Abbreviations & Conventions i ABBREVIATIONS & CONVENTIONAL MARKINGS [Should we list our grammatical abbreviations here, or just state that we follow the conventions of the CHD in these matters?] † Forms marked by a following † are æi-conjugation intrusions in paradigms of mi-verbs. * preceding a form indicates it is hypothetical or reconstructed. Ð in Hittite transcriptions indicates a boundary before a clitic element. Unlike the verbs in the Semitic languages, Hittite verbs with third person subjects are gender indifferent. To avoid ugly renderings like “he/she/it …-s” in our translations we have arbitrarily used the masculine pronoun “he”. i 1. Orthography & Phonology 1 CHAPTER 1 ORTHOGRAPHY AND PHONOLOGY The Cuneiform Writing System of the Hittites 1.1 The Hittite texts were written by professional scribes on clay tablets, impressed with a stylus and then dried in the sun. The writing system derives ultimately from Lower Mesopotamia, present-day Iraq, where it was devised by the Sumerians and adapted centuries later for the writing of the semitic Akkadian language. In addition to cuneiform writing on clay tablets the Hittites occasionally made use of a hieroglyphic script (Plate 2). During the earliest phase of their kingdom’s history, called the Old Hittite period, the kings used this hieroglyphic script to inscribe their names and titles on stamp and cylinder seals. Much later, during the so-called New Hittite (or Empire) period, kings began to use this system for carving royal inscriptions on cliffs or stelae. The language in which these latter inscriptions were composed was Luwian, a tongue closely related to Hittite. 1.2 Before the advent of the Old Assyrian merchant colonies at the beginning of the second millennium B.C. there was no writing in Anatolia (HdO 161f.). Once the Old Assyrian writing system arrived it was employed not only by the Assyrian merchants, but also on occasions by the local Anatolian rulers (Balkan 1957, HdO 162). Among these local rulers may be numbered Anitta, King of Kuååar and Neåa, one of whose texts survives for us in an Old Hittite tablet (edition by Neu 1974). 1.3 (*1.0.3) Exactly at what time or from what precise source the Hittites obtained the cuneiform writing system and applied it to the recording of their own IE language is not known. It might be suspected that, since Assyrian trading colonies existed in central Asia Minor (Cappadocia) from as early as c. 1900 BC and have left behind them written documents composed in cuneiform, the Hittites would have obtained knowledge of the cuneiform writing system from them. But even a cursory comparison of Old Assyrian (Plate 3) and Old Hittite cuneiform writing (Plate 4) reveals that: (1) the shapes of the signs (palaeography), (2) the selection of logograms (Sumerograms), and (3) the choice of signs for the expression of a given syllable (orthography) are all quite different. For example, OAss uses the ®I sign for the syllable ti, while Hittite scribes used the TI or DI signs. It is therefore generally assumed that Æattuåili I (c. 1650-1600) during his military campaigns in North Syria captured scribes who were using a form of the late Old Babylonian syllabary, and these men formed the nucleus of the first scribal academy at 1 Æattuåa. 1 So Gamkrelidze 1961, Hawkins 1979; Morpurgo Davies 1986; Hawkins 1986. But see Hecker 1990, who argues for a Hittite borrowing of an atypical form of cuneiform known in the Old Assyrian milieu. Klinger 1998 also discusses the question of who taught the Hittites to write. 1 1. Orthography & Phonology 2 Limitations 1.4 We have no way of knowing the precise sounds of Hittite speech, since we have no living speaker of the language, transcription of Hittite words in an ancient contemporary alphabetic script, or acoustical recording of the ancient speech. We gain access to evidence for Hittite phonology and morphology only through the filter of the 2 conventions employed in writing on clay, using the (originally Mesopotamian) cuneiform syllabary. This system is less precise than later alphabetic systems, such as Greek and Latin, which have separate written characters for each vowel and consonant. 