Hattic was a language spoken by the
HattiansThe Hattians were an ancient people who inhabited the land of Hatti in present-day central and southeastern parts of Anatolia, Turkey. The Hattian civilisation was situated between ca...
in Asia Minor between the
3rdThe 3rd millennium BC spans the Early to Middle Bronze Age.It represents a period of time in which imperialism, or the desire to conquer, grew to prominence, in the city states of the Middle East, but also throughout Eurasia, with Indo-European expansion to Anatolia, Europe and Central Asia. The...
and the
2ndThe 2nd millennium BC marks the transition from the Middle to the Late Bronze Age.Its first half is dominated by the Middle Kingdom of Egypt and Babylonia. The alphabet develops. Indo-Iranian migration onto the Iranian plateau and onto the Indian subcontinent propagates the use of the chariot...
millennia BC. Scholars call this language 'Hattic' to distinguish it from the
Hittite languageHittite is the extinct language once spoken by the Hittites, a people who created an empire centered on Hattusa in north-central Anatolia...
--the Indo-European language of the Hittite Empire.
The heartland of this oldest attested language of
AnatoliaAnatolia is a geographic region of Western Asia, comprising most of the modern Republic of Turkey. The region is bounded by the Black Sea to the north, the Caucasus to the northeast, the Iranian plateau to the southeast, the Mediterranean Sea to the south and the Aegean Sea to the west...
, before the arrival of
NesianHittite is the extinct language once spoken by the Hittites, a people who created an empire centered on Hattusa in north-central Anatolia...
(i.e., "
HittiteHittite is the extinct language once spoken by the Hittites, a people who created an empire centered on Hattusa in north-central Anatolia...
") speakers, ranged from
HattusaHattusa was the capital of the Hittite Empire in the late Bronze Age...
(which they called "Hattus") northward to
NerikNerik was a Bronze Age city to the north of the Hittite capitals Hattusa and Sapinuwa. The Hittites held it as sacred to a storm god who was the son of Wurusemu, sun goddess of Arinna...
.
Hattic was a language spoken by the
HattiansThe Hattians were an ancient people who inhabited the land of Hatti in present-day central and southeastern parts of Anatolia, Turkey. The Hattian civilisation was situated between ca...
in Asia Minor between the
3rdThe 3rd millennium BC spans the Early to Middle Bronze Age.It represents a period of time in which imperialism, or the desire to conquer, grew to prominence, in the city states of the Middle East, but also throughout Eurasia, with Indo-European expansion to Anatolia, Europe and Central Asia. The...
and the
2ndThe 2nd millennium BC marks the transition from the Middle to the Late Bronze Age.Its first half is dominated by the Middle Kingdom of Egypt and Babylonia. The alphabet develops. Indo-Iranian migration onto the Iranian plateau and onto the Indian subcontinent propagates the use of the chariot...
millennia BC. Scholars call this language 'Hattic' to distinguish it from the
Hittite languageHittite is the extinct language once spoken by the Hittites, a people who created an empire centered on Hattusa in north-central Anatolia...
--the Indo-European language of the Hittite Empire.
The heartland of this oldest attested language of
AnatoliaAnatolia is a geographic region of Western Asia, comprising most of the modern Republic of Turkey. The region is bounded by the Black Sea to the north, the Caucasus to the northeast, the Iranian plateau to the southeast, the Mediterranean Sea to the south and the Aegean Sea to the west...
, before the arrival of
NesianHittite is the extinct language once spoken by the Hittites, a people who created an empire centered on Hattusa in north-central Anatolia...
(i.e., "
HittiteHittite is the extinct language once spoken by the Hittites, a people who created an empire centered on Hattusa in north-central Anatolia...
") speakers, ranged from
HattusaHattusa was the capital of the Hittite Empire in the late Bronze Age...
(which they called "Hattus") northward to
NerikNerik was a Bronze Age city to the north of the Hittite capitals Hattusa and Sapinuwa. The Hittites held it as sacred to a storm god who was the son of Wurusemu, sun goddess of Arinna...
. Other cities mentioned in Hattic include Tuhumiyara and Tissaruliya.
The Hittites conquered Hattus from Kanesh to its south, and thence eventually absorbed or replaced the Hattic speakers (
HattiansThe Hattians were an ancient people who inhabited the land of Hatti in present-day central and southeastern parts of Anatolia, Turkey. The Hattian civilisation was situated between ca...
); but they retained the name
HattiHatti in Bronze Age Anatolia refers to:*the area of Hattusa, roughly delimited by the Halys bend*the Hattians of the 3rd and 2nd millennia BC*the Hittite Empire of ca 1400 BC–1200 BC...
for the region.
