Anatolian languages

Branch of the Indo-European language family spoken in Anatolia in the 2nd–1st millennia BC.

The attested Anatolian languages are Hittite, Palaic, Luwian (Luvian), Hieroglyphic Luwian, Lycian, and Lydian. Hittite, by far the most copiously attested of the group, is known chiefly from a vast archive of cuneiform tablets found in 1905 at Hattusas (now Bogazköy, in north-central Turkey), the capital of the Hittite empire; Hittite texts date from the 16th to 13th century BC. By the late Roman or early Byzantine period at the latest, Anatolian languages had all become extinct. Several non-Indo-European languages of ancient Anatolia, all known from cuneiform texts, are also sometimes considered Anatolian languages: Hattic, spoken in central Anatolia before the coming of the Hittites and known solely from words and texts preserved by Hittite scribes; Hurrian, spoken in the 2nd millennium BC in northern Mesopotamia and southeastern Anatolia; and Urartian (Urartean), known from northwestern Anatolian texts of the 9th–7th centuries BC.

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Introduction

 extinct Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages spoken in Anatolia from sometime in the 3rd millennium BCE until the early centuries of the present era, when they were gradually supplanted. By the late 20th century the term was most commonly used to designate the so-called Anatolian group of Indo-European languages: Hittite (Hittite language), Palaic (Palaic language), Cuneiform Luwian, Hieroglyphic Luwian (see Luwian language), Lycian (Lycian language), Lydian (Lydian language), Carian (Carian language), and possibly Pisidian (Pisidian language) and Sidetic (Sidetic language). Hittite, Palaic, and Cuneiform Luwian are known from 2nd-millennium cuneiform texts found mainly in the ancient capital of the Hittite empire, Hattusa, near the modern town of Boğazkale (formerly Boğazköy), Tur. Hieroglyphic Luwian is found on seals and inscriptions from circa 1400 to about 700 BCE. Lydian, Lycian, and Carian are known from texts in alphabetic script from circa 600 to perhaps 300 BCE. Although there is evidence enough to suggest that they belong to the Anatolian group, Sidetic (c. 300–100 BCE) and Pisidian (c. 1–200 CE) are very poorly attested languages.

Historical background of ancient Anatolia

      The earliest non-Indo-European texts—and the oldest textual evidence from Anatolia—are the so-called Cappadocian tablets (2000–1735 BCE), cuneiform documents kept by the merchants of central Anatolia. They are written in one of the Semitic languages, Old Assyrian, and mainly stem from trading centres such as the ancient city of Nesha (also known as Kanesh; now Kültepe, Tur.).

      It is customarily assumed that the Indo-Europeans entered Anatolia sometime in the 3rd millennium, although there are no specific archaeological data that might enable scholars to identify more closely the period of entry or the route the invaders followed. Hattian (Hattian language) (or Hattic) was the substratum language spoken in central and northern Anatolia before the entry of the Indo-European Hittites. All extant Hattian texts have been found in Hittite archives. Hattian is completely unrelated to Hittite and its sister languages as well as to Hurrian (Hurrian language), a language also spoken in Anatolia but originally from the east. In the Caucasus region that centres on Lake Van (Van, Lake), Hurrian of the 3rd and 2nd millennia BCE was replaced by the related Urartian language in the 1st millennium. However, the latter should not be considered a direct continuation of Hurrian. Hattian, Hurrian, and Urartian are all non-Indo-European.

      Although the Hattian and Hurrian peoples did influence Hittite culture, their contributions to the Hittite language were mostly limited to terms for local flora, fauna, and a few other categories. Comparisons of Hittite agricultural terms and those of other Indo-European subgroups indicate that the “Anatolians” seceded from the parent group before the creation of a common agricultural nomenclature but after the onset of a common Indo-European notion of the hereafter, pictured as a pastureland with grazing cattle “for which the dead king sets out.” This suggests that the Indo-European forebears of the later speakers of Hittite, Palaic, and Luwian, as well as those of minor members of this group, entered Anatolia together, following a common route, as the Anatolian languages share a considerable number of losses as well as innovations that presuppose a long common past.

