This
map shows the regions of the world where Hittite was
commonly spoken between 2000
BCE and 1200 BCE (red circle). Hittite descends from the Anatolian
branch of Indo-European. Its closest relatives include
rather
obscure languages like Palaic, Luvian, Hieroglyphic Luvian,
Lycian, and Lydian, none of which survived to the modern
day.
Aside from brief references in the Bible (Gen. 23 and 2 Sam.
11), and a handful of untranslatable documents, scholars
knew
very little of the Hittites until the early twentieth-century.
In 1907 an archeological discovery found nearly 10,000
clay
tablets in the marked region below. Some were written in Babylonian
cuneiform and Babylonian/Akkadian, but the rest were
written
in Hittite. This find allowed great progress to be made in
linguistic studies of Hittite. In particular, the language
is marked by
its unusual use of laryngeals as phonological units, and it
appears to have borrowed loan-words from non-Indo-European
sources,
but otherwise it matches certain predictions
for the pattern of Indo-European sound changes proposed by
Ferdinand de Saussure in 1879.
| Daniel M. Short originally created this
map and the other Indo-European language charts for his website at http://www.danshort.com/.
I reproduce these images here with the author's permission, but they are
copyrighted by Daniel Short as of 2002. These charts should not be reproduced
or reused without Mr. Short's approval. You may contact him at danshort@gte.net
for more information. These images are not public domain. |