The Hittite term for Hattic was
hattili after the city of Hattus, whereas the Hittite dynasty called their own language
nesili after their city of origin Kanesh. The form "Hittite" in English originally comes from biblical
HethHeth may refer to:* Heth , a letter in many Semitic alphabets* Children of Heth, a Canaanite nation in the Hebrew Bible, purportedly named after Heth, son of Canaan, son of Ham, son of Noah* figures in the Book of Mormon:...
, quite possibly connected to common Assyrian and Egyptian designations of "Land of the Hatti" (Khatti) west of the
EuphratesThe Euphrates is the longest and historically one of the most important rivers of Southwest Asia. Together with the Tigris, the Euphrates is one of the two defining rivers of Mesopotamia...
. It is unknown what native speakers of "
hattili" called their own language.
Corpus
No documents have been found in which the native Hattic speakers wrote their own language. Scholars today rely on indirect sources or mentions by their neighbours and successors, the Nesian-speaking Hittites. Some Hattic words can be found in religious tablets of Hittite priests, dating from the 14th and 13th centuries BC. Those passages contained between the lines of the text signs with the explanation "the priest is now speaking in Hattian".
Roots of Hattic words can also be found in the names of mountains, rivers, cities and gods. Other Hattic words can be found in some mythological texts. The most important of these is the myth "The Moon God who fell from the Sky", written in both Hattic language and Hittite.
The catalogued Hattic documents from
HattusaHattusa was the capital of the Hittite Empire in the late Bronze Age...
span CTH 725-745. Of these CTH 728, 729, 731, 733, and 736 are Hattic / Hittite bilinguals. CTH 737 is a Hattic incantation for the festival at Nerik. One key (if fragmentary) bilingual is the story of "The Moon God Who Fell from the Sky".
There are additional Hattic texts in
SapinuwaSapinuwa or Shapinuwa was a Bronze Age Hittite city.- Digs :In the first excavated region was a Cyclopean-walled building dubbed "Building A". Building A has yielded 3000 tablets and fragments...
, which had not been published as of 2004.
Orthography
The Hittites used Sumero-Akkadian
cuneiformCuneiform can refer to:*Cuneiform script, an ancient writing system originating in Mesopotamia in the 4th millennium BC*Cuneiform , three bones in the human foot*Cuneiform Records, a music record label...
for their own language, and they applied this system to the Hattic language as well.
In the Hittite form of cuneiform, all sibilants are written with the "sh" phonograms. Hittite scribes applied this to Hattic as well.
Language characteristics
The Hattic language is a language peculiar to itself and completely different from any Indo-European or Semitic language.
Known words include:
- child = pinu;
- god = shapu;
- moon god = Kasku;
- sun goddess = Wurusemu;
- temple = hilamar.
Hattic formed a "collective" plural by adding a
wa- prefixA prefix is an affix which is placed before the stem of a word. Particularly in the study of Semitic languages, a prefix is called a preformative, as they can alter the form of the words to which they are fixed.Examples of prefixes:...
:
e.g., "The Gods" =
washapu. It formed conventional plurals with a
le- prefix: "children" =
lepinu.
Certain similarities between Hattic and both
NorthwestThe Northwest Caucasian languages, also called Abkhazo-Adyghean, or sometimes Pontic as opposed to Caspian , are a group of languages spoken in the Caucasus region, chiefly in Russia , the disputed territory of Abkhazia, and Turkey, with smaller communities scattered throughout the...
(e.g.,
AbkhazAbkhaz is a Northwest Caucasian language spoken mainly by the Abkhaz people. It is the official language of Abkhazia, where around 100,000 people speak it. Furthermore, it is spoken by thousands of members of the Abkhazian diaspora in Turkey, Georgia's autonomous republic of Adjara, Syria, Jordan...
) and
South CaucasianThe South Caucasian languages are spoken primarily in Georgia, with smaller groups of speakers in Turkey, Azerbaijan, Iran, Russia and Israel. There are approximately 5.2 million speakers of this language family group worldwide.It is not known to be related to any other language group in the world...
(Kartvelian) languages have led to assumptions by some scholars about the possibility of a linguistic block stretching from central
AnatoliaAnatolia is a geographic region of Western Asia, comprising most of the modern Republic of Turkey. The region is bounded by the Black Sea to the north, the Caucasus to the northeast, the Iranian plateau to the southeast, the Mediterranean Sea to the south and the Aegean Sea to the west...
to the
CaucasusThe Caucasus or Caucas is a geopolitical region between at the border of Europe and Asia. It is home to the Caucasus Mountains, including Europe's highest mountain ....
.
External links
- A detailed description by Igor Diakonov
Igor Mikhailovich Diakonov was a Russian historian, linguist, and translator and a renowned expert in the Ancient Near East and its languages....
(in Russian)