      In the central parts of Anatolia, within the bend of the Halys River (now called the Kızıl River), and in the northern regions, Hittite and Palaic were influenced by Hattian as a substratum language. The Hattian culture also influenced the political and religious concepts of the newcomers, and a clear cultural dependency of the Indo-Europeans on the older Hattian population is evident. Some scholars have stressed the likelihood that farther to the south the Luwians (Luwian) might have been conversant with a different substratum language. In view of the absence of textual evidence and because knowledge of the Luwian vocabulary is rather restricted, it is perhaps not surprising that this possible substratum element escapes definition.

      After the fall of the Hittite empire (c. 1180 BCE), the most important invaders of Anatolia were the Phrygians, but their entry into recorded history does not begin until the 8th century BCE. From then until the 3rd century BCE, Old Phrygian (Phrygian language) is attested as the main language in central Anatolia. An Indo-European language, Old Phrygian is not considered to be part of the Anatolian group; instead, it is considered akin to Thracian (Thracian language), Illyrian (Illyrian language), or possibly Greek (Greek language).

      In the first half of the 1st millennium, the southern and western shores of Anatolia attracted Greek-speaking peoples; the western coast had attracted Greek settlers beginning in Mycenaean times, several centuries earlier. During the second half of the millennium, Greek entered central Anatolia as the language of the ruling caste; Latin took this role from about 200 BCE onward.

      In the Caucasus region to the east, Armenian (Armenian language)-speaking invaders penetrated into the former Urartian territory well before the beginning of the Persian period, probably in the 7th and 6th centuries BCE. During Persian times (559–331 BCE), a Persian (Iranian languages) ruling caste entered Anatolia and was still clearly recognizable in the Hellenistic and Roman periods (e.g., in Bithynia, Pontus, Cappadocia, and Commagene). Late data on names and scattered remarks made by Church Fathers indicate that until late Roman and perhaps even Byzantine times some Anatolian dialects remained in use in certain isolated parts of the interior. (See also Anatolia: Ancient Anatolia (Anatolia).)

Early research

      Studies of the Anatolian subgroup of Indo-European began in 1821 with Lycian, one of the most recent Anatolian offshoots in the temporal sequence. Later in the 19th century, scholars began to consider an earlier language, Hieroglyphic Luwian, which was initially thought to be a hieroglyphic form of Hittite. By the close of the 19th century, work had begun on the oldest of the Anatolian languages, 2nd-millennium Hittite. Although not acknowledged as such at the time, the first step in the right direction was taken in 1902, when Assyriologist Jørgen Alexander Knudtzon pointed out that the language of the so-called Arzawa letters (e.g., Hittite), from the Amarna (Amarna, Tell el-) archive, had an apparent affinity with Indo-European.

      The first series of excavations at the ancient Hittite capital of Hattusa (1906–12) was led by archaeologists Hugo Winckler and Theodore Makridi, and their efforts unearthed about 10,000 cuneiform tablets. It was work on this corpus that led archaeologist and linguist Bedřich Hrozný (Hrozný, Bedřich) to his epoch-making discovery that Hittite was indeed Indo-European (1915). For Hittite and its sister languages, the proposed connection to Indo-European was based on both the nominal (noun) declension and the verbal conjugation: the languages shared a nominative ending in -s, the accusative in -n, verbal endings like -ti and -nti for the 3rd person singular and plural of the present tense, and an imperative form such as estu ‘let it be.'

