New Indo-European Language Discovered

[Micael]

Neat find, and if nothing else serves as a reminder of how many languages are likely lost to time.

New Indo-European Language Discovered

09/