Luwian language

Luwian
luwili
Native to	Hittite Empire, Arzawa, Neo-Hittite kingdoms
Region	Anatolia, Northern Syria
Extinct	around 600 BC
Language family	Indo-European Anatolian Luwian
Sources	Inscriptions and names
Language codes
ISO 639-3	Either: xlu – Cuneiform Luwian hlu – Hieroglyphic Luwian
Distribution of the Luwian language (after Melchert 2003)

Luwian (sometimes spelled Luvian) is an extinct language of the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European language family. Luwian is closely related to Hittite, and was among the languages spoken during the second and first millennia BC by population groups in central Anatolia, to the west or southwest of the core Hittite area. In the oldest texts, eg. the Hittite Code, the Luwian-speaking areas were called Luwiya. In a later copy of the Hittite Code, the term Luwiya is replaced with Arzawa, but this is likely to reflect the interpretation of a particular scribe caused by the geopolitical realities of his own time. In the post-Hittite era, the region of Arzawa came to be known as Lydia (Assyrian Luddu, Greek Λυδία).

Luwian is either the direct ancestor of Lycian, or a close relative of the ancestor of Lycian. Luwian has also been adduced as one of the likely candidates for the language spoken by the Trojans, alongside a possible Tyrrhenian language (related to Lemnian), Thracian, and Greek.

Beginning in the fourteenth century BC, Luwian native speakers came to constitute the majority of the population of the Hittite capital Hattusa. It appears that by the time of the collapse of the Hittite Empire circa 1180 BC, the Hittite king and the members of the royal family were fully bilingual in Luwian. Long after the extinction of the Hittite language Luwian continued to be spoken in the Neo-Hittite states of Syria, such as Milid and Carchemish, as well as in the central Anatolian kingdom of Tabal that flourished around 900 BC.

Luwian has been preserved in two writing systems, namely the Anatolian adaptation of Mesopotamian cuneiform and Anatolian hieroglyphs.

Cuneiform Luwian

Cuneiform Luwian is a term that refers to the corpus of Luwian texts attested in the tablet archives of Hattusa; it is essentially the same cuneiform writing system used in Hittite. In Laroche's Catalog of Hittite Texts, the corpus of Hittite cuneiform texts with Luvian insertions runs from CTH 757-773, mostly comprising rituals. Cuneiform Luwian texts are written in several dialects, of which the most easily identifiable are Kizzuwatna Luwian, Istanuwa Luwian, and Empire Luwian. The last dialect represents the vernacular of Hattusa scribes of the 14th-13th centuries BC and is mainly attested through Glossenkeil words in Hittite texts.

Hieroglyphic Luwian

Main article: Hieroglyphic Luwian

Hieroglyphic Luwian is a a term that refers to the corpus of Luwian texts written in a native script, known as Anatolian hieroglyphs. Once thought to be a variety of the Hittite language, "Hieroglyphic Hittite" was formerly used to refer to the language of the same inscriptions, but this term is now obsolete.The dialect of Luwian hieroglyphic inscriptions appears to be either Empire Luwian or its descendant Iron Age Luwian. The first report of a monumental inscription dates to 1850, when an inhabitant of Nevşehir reported the relief at Fraktin. In 1870, antiquarian travellers in Aleppo found another inscription built into the south wall of the el-Qiqan Mosque. In 1884 Polish scholar Maryan Sokolowski discovered an inscription near Köylütolu, western Turkey. The largest known inscription was excavated in 1970 in Yalburt, northwest of Konya. Luwian hieroglyphic texts contain a limited number of lexical borrowings from Hittite, Akkadian, and West Semitic; no borrowings from Greek have been detected thus far, although borrowings in the opposite direction do exist.

Relationship to preceding languages

Luwian has numerous archaisms, and so is important both to Indo-European linguists and to students of the Bronze Age Aegean.

Craig Melchert in Studies in Memory of Warren Cowgill (1987; pp 182–204) used Luwian to support the controversial idea that the Proto-Indo-European language had three distinct sets of velar consonants:

• plain velars
• palatovelars
• labiovelars

For Melchert, PIE *ḱ> Luwian z (probably [ts]); *k > k; and *kʷ > ku (probably [kʷ]).

Luwian has also been enlisted for its verb kaluti, which means "turn" or "circle". Many linguists claim that this derives from a proto-Anatolian word for "wheel", which in turn would have derived from the common word for "wheel" found in all other Indo-European families. The wheel was invented in the 5th millennium BCE and, if kaluti does derive from it, then the Anatolian branch left PIE after its invention (so validating the Kurgan hypothesis as applicable to Anatolian). However kaluti need not imply a concrete wheel, and so need not have derived from a PIE word with that meaning. The IE words for a wheel may well have arisen in those other IE languages after the Anatolian split.

Stele of Sultanhan, Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, Ankara, Turkey.

Luwian possessive adjectives

Where Hittite allows the classically Indo-European suffix -as for the singular genitive and -an for the plural genitive, the "canonical" Luwian as used in cuneiform employed instead a possessive suffix -assa for the singular genitive and -anzassa- for the plural genitive. Given the prevalence of -assa place-names and words scattered around all sides of the Aegean Sea, this possessive suffix was sometimes considered evidence of a shared non-Indo-European language or an Aegean Sprachbund preceding the arrivals of Luwians and Greeks. It is, however, possible to account for the Luwian possessive construction as a result of case attraction in the Indo-European noun phrase. The possessive adjectives are pervasive in Kizzuwatna Luwian, but in Empire Luwian and its descendent Iron Age Luwian they compete with the inherited genitives. The special form of possessive adjectives with plural possessor is restricted to Kizzuwatna Luwian and probably represents a result of its structural interference with Hurrian. Template:FixBunching Template:Languages portal Template:FixBunching Template:ANE portal Template:FixBunching

References

• Laroche, Emmanuel. Catalogue des textes hittites 1991.
• Melchert, H. Craig. "PIE velars in Luvian." In Studies in memory of Warren Cowgill (1929–1985): Papers from the Fourth East Coast Indo-European Conference, Cornell University, June 6–9, 1985, ed. C. Watkins, 182–204. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1987.
• Melchert, H. Craig. Anatolian Historical Phonology. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994.
• Melchert, H. Craig (ed). The Luwians. Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2003. ISBN 90-04-13009-8.
• Otten, Heinrich. Zur grammatikalischen und lexikalischen Bestimmung des Luvischen. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1953.
• Rosenkranz, Bernhard. Beiträge zur Erforschung des Luvischen. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1952.
• Starke, Frank. Die keilschrift-luwischen Texte in Umschrift (StBoT 30, 1985)
• Starke, Frank. Untersuchungen zur Stammbildung des keilschrift-luwischen Nomens (StBoT 30, 1990)
• Woudhuizen, Fred. The Language of the Sea Peoples. Amsterdam: Najade Pres, 1992.
• Yakubovich, Ilya. Sociolinguistics of the Luvian Language. Leiden: Brill, 2010

External links

• Arzawa, to the west, throws light on Hittites
• Alekseev Manuscript
• Hieroglyphic Luwian Phonetic Signs
• Catalog of Hittite Texts: TEXTS IN OTHER LANGUAGES
• Genitive Case and Possessive Adjective in Anatolian