History and development

Languages using cuneiform writing (cuneiform) and hieroglyphs (hieroglyph)

Hittite (Hittite language)

 By the early 21st century some 30,000 tablets or fragments of tablets in the Hittite language had been recovered through archaeological excavations. The overwhelming majority of these were found in the tablet collections of Hattusa, although additional collections have been unearthed in the former Hittite provincial centres of Tapikka (Maşat Hüyük, Tur.), Sapinuwa (Ortaköy, Tur.), Sarissa (Kuşaklı, Tur.), and others since 1973. Hittite tablets from places other than the capital and these provincial centres are rare; only stray examples have been found, as at Alaca Hüyük, Alalakh (Tell Açana), Emar, Tarsus, Ugarit, Dur-Kurigalzu (now ʿAqarqūf, Iraq, west of Baghdad), and Amarna (Egypt). These findings attest to the growth of a great Hittite empire and its sphere of influence, especially between approximately 1350 and 1180 BCE. Other fragments have become known through antiquities dealers but are of unknown provenance.

      In Hittite cuneiform texts, the language is referred to as nesili (nasili) ‘in the language of Nesha' or nesumnili ‘in the language of the Neshite.' This is an obvious reference to the city of Nesha; according to Hittite history, the Hittite empire started with King Anitta's conquest of Nesha. By using the terms nesili and nesumnili, the Hittites distinguished their language from the substratum language, Hattian, which appears as hattili ‘in Hattian.' Although the Hittites chose to differentiate these two languages, they referred to themselves as “the people of Hatti”—the name of their predecessors in the region.

      Earlier Hittite linguistic material is represented by the indigenous proper names and a few loanwords found in the Cappadocian tablets, especially those from Nesha dating to circa 2000–1735 BCE. These texts are sometimes referred to as “Kaneshite” (at other times, scholars invoke Kültepe, the modern name of the city); the former is obviously the modern equivalent of the word kanisumnili ‘language of the Kaneshite' found in a Hittite text.

      Old Hittite, the written embodiment of the earliest Indo-European language that has been discovered so far, is known from some tablets preserved in a type of handwriting (“old ductus”; see epigraphy) that was typical of the Old Kingdom period (c. 1650–c. 1500 BCE). An intermediary “Dark Age” followed (c. 1500–c. 1420 BCE), from which hardly any Hittite linguistic material is preserved. The period from about 1420 to approximately 1350 BCE is sometimes referred to as the era of the so-called Middle Hittite language. Most of the texts in Old and Middle Hittite, however, are copies made during the later empire period (c. 1350–c. 1180 BCE).

      The archives of Hattusa have been found in various parts of the city, including the citadel, the Great Temple complex, and the so-called House on the Slope in the Lower City. Tablets have also been found in the temple area in the Upper City. Although the majority of the texts are concerned with religious subjects (hymns, prayers, myths, rituals, oracular wisdom, and festival texts), these collections also include material of historical, political, administrative, literary, and legal character.

      In addition, there is a genre of “scholarly literature” that consists of the material considered by the scribes to be essential for their training; it includes word lists, omens, and ritual prescriptions, all reflecting an encyclopaedic approach aimed at complete coverage of the subjects concerned. The Sumerian (Sumerian language) texts found in the Hattusa archives belong to this class of literature, while treaties and correspondence with foreign powers were written in Akkadian (Akkadian language), the diplomatic language of that period. Therefore, both Sumerian and Akkadian formed part of the curriculum of the qualified scribes working in the Hittite capital.

      Many of the genres noted here were considered to be so important as to be kept for hundreds of years and to be copied repeatedly. Others of a more ephemeral character—administrative texts, letters, and oracle recordings—were, as a rule, written on clay tablets that were preserved only for a generation or two. After having served their purpose, such documents were often recycled: the clay was ground up, moistened, and reconstituted into new tablets.

      The cuneiform adopted by the Hittite scribes is a variant of Mesopotamian (Mesopotamia, history of) cuneiform and closely resembles the ductus and shapes prevalent in tablets of the 17th century BCE (layer VII) from Alalakh. It is possible that the cuneiform script might have been introduced as a result of the Hittites inducing Syrian scribes to transfer their activities to Hattusa during the early part of the Old Kingdom, shortly after 1650 BCE. It has also been posited, with good reason, that the newly acquired script was first used to write Akkadian and was only later employed for Hittite as well.

