Talk:Hattic language

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[edit] Merge suggestion

Hi, Is there anything here that cannot or should not go under Hittite language? Perhaps one name or the other is better, but this page is already encompassed. Any thoughts? --Mashford 13:31, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

Hi Jeorge,

Hatto-Iberian/Hetto-Iberian is not Proto-Iberian. Hetto-Iberians refers only to the hypothetical grouping of Alarodian & Northwest Caucasian languages with Hattic. Georgians do not like the term so much because it excludes South-Caucasian so they use the wider term Proto-Iberian to include all tentatively related languages.

The relationship between Hattic & Northwest Caucasian (Circassian) is quite solid, but the relationship in the Wider Hetto-Iberian family is more controvercial, while its position in Proto-Iberian is something discussed only by linguists from the former Soviet states at present.

Minor correction: J.D. Bengtson, V. Blazhek and others outside the former Soviet Union have discussed this issue too.--Pet'usek 09:39, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

Zestauferov 11:51, 26 Apr 2004 (UTC)

• OK, I have reworded the article slightly to strenghten the connection with NW Caucasian (on your word). IMHO the situation viz the conjectured larger groupings should be discussed in the languages of the Caucasus page.
  Jorge Stolfi 04:51, 27 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Hi Zestauferov

I am intrigued by your description of the relationship between Hattic and NW Caucasian as 'solid'. Although this relationship has been proposed by Meszaros, Ardzinba, Braun, Chirikba, and Ivanov, many specialists have rejected these and suggest that Hattic is not discoverably related to any other family, living or dead. Girbal and Kabeskiri suggest a relationship with Kartvelian. Faehnrich suggests a relationship with East Caucasian. IMO none of these suggestions is solid either. Perhaps you could tell us what systematic correspondences there are which actually point to a relationship with NW Caucasian. Personally I find three things suspicious: a) feminines are formed by adding a -t; b) the unmarked form of the verb is the past tense; and c) the word for 'son', 'child' is 'bin'. IMO, this can only mean one thing: Hattic is Afroasiatic.

Best regards

Well, that may well be due to a long time of Semitic influence. Even suffixes can be borrowed, although it's not that common and widespread. And a single word for "child"...As far as I know, two criteria are necessary to postulate a genetic link: regular/recurrent phonological correspondences + sufficient number of lexical (moreover, it has to be the most basic concepts) and morphological matches.--Pet'usek 09:39, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

Ed Robertson

I'd also like to know what the evidence is. I've seen very little of the Hattic language, but I have some expertise in Northwest Caucasian, so I'd be interested to see what characteristics of Hattic are supposed to be NWC. (Nevertheless, I wouldn't jump to the conclusion that it's Afroasiatic based on three small facts. [t] is a very common phoneme, and the word for "child" could be a loan.) thefamouseccles 03:24, 29 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Exactly. That's right, Ed.--Pet'usek 09:39, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

Hi!

I have a book in Polish "Ludy i jezyki starozytnej Anatolii" which contains some information on Hattic. I will put it here just as a dump of information without any decent organization of it. The book has a chapter on Hattians but without specific subchapter on language, just some information scattered with additional references to works by Klinger, Dunaevskaja, Ardzinba, Chirikba, Braun and Taracha.

Hattic can be described as agglutinative, ergative and polisytetic. It is however significantly different than Hurrian.

Words in Hittire believed to be of Hattic origin: tabarna (king), tawananna (queen), tuhkanti (heir to the throne), hapalki (iron).

Other Hattic words: pinu (son), wel (house), wur (country), ashhab (god). (Note that I use "sh" for s with small "v" sign above).

Verb roots can be preceded by up to 6 prefixes in a fixed order: tVsh- indicates prohibition, tV- indicates wish, a- indicates transitivity, an- and ash- subject, ta- and she- locativity, ah- and h- and ha- object. After verb roots follow the suffices, with unclear meaning (except for -em that indicates negation).

There are separate prefixes indicating collectivity (wa-) and plural number (le-).

Possesive prefixes mentioned in the book: u- "your", i- "his", li- "their".

Nominal forms may be formed by reduplication.

That is all I can provide. My translation may be messy (Ia m not linguist), sorry about that.

/Jerzy

Great, Jerzy! Thank you for the information a lot, because there's no information on Hattic available here in the Czech Republic. I'm grateful for any info on Hurrian, Urartian, PWC, PEC and Hatti(c/an). If anybody has any information s/he can share with me, I'll be very very thankful indeed! :-)--Pet'usek 09:39, 17 August 2006 (UTC)

The grammar (agglutinative polysynthetic with up to 6 prefixes, and ergative) does indeed sound West Caucasian ( = Abkhaz-Adyghe), though, as far as I know, Sumerian is also similar. David Marjanović (talk) 19:41, 18 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Çatalhöyük language

Over at Ian Hodder's Çatalhöyük web site, the discussion boards got into the question of what language might have been spoken at Çatalhöyük. Obviously, we don't have anything to go on, so all we have is sheer educated guesswork at best. But some have speculated that it might have been Hattic, or rather the ancestor of Hattic, or else another language in the same family as Hattic. The only basis for this is the fact that Hattic is just the earliest known language of Anatolia. There could easily have been other languages, which we'll never know, which died out unrecorded during the 3,000 years in between the end of population at Çatalhöyük and the attestation of Hattic. The area where Hattic was spoken, say around the easternmost bend of the Halys, was about 250 miles (400 km) to the northeast of Çatalhöyük. Not too far away. For prehistory fans who are into Anatolia, Hattic would be a great language to learn, being the only linguistic link to pre-Indo-European Anatolia, however tenuous. Too bad we know so little about it.

--Johanna

Johanna-Hypatia 19:09, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Nessians from South

I removed from its south in:

"before the arrival of Nesian (ie, "Hittite") speakers from its south"

All early Indo-European migrations are hugely controversial -- any statement like that needs references.

It's not controversial here. The reference is the map.

1. The sites Hattus and Sapinuwa are known, and Hittite records show Nerik to be north of both. Kneshian "Hittite", prior to 1700 BC or so, is recorded at Kanesh in Assyrian records.

2. The Nesili / Hattili distinction derives from speakers of the former conquering and describing speakers of the latter.

-- Zimriel 17:36, 11 May 2007 (UTC)