablets written in the Hittite language but using the already deciphered Akkadian style of cuneiform, thus allowing linguists to piece the language together from a phonological standpoint. However, while we could now make accurate guesses at what the language sounded like, the grammar and meaning remained elusive; consider if someone taught you the sounds made by the letters in the Hebrew alphabet, but nothing of the Hebrew language. The linguist Bedřich Hrozný made a breakthrough when considering the following sentence: nu NINDA-an ezzatteni watar-ma ekutteni “NINDA” is in all caps because it does not represent the actual Hittite word. Instead the cuneiform symbol used was an ideogram i.e. a pictographic image known to represent bread, the word for which is “ninda” in Sumerian. Bedřich noticed two things. First the word following “ninda”, “ezzatteni” looks similar to German “essen”, meaning “to eat”, and also to its Latin equivalent “edo”. Eating and bread are common couples. Secondly he noticed “watar” which, well, sounds like water. He guessed correctly that the sentence would translate to something like “eat bread and drink water”. Noticing these roots was impressive as it meant Hittite, unlike most of the languages spoken around it, was Indo-European. The decipherment of Hittite was also an important moment for reconstructive linguistics i.e. the science of reconstructing unattested languages. Using a tool called the comparative method linguists can reconstruct more ancient unattested languages by comparing the existing daughter languages. The issues with these reconstructions though is that they are inherently impossible to truly verify; one must simply trust modern linguistic theory, which, I should mention, is in a state of constant flux. Ill try to keep the explanation digestible. Before Hittite was rediscovered Linguists had posited a certain sound that existed in Proto-Indo-European (PIE) to explain certain features of its descendants. The only issue was this sound had fused with other sounds very early in the language families history, so the only evidence of it where echoes of echoes. The comparative method said it must exist, but the historical record said it did not. Then comes Hittite. Hittite belongs to a branch of Indo-European that split off much earlier than most other branches. As such, it preserves features that were lost in other branches. Amongst these where sounds that could have only emerged from these theoretical PIE sounds. Thus Hittite proved the legitimacy of the comparative method. -- source link