      The Hittites recorded cuneiform script on as many as three kinds of writing material: clay, wood, and metal. Clay certainly was the most common and most durable tablet material; nearly all preserved Hittite texts are written on clay. These texts, however, often mention “wooden tablets”—wooden writing boards covered with wax. One such wooden writing board, without any writing preserved on it, was found in a shipwreck just off the Lycian coast, but the ship's provenance is unknown. As no wooden tablets have survived with intact writing, it is not known whether they were inscribed using cuneiform or hieroglyphics. For special purposes, metal tablets were made. The clay texts mention tablets of iron, bronze, silver, and gold; the official cuneiform version of the famous peace treaty between the pharaoh Ramses II and the Hittite king Hattusilis III, negotiated circa 1258 BCE, was said to be made of silver. Only one metal tablet had been found by the early 21st century: a bronze tablet found in Hattusa containing a state treaty between King Tudhaliyas IV (c. 1240–c. 1210 BCE) and his vassal Kurunta of Tarhuntassa in southern Anatolia.

Palaic (Palaic language)

      The Palaic language, which appears as palaumnili ‘language of the Palaite' in Hittite cuneiform texts, was the language of the region of Palā in northwest Anatolia from the 2nd millennium BCE (Palā approximates the location of Blaëne in the Greek period and Paphlagonia in the Roman). Palā, Luwiya, and Hattusa formed the three major Anatolian provinces of the Old Hittite kingdom, but, from the intermediary Dark Age onward, Kaska nomads engaged in raids against the settlements of northern Anatolia, and Palā declined in importance.

      Palaic is preserved only in a few liturgical fragments from Hattusa that were dedicated to the cult of the Hattian god Ziparwa. Palaic was surely extinct as a spoken language by the 13th century BCE and may have already been so by the 16th century, the period attributed to the earliest preserved texts in the language.

      The Indo-European character of Palaic was first advocated by Assyriologist Emil Forrer in 1922. As with Old Hittite, part of the Palaic material is preserved on tablets written in a hand known as “old ductus.” The knowledge of the limited vocabulary leaves much to be desired, but, despite some unmistakable influences from the non-Indo-European Hattian, several parallels—especially in the inflection of the noun, the forms of the demonstrative, relative, and enclitic pronouns, and the verbal endings—vouch for a close relationship to Hittite and Luwian.

Luwian (Luwian language)

 The Luwian (Luwian language) (or Luvian) language was spoken in southern Anatolia and in the Hittite provinces and allied states of northern Syria. Its status as a spoken language in western and central Anatolia is an unresolved question. Various writing systems exist for the language. Cuneiform Luwian refers to the language recorded in the Hittite cuneiform archives from Hattusa; it is found in ritual passages and loanwords throughout the Hittite texts of the 16th–13th centuries BCE.

      The hieroglyphs that came to be used to write Luwian were devised in Anatolia sometime early in the 2nd millennium and had already appeared on personal seals during the Old Hittite empire (1650–1500 BCE). During the Dark Age of the 16th and 15th centuries BCE, the early hieroglyphic writing grew into a fully developed system with logograms (logogram) (word-signs), syllabic values, and auxiliary signs. During the New Empire (1400–1190 BCE), the hieroglyphic script was in use for a multitude of purposes, including rock inscriptions and seals. From the early 12th-century demise of the empire into the 8th century BCE, the language remained in use in the Neo-Hittite states of southern Anatolia and Syria. Although Hieroglyphic Luwian is more widely attested than Cuneiform Luwian, radical revisions in the understanding of many hieroglyphic signs have shown that the two written forms of the language represent two very similar dialects whose precise relationship requires further research.

