Indo-Hittite

Indo-Hittite
Indo-Hittite
Linguistic classification	Proposed primary language family
Proto-language	Proto-Indo-Hittite
Subdivisions	Anatolian †; Other Indo-European languages ;
ISO 639-2 / 5	ine
Glottolog	indo1319 (Indo-European)

Last updated October 07, 2023

In Indo-European linguistics, the term Indo-Hittite (also Indo-Anatolian) refers to Edgar Howard Sturtevant's 1926 hypothesis that the Anatolian languages may have split off a Pre-Proto-Indo-European language considerably earlier than the separation of the remaining Indo-European languages. The term may be somewhat confusing, as the prefix Indo- does not refer to the Indo-Aryan branch in particular, but is iconic for Indo-European, and the -Hittite part refers to the Anatolian language family as a whole.

Proponents of the Indo-Hittite hypothesis claim the separation may have preceded the spread of the remaining branches by several millennia, possibly as early as 7000 BC. In this context, the proto-language before the split of Anatolian would be called Proto-Indo-Hittite, and the proto-language of the remaining branches, before the next split, presumably of Tocharian, would be called Proto-Indo-European (PIE). This is a matter of terminology, though, as the hypothesis does not dispute the ultimate genetic relation of Anatolian with Indo-European; it just means to emphasize the assumed magnitude of temporal separation.

According to Craig Melchert, the current tendency 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."^[1] Hittite, as well as its Anatolian cousins, split off from Proto-Indo-European at an early stage, thereby preserving archaisms that were later lost in the other Indo-European languages.^[2]

Linguistics

Traditionally there has been a strong notion among Indo-European linguistics that the Anatolian branch was separated earlier than other branches. Within the framework of the Kurgan hypothesis, the split is estimated to have occurred in roughly 4000 BC.

Some fundamental shared features such as the aorist category of the verb (which denotes action without reference to duration or completion), with the perfect active particle -s fixed to the stem, link the Anatolian languages closer to the southeastern languages such as Greek and Armenian^[3] and to Tocharian.^[4]

Features such as the lack of feminine gender in the declensions of nominals, a division between an "animate" common gender and an "inanimate" neuter gender, a reduced vowel system, a tendency towards a greater simplicity of the case system, a less typical Indo-European vocabulary and other striking features have been interpreted alternately as archaic retentions, which means that the common Indo-European structural features observed in the non-Anatolian branches evolved at a later stage, or just as later innovations being caused by prolonged contacts in typologically alien surroundings "en route" or after their arrival in Anatolia. In favor of the Indo-Hittite hypothesis are the very Indo-European agricultural terminology conserved in Anatolia, otherwise considered the cradle of agriculture, and the laryngeal theory that hypothesizes the existence of one or more additional spirant or stop consonants in the Indo-European parent language that has only been attested in Hittite and of which only traces are left outside Anatolian.^[5]

However, in general this hypothesis is considered to attribute too much weight to the Anatolian evidence and as early as 1938 it was demonstrated that the Anatolian group should be placed on the same level as other Indo-European subgroups and not as equal with Indo-European. According to another view the Anatolian subgroup left the Indo-European parent language comparatively late, approximately at the same time as Indo-Iranian and later than the Greek or Armenian divisions. A third view, especially prevalent in the so-called French school of Indo-European studies, holds that extant similarities in non-satem languages in general—including Anatolian—might be due to their peripheral location in the Indo-European language area and early separation, rather than indicating a special ancestral relationship.^[6]

Genetics

Recent paleogenetic studies of population migration reportedly give new credence to Proto-Indo-Anatolian theories,^[7] but several linguists have disputed this and believe that genetics cannot accurately describe historical language change.^[8]

Notes

↑ Melchert 2012 , p. 7.
↑ Jasanoff 2003 , p. 20 with footnote 41
↑ Britannica 15th edition 22:593
↑ Adams, Douglas Q.; Lane, George S. (2010) [1974]. "The Tocharian problem". In Preece, Warren E.; Goetz, Philip W. (eds.). Tocharian languages. Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 22 (15th ed.). p. 667. ISBN 978-1-59339-292-5.
↑ Britannica 15th edition, 22 p. 586, 589, 593
↑ Britannica 15th edition, 22 p. 594, "Indo-Hittite hypothesis"
↑ Lazaridis, Iosif; et al. (2022). "The genetic history of the Southern Arc: A bridge between West Asia and Europe". Science. 377 (6609): eabm4247. doi: 10.1126/science.abm4247 . PMID 36007055. S2CID 251843620.
↑ Pereltsvaig, Asya (2015). The Indo-European Controversy: Facts and Fallacies in Historical Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1107054530.

Related Research Articles

The Hittites were an Anatolian people who played an important role in establishing first a kingdom in Kussara, then the Kanesh or Nesha kingdom, and next an empire centered on Hattusa in north-central Anatolia. This empire reached its height during the mid-14th century BC under Šuppiluliuma I, when it encompassed most of Anatolia and parts of the northern Levant and Upper Mesopotamia.

The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family—English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutch, and Spanish—have expanded through colonialism in the modern period and are now spoken across several continents. The Indo-European family is divided into several branches or sub-families, of which there are eight groups with languages still alive today: Albanian, Armenian, Balto-Slavic, Celtic, Germanic, Hellenic, Indo-Iranian, and Italic/Romance; and another nine subdivisions that are now extinct.

The Anatolian languages are an extinct branch of Indo-European languages that were spoken in Anatolia, part of present-day Turkey. The best known Anatolian language is Hittite, which is considered the earliest-attested Indo-European language.

The laryngeal theory is a theory in the historical linguistics of the Indo-European languages positing that:

Luwian, sometimes known as Luvian or Luish, is an ancient language, or group of languages, within the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European language family. The ethnonym Luwian comes from Luwiya – the name of the region in which the Luwians lived. Luwiya is attested, for example, in the Hittite laws.