1.5 The cuneiform syllabary from its earliest stages consisted of phonetic signs and logograms. Logograms are signs or combinations of signs that evoke a particular word in the target language (e.g., the noun “king”, the adjective “large” or the verb “to sit down”). Logograms in Hittite texts can consist of words from the Sumerian or Akkadian language, the former called Sumerograms, the latter Akkadograms. Sumerograms in Hittite texts usually 3 4 fail to indicate the grammatical case of the noun or adjective and the voice, tense or subject of the verb, whereas 5 Akkadograms usually indicate all of these. The repertoire of phonetic signs consists only of signs of the following types. VOWEL (V), e.g., a, e, i, u CONSONANT + VOWEL (CV), e.g., ba, da, pé, ti, lu VOWEL + CONSONANT (VC), e.g., ab, eå, il, ut CONSONANT + VOWEL + CONSONANT (CVC), e.g., bar, kap, kán, kir, æur 1.6 1.1.3Since Hittite has no sign for a consonant without a vowel, it is impossible to write initial or final clusters of two or more consonants or internal clusters of three or more consonants without using at least one “ghost” or “empty” (i.e., unpronounced) vowel. As an example of an initial cluster, /spanti/ “he libates” must be spelled either iå-pa-an-ti or åi-pa-an-ti. (Watkins, In Press #4174) cites ma-li-id-du- and mi-li-id-du- as evidence for an initial cluster ml in this word. As examples of a final cluster, /est/ “he was” is written e-eå-ta, *kissart is written 2For general treatments of the subject of writing systems in the ancient Near East see Hawkins 1979, 1986; Morpurgo Davies 1986. 3In the Sumerian language itself there were postpositioned markers for what corresponds to IE “case” (Thomsen 1984 88- 109), but these markers were not employed by Hittite scribes. For example, the Sumerogram LUGAL “king” (without added Hittite ending) can stand for subject, direct or indirect object, or possessor, as can the adjective GAL “great”. When a Sumerogram stands in a case other than subject or direct object, it is usually marked with an Akkadian preposition (e.g., ÅA LUGAL “of the king,” ANA LUGAL “to/for the king”). 4 For example, only the presence of a Hittite verbal ending attached to the end of the Sumerogram DIB “seize” can indicate whether the subject is “I”, “you”, “he”, “she” or “they”. 5 Thus A-BU “father” is normally subject, A-BA is direct object, A-BI is indirect object or possessor. Similarly with “hand”: QA-TUM subject, QA-TAM direct object, QA-TI object of preposition (Akkadian “genitive” case). See Chapter 8 for a brief survey of Akkadian grammar. We say “normally”, because in Hittite contexts the Akkadian case forms occasionally are used erroneously. 2 1. Orthography & Phonology 3 either ki-iå-åar-ta or ki-iå-åar-at, /aks/ “he died” (from stem akk-) is written ak-ki-iå, and /laks/ “he knocked over” (stem lakk-) is written la-ak-ki-iå. As an example of a medial triconsonantal cluster, /harspawants/ must be spelled æar-aå-pa-wa-an-za. The ghost vowels in the above examples are bolded. ® ¤1.129 [*1.9.2.4.2]. Transcriptional Conventions 1.7 Syllabically written Hittite words are always written in lower case italic letters (e-eå-zi “he is”), Akkadograms in upper case italic letters (A-WA-TUM“word”), and Sumerograms in upper case non-italic letters (LUGAL “king”). Signs forming a part of a Hittite or Akkadian word are connected to each other and to an adjacent Sumerogram with hyphens. Signs forming part of a Sumerian word are connected to each other with periods (e.g., GAL.GAL “great (plural)”, DUMU.MUNUS “daughter, young woman”). In hand-written exercises students can use simple, lower case writing for Hittite, underlined capital letters for Akkadograms, and non-underlined capital letters for Sumerograms. Homophony 1.8 The cuneiform syllabary contains many signs of identical phonetic value (e.g., several signs each for the syllables a, i, e, u, ba, aå, åu, or kan). Multiple signs with identical syllabic values are called homophones. In order to distinguish homophones in transliteration cuneiformists (Assyriologists and Hittitologists) mark them with accents or subscript numbers. Using the arbitrary value ba, we can observe that unmarked ba in transliteration indicates the first (or most common) sign with the /ba/ value, bá (with acute accent) denotes the second, bà (with grave accent) the third, ba› the fourth, and subsequent values are all indicated with subscript numbers. In reading and writing Hittite in transliteration, therefore, it is very important to indicate the exact sign among homophones. Some homophonous values of signs in the Mesopotamian forms of the syllabary are not used for writing Hittite. For example, the “number one” value of pi is the sign which in Hittite texts is almost invariably to be read wa. The sign most commonly used for the value /pi/ (or /bi/) is that which is transliterated as bi (number one /bi/) or pí (number two /pi/). Similarly, Hittite scribes preferred the number two signs for /kan/, /par/ and /pat/. But in most cases the signs used are the number one variants. Polyphony 1.9 Some cuneiform signs have more than one phonetic value, that is, they are polyphonous. Some CV type signs 6 whose initial consonant is a stop can have either a voiced or voiceless interpretation: BU can be bu or pu. Signs of the types VC and CVC do not indicate whether the final stop is voiced or voiceless (b or p, d or t, g or k).