      As in the case of Palaic, the pioneering work on Cuneiform Luwian was done by Emil Forrer in 1922. New text materials were published in 1953, closely followed by both grammatical and vocabulary studies as well as a standard dictionary of the language (1959). The first attempts to decipher Hieroglyphic Luwian, made by archaeologist Archibald H. Sayce (Sayce, Archibald H) in the 1880s, were fortunate in some fundamental details. However, it was not until the 1930s that systematic and mutually stimulating research by scholars of several countries led to the establishment of a number of syllabic values for the characters as well as to a correct analysis of the sentence structure of the inscriptions. In his publication of the (bilingual) Hittite royal seals (in 1940 and 1942), pioneering Hittitologist Hans G. Güterbock bridged the gap between the inscriptions of the empire period and the late Neo-Hittite states; the seals found in the French excavations at Ugarit (in northern Syria) served a similar purpose. The most important finding of the mid-20th century was the discovery in 1947 by Helmuth T. Bossert (Bossert, Helmuth Theodor), an archaeologist and philologist, of the Karatepe bilingual inscriptions, written in Phoenician (Phoenician language) and Hieroglyphic Luwian.

      On many points the Luwian vocabulary is still an enigma. The unity between the various Luwian dialects and the close relationship of Luwian to Hittite, Palaic, Lycian, and Lydian, however, are secured by several linguistic parallels, especially in the singular inflection of the noun, the forms of certain pronouns, the verbal endings, and a number of lexical (vocabulary) correspondences.

Languages using an alphabet

Lycian (Lycian language)

      The Lycian language was spoken in southwestern Anatolia in the 1st millennium BCE. Two varieties of the language are distinguished, Lycian A and Lycian B (sometimes known as Milyan), although there are only a handful of texts in the latter. The Lycian alphabet was related to the Greek alphabet.

      The majority of the nearly 200 examples of written Lycian are inscriptions on coins and tombs; the coins derive from the period between 500 and about 360 BCE, while the tradition of the Lycian monumental inscriptions is thought to have continued into the 3rd century BCE. There are also some longer texts of a historical nature. One of these is a stela at Xanthus, the ancient Lycian capital. Another is a trilingual text in Aramaic (Aramaic language), Greek, and Lycian dedicating a shrine to the goddess Leto; found in 1973, it consolidated the modern understanding of the language.

      In the first phase of research, which ended about 1880, Lycian was investigated by an etymological (etymology) method in which it was linked up either with Greek or with the Iranian languages. Later a more reliable combinatory method, in which passages expressing similar contents are compared in order to obtain a better understanding of a language's structure, was introduced. In 1945 linguist Holger Pedersen (Pedersen, Holger) published a synthesis that proved conclusively that Lycian belongs to the Anatolian branch of Indo-European languages and indicated a relationship of Lycian with Hittite. This conclusion was slightly modified when Franz J. Tritsch (in 1950) and, later, Emmanuel Laroche showed that Lycian should be more specifically compared to Luwian. It is now known that Lycian shares many features with Hittite, Luwian, and Lydian, although crucial divergences from each of these languages establish it as an independent branch of the Anatolian subgroup.

Lydian (Lydian language)

      The Lydian (Lydian language) language was spoken in western Anatolia in the 1st millennium BCE. The more than 100 Lydian texts, written in an alphabet related to the Greek alphabet, were found chiefly at the ancient capital of Sardis (near present-day İzmir, Tur.). They include decrees and epitaphs, some of which were composed in verse; most were written during the 5th and 4th centuries BCE, although a few may have been created as early as the 7th century BCE.

      Early results concerning Lydian were reached using a strictly combinatory method. This research culminated in a conclusive article by Piero Meriggi on the Indo-European character of Lydian (1936). Subsequently other scholars published evaluations of the Lydian data, a dictionary, and a grammar book. The final obstacle to its classification as part of the Anatolian group of languages was removed in 1959 by linguist Onofrio Carruba, who proved that Lydian, like the other members of the group, does not possess a separate feminine gender.

      Lydian grammar shows that the language belongs to the same subgroup as Hittite and Luwian of the 2nd millennium and Lycian of the 1st millennium. However, in many respects it differs markedly from its nearest relatives. Understanding of the Lydian lexicon, and hence of the details of the texts, remained severely limited in the early 21st century.

