Hattic language

Spoken in

Isolated language

• Hattish

-

Mis (not coded)

Xht

The Hattic ( called by the Hittites hattili ) was the language of the substrate population in Anatolia, the Hatti, who lived in the same area as the later immigrated Hittites and were not driven by them. It is the oldest documented by texts language of Anatolia. This language was not written down by native speakers, but by the Hittites, from whose language the Hattic completely different in structure and vocabulary. The distribution area of the Hatti included from the intrusion of Indo-European Hittites, Palaer and Luwians throughout central and northern Anatolia to the Black Sea coast and parts of Cappadocia; Hattish extinct around 1500 BC as a spoken language, but had a cult language in Hittite empire is still very important.

Relationships with other languages

The Hattic not only points to the Hittite no family relationship on, but also to any of the other known languages ​​in Altanatolien and in the neighboring areas. According to current knowledge, the Hattic must be considered as a separate language. Hypotheses, to put it with the West Caucasian languages ​​in relationship are not yet proven. There are some lexical echoes of Hurrian, which in turn contacts altkaukasischen languages ​​are attributed. Many of these purely lexical comparisons are now obsolete. They are mostly due to the lack of understanding of the Hatti pre-, in-, and suffixes.

The backed lexical knowledge of Hatti are low and also thematically severely limited by the use in the cultic area. Many prefixes, infixes and suffixes difficult even professionals, to identify the actual root word hattischer words. Since Hattish was consistently not written in the previously existing texts by people with hattischer native language, enter it also trivial spelling errors or spelling variants of Hattish - specific sounds overly often. The relationship to the Hurrian or Caucasian languages ​​is therefore uncertain. However, given the relatively large number of known but not yet localized and excavated residence cities in Hattish - Hittite times in Asia Minor certainly optimism of place that future inscription finds throw more light on the Hattic language and its possible connections to the languages ​​of neighboring peoples.

The culture and religion of the Empire althethitischen is in much of a continuation of the Hatti civilization, which can also be seen in the use of Hatti primarily as a liturgical language of the Hittites. Linguistic significance of the Hattic mainly as a substrate for the Hittite language and Palaische, so the Anatolian Indo-European languages ​​North and Central Anatolia, obviously less for the Luwian.

Hattisches language material

The survival of the Hatti language residues is due to the Hittites who had the habit of talking about "foreign" gods as part of their rites and liturgies each in their own language. So also the Hatti gods were addressed to Hattish and fixed in writing this language so; the spectrum of the speech material is characterized, however, very limited. The exception Hattic religious language material is (now Boğazkale ) preserved in Hittite cuneiform by the State archives of the Hittite capital Hattusa. There are besides longer monolingual or bilingual texts Hatti - Hittite bilinguals Hattish - with often disastrous Hittite translation - and incantations that have been handed down within Hittite rituals. In addition, there are Hattic loanwords and names in Hittite, Palaischen and ancient Assyrian.

Fundamental to the analysis of Hatti are the works of Forrer in 1922 and Guterbock 1935. According to the publication of the summary work of Oğuz Soysal in 2004, currently is a Reexamination of the Hatti material underneath.

Character of the Hatti language

The material low and poorly preserved hinders any thorough research into the language of Hatti. The agglutinative morphology mainly works with prefixes. Examples are ( Friedrich 1931, after Forrer ):

Grammatical markers

Some verbal forms