Hittite, also known as Nesite, is an extinct 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, now long extinct, is attested in cuneiform, in records dating from the 17th to the 13th centuries BC, with isolated Hittite loanwords and numerous personal names appearing in an Old Assyrian context from as early as the 20th century BC, making it the earliest attested use of the Indo-European languages.

Palaic is an extinct Indo-European language, attested in cuneiform tablets in Bronze Age Hattusa, the capital of the Hittites. Palaic, which was apparently spoken mainly in northern Anatolia, is generally considered to be one of four primary sub-divisions of the Anatolian languages, alongside Hittite, Luwic and Lydian.

Indo-Uralic is a controversial hypothetical language family consisting of Indo-European and Uralic.

Graeco-Armenian is the hypothetical common ancestor of Greek and Armenian branches that postdates Proto-Indo-European language. Its status is somewhat similar to that of the Italo-Celtic grouping: each is widely considered plausible without being accepted as established communis opinio. The hypothetical Proto-Graeco-Armenian stage would need to date to the 3rd millennium BC and would be only barely different from either late Proto-Indo-European or Graeco-Armeno-Aryan.

The Anatolian hypothesis, also known as the Anatolian theory or the sedentary farmer theory, first developed by British archaeologist Colin Renfrew in 1987, proposes that the dispersal of Proto-Indo-Europeans originated in Neolithic Anatolia. It is the main competitor to the Kurgan hypothesis, or steppe theory, which enjoys more academic favor.

The Armenian hypothesis, also known as the Near Eastern model, is a theory of the Proto-Indo-European homeland, initially proposed by linguists Tamaz V. Gamkrelidze and Vyacheslav Ivanov in the early 1980s, which suggests that the Proto-Indo-European language was spoken during the 5th–4th millennia BC in "eastern Anatolia, the southern Caucasus, and northern Mesopotamia".

The Proto-Indo-European homeland was the prehistoric linguistic homeland of the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE). From this region, its speakers migrated east and west, and went on to form the proto-communities of the different branches of the Indo-European language family.

Edgar Howard Sturtevant was an American linguist.

The h₂e-conjugation theory adds a third conjugation to the two generally accepted conjugations of the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE), the thematic and athematic conjugations.

The Indo-European Etymological Dictionary is a research project of the Department of Comparative Indo-European Linguistics at Leiden University, initiated in 1991 by Peter Schrijver and others. It is financially supported by the Faculty of Humanities and Centre for Linguistics of Leiden University, Brill Publishers, and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research.

Jay Harold Jasanoff is an American linguist and Indo-Europeanist, best known for his h₂e-conjugation theory of the Proto-Indo-European verbal system. He teaches Indo-European linguistics and historical linguistics at Harvard University.

Alwin Kloekhorst is a Dutch linguist, Indo-Europeanist and Hittitologist.

Languages of the Indo-European family are classified as either centum languages or satem languages according to how the dorsal consonants of the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) developed. An example of the different developments is provided by the words for "hundred" found in the early attested Indo-European languages. In centum languages, they typically began with a sound, but in satem languages, they often began with.

The grammar of the Hittite language has a highly conservative verbal system and rich nominal declension. The language is attested in cuneiform, and is the earliest attested Indo-European language.

Hittite phonology is the description of the reconstructed phonology or pronunciation of the Hittite language. Because Hittite as a spoken language is extinct, thus leaving no living daughter languages, and no contemporary descriptions of the pronunciation are known, little can be said with certainty about the phonetics and the phonology of the language. Some conclusions can be made, however, by noting its relationship to the other Indo-European languages, by studying its orthography and by comparing loanwords from nearby languages.

References

Jasanoff, Jay H. (2003). Hittite and the Indo-European Verb. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199249053.001.0001. ISBN 9780199249053.
Melchert, H. Craig (2012). "The Position of Anatolian" (PDF).
Schmidt, Karl Horst (1992). "Contributions from new data to the reconstruction of the proto-language". In Polomé, Edgar C.; Winter, Werner (eds.). Reconstructing Languages and Cultures. Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs. Vol. 58. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. pp. 35–62. doi:10.1515/9783110867923.35. ISBN 9783110126716.
Sturtevant, Edgar Howard (1931). "Hittite Glossary: Words of Known or Conjectured Meaning, with Sumerian Ideograms and Accadian Words Common in Hittite Texts". Language. Language Monograph, 9. Linguistic Society of America. 7 (2): 3–82. doi:10.2307/522061. JSTOR 522061.
Sturtevant, Edgar Howard (1932). "The Development of the Stops in Hittite". Journal of the American Oriental Society. American Oriental Society. 52 (1): 1–12. doi:10.2307/593573. JSTOR 593573.
Sturtevant, Edgar Howard; Hahn, E. Adelaide. A Comparative Grammar of the Hittite Language. William Dwight Whitney Linguistic Series. Vol. 1. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Sturtevant, Edgar H. (1942). The Indo-Hittite laryngeals. Baltimore, MD: Linguistic Society of America. doi:10.2307/j.ctt1x76d2x. JSTOR j.ctt1x76d2x.
Sturtevant, Edgar H. (1940). "Evidence for Voicing in Indo-Hittite γ". Language. Linguistic Society of America. 16 (2): 81–87. doi:10.2307/408942. JSTOR 408942.
Sturtevant, Edgar H.; Bechtel, George (1935). A Hittite Chrestomathy. William Dwight Whitney Linguistic Series. Philadelphia, PA: Linguistic Society of America.

Indo-Hittite

Contents

Linguistics

Genetics

See also

Notes

Related Research Articles

References

Further reading