Carian (Carian language)

      The Carian language was spoken in extreme southwestern Anatolia from the 1st millennium BCE. The chief evidence for Carian consists of more than 100 tomb inscriptions and numerous instances of graffiti from Egypt. Most of these inscriptions are from the city of Memphis, the site of a sizable community of Carian mercenaries employed by pharaohs during the 7th to 5th centuries BCE. A few texts on stone and other objects have also been found in Caria itself.

      Serious study of Carian began only in 1980 with the initial partial decipherment of the script by Egyptologist John Ray, who found several grammatical features suggesting that Carian is related to Hittite and Luwian and is part of the Anatolian group. His approach was successfully continued by Ignacio Adiego Lajara and fully confirmed by the discovery of a Carian-Greek bilingual in Kaunos in 1996 and 1997. Much remains uncertain, but the grammatical features thus attested confirm that Carian is related to Hittite and Luwian and is part of the Anatolian group.

Sidetic (Sidetic language) and Pisidian (Pisidian language)

      Sidetic (Sidetic language) and Pisidian (Pisidian language) are very poorly attested languages from the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE and the first two centuries CE, respectively. Sidetic texts include perhaps a half-dozen inscriptions and a few coins. Pisidian is known from perhaps two dozen texts, all short tomb inscriptions. Grammatical features demonstrate that both languages are related to Hittite and belong to the Anatolian group. The first reliable study of Sidetic was made by Bossert in 1950. The Sidetic texts are now included in the monumental work on the city of Side by Johannes Nollé. Claude Brixhe summarized what is known about Pisidian in 1988.

Linguistic characteristics

Grammatical characteristics

      In the Anatolian languages, the noun inflects, or indicates through its form, singular and plural, animate and inanimate, and common (masculine and feminine or “animate”) and neuter (or “inanimate”) gender. As in modern European languages, linguistic gender refers primarily to formal classes of nouns and corresponds only partially to the animacy or sex of the actual item to which the noun refers. The attested languages do not show a distinct dual number, a grammatical form specifically indicating two objects or feminine gender.

      Old Hittite distinguishes seven cases—varying forms of the noun that mark its function in a sentence, such as subject, direct object, indirect object, or possessor—in the singular, but these are reduced to five in the later language, and the other Anatolian languages show a similarly simplified system. Suffixes marking cases are inherited from or built on Indo-European material. One innovation is that the nominative of a neuter noun may not serve as the subject (i.e., as an agent) of a transitive verb. The noun in such a role appears in a case called “ergative” (appearing in Hittite as -ants): neuter wātar ‘water,' but witenants ārri ‘the water washes.' On the other hand, a striking archaism is that Hittite and Luwian preserve an archaic type of noun with alternating -r and -n suffixes that appear in different cases: Hittite wāt-ar, wit-en-as ‘water'; Luwian dū-r, dū-n-ati ‘urine.'

      The personal pronouns show recognizable Indo-European stems and the characteristic use of distinct subject and nonsubject forms, as with Hittite wēs ‘we' and antsās ‘us.' Peculiar to Anatolian is a u vowel in the first person singular, with Hittite ūk ‘I' and ammuk ‘me' and Luwian (a)mu, Lycian amu/ẽmu, and Lydian amu, all meaning both ‘I' and ‘me.' Another innovation is a demonstrative stem (‘this, that') appearing as abā- ‘that' in Hittite, Palaic, and Luwian and as ebe- ‘this' in Lycian; the same stem is used as the personal pronoun bi- ‘he, she, it' in Lydian. The relative-interrogative pronoun kwi- ‘who' (compare Latin quī/quis) is pan-Anatolian. The Anatolian languages have greatly elaborated the Indo-European system of enclitic pronouns (unaccented pronouns that are attached to a preceding accented word), as with Hittite kuenzi-us ‘kills them,' where -us indicates ‘them.'.

      The Anatolian verb inflects for singular and plural, as in the noun; for two tenses, present (also used for the future) and preterite (past); and for two moods, indicative and imperative. In Hittite, Palaic, Luwian, and probably Lycian there is, besides the active voice, a mediopassive voice that marks actions that affect the subject, as in the contrast between active neyanzi ‘they turn (someone or something else)' and mediopassive neyantari ‘they turn (themselves).' The mediopassive is also used for actions that are inherently internal to the subject. For instance, to render ‘lies, reclines' in Hittite is kittari, in Palaic kītar, in Luwian zīyar, and in Lycian sijẽni. The mediopassive may also be used for the passive, when a subject has an action performed on it, as in the Hittite dattari ‘is taken.'.

      The basic verb stem can express various aspectual distinctions, such as the degree to which an action is ongoing or complete. Examples include the Hittite dāi ‘takes' or ‘is taking' and dāhhun ‘I took' or ‘I have taken.' However, infixes such as -ske- may be added to any verb stem to overtly indicate various imperfective meanings, as with the Hittite daskemi ‘I am taking,' ‘I take (several objects),' or ‘I repeatedly/habitually take.' Hittite and Luwian also combine the verbs “have” and “be” with the past participle to indicate an attained state, a construction remarkably close to the English perfect: “had taken” is rendered in Hittite as dān ‘taken' + harta ‘had'; “because they had heard about me” is rendered nu conjunction + -mu ‘me' + kuit ‘because' + istamassan ‘heard' + harker ‘they had.'

      A deservedly famous feature of the Anatolian languages is the practice of attaching not only enclitic pronouns but also whole series of particles of diverse meanings to the first accented word in a sentence, including conjunctions that begin sentences. This usage is found elsewhere in older Indo-European languages, but the Anatolian group has exploited it to an unusual degree. For instance, Hittite nu-war-at-si-kan dānzi ‘they take it from him' contains the conjunction nu, a particle -war- indicating the sentence is a direct quotation, -at- ‘it' marking the direct object, -si- ‘to him' marking the indirect object, and a particle -kan whose precise meaning is still not determined, followed by the verb dānzi ‘they take.'

Phonological characteristics (phonology)

      The five-vowel system of Indo-European is reduced to four by the merger of inherited o with other vowels, so that Hittite, Lycian, and probably Palaic show four vowels: a, e, i, and u. Luwian reduces this further to a, i, and u by merging e usually with a, but under certain conditions with i. The attested o vowel of Lydian is secondary. Hittite, Palaic, and Luwian preserve a contrast between short and long vowels, but Lycian and Lydian probably do not. The latter two languages develop distinct nasalized vowels /ẽ/ and /ã/. Only Hittite preserves in a significant way the vowel gradation known as “ablaut” (compare English sing, sang, sung), as with ēs-tsi ‘is' versus as-antsi ‘are.'

      The Anatolian languages reduce the three contrasting series of stop consonants inherited from Proto-Indo-European to two. One of these represents etymological voiceless stops and the other voiced stops, but the pronunciation in the attested languages is debatable. As first argued by linguist Jerzy Kuryłowicz (Kuryłowicz, Jerzy) in 1927, Hittite (as well as Palaic and Luwian) provides in the form of a consonant h(h) direct evidence for the “laryngeal” consonants reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European on purely internal grounds by linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (Saussure, Ferdinand de) in 1879. Study of the details of the development of these guttural (or pharyngeal) fricatives in Anatolian continues.

Lexical data

 Some examples of correspondences in vocabulary are given in the table. The oft-cited false impression that Hittite has replaced much of its vocabulary with borrowings from non-Indo-European languages is due to the peculiar nature of the preserved texts. Most of these describe the state cult or private rituals, areas of life where foreign influence on Hittite culture was unusually strong. Careful analysis shows that roughly 80 percent of Hittite core vocabulary is inherited from Proto-Indo-European, and the limited available evidence suggests a similar figure for the other languages.

Relationship with the other subgroups

      The Anatolian languages of the 2nd millennium BCE are the oldest Indo-European languages attested. The traditional picture of Indo-European thus faces a serious challenge in the apparent absence in Anatolian of such features as the feminine gender for nouns, the subjunctive and optative moods (mood), and the verb tenses (tense) aorist (usually indicating simple past ‘ran') and perfect (indicating an attained state ‘has run') known from other archaic Indo-European languages.

      There have been two major responses to this dilemma. One approach has sought to show that Anatolian inherited but lost all the categories named above (perhaps preserving a few crucial remnants). A radically opposing viewpoint, widely known as the “Indo-Hittite (Indo-Hittite languages)” hypothesis, holds that Anatolian and Proto-Indo-European, the reconstructed source of all other Indo-European languages, are collateral (same-generation) descendants of a still earlier linguistic stage, Indo-Hittite (Indo-Hittite languages), that lacked these characteristics. This perspective posits that the absence of these grammatical features in Anatolian reflects its direct descent from the earlier Indo-Hittite stage.

      This issue is far from settled, but it is unlikely that either of the models just described is valid in their extreme form. There is growing evidence that categories like the feminine gender and the aorist tense are reflected in Anatolian, but not in the form in which they have traditionally been reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European. Some specialists take this to show that speakers of the forerunner of the Anatolian languages separated from the common prehistoric speech community a few generations or a few centuries before other groups. However, no single viewpoint can be said to represent a consensus of scholars in the field.

Philo H.J. Houwink ten Cate H. Craig Melchert Theo P.J. van den Hout

Additional Reading

Grammatical sketches of all the Indo-European languages of Anatolia except Pisidian and Sidetic are available in Roger D. Woodard (ed.), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages (2004). Authoritative discussions of Pisidian and Sidetic are available in French and German, respectively. What is known of Pisidian is recounted in Claude Brixhe, La Langue des inscriptions épichoriques de Pisidie, in Yoël Arbeitman (ed.), A Linguistic Happening in Memory of Ben Schwarz (1988), pp. 131–155; information on Sidetic is available in Johannes Nollé, Side im Altertum: Geschichte und Zeugnisse, 2nd ed. (2001). Concise descriptions of the cuneiform languages of the 2nd millennium BCE appear in H. Craig Melchert, “Indo-European Languages of Anatolia,” in Jack Sasson et al. (eds.), Civilizations of the Ancient Near East, vol. 4 (1995), pp. 2151–60. A detailed description of Hittite grammar is presented in Harry A. Hoffner, Jr., and H. Craig Melchert, A Grammar of the Hittite Language, vol. 1 (2008). The standard handbook on Carian is Ignacio Adiego, The Carian Language (2007).Lucid and well-balanced discussions of population movements and linguistic diversity are provided by Philo H.J. Houwink ten Cate, “Ethnic Diversity and Population Movement in Anatolia,” in the Sasson work cited above, vol. 1, pp. 259–270; and Trevor Bryce, The Kingdom of the Hittites, new ed. (2005). There is no consensus on the historical relationship of the Anatolian languages in the narrow sense (i.e., without Phrygian) to the rest of Indo-European nor on the question of whether Indo-European is or is not intrusive to Asia Minor. The diversity of viewpoints is exemplified by the papers and critical responses in Robert Drews (ed.), Greater Anatolia and the Indo-Hittite Language Family (2001); additional discussion is presented in a collection of essays by Jaan Puhvel, Epilecta Indoeuropaea (2002), especially in section 19, “Whence the Hittite, Whither the Jonesian Vision?,” pp. 92–107, and section 33, “Anatolian: Autochthon or Interloper?,” pp. 181–193.The origins, history, and decipherment of the Anatolian hieroglyphs are described by David Hawkins in “Scripts and Texts,” chapter 4 in H. Craig Melchert (ed.), The Luwians (2003), pp. 130–169. The early history of decipherment of various Anatolian scripts is well described in J. Friedrich, Extinct Languages (1957, reissued 1993; originally published in German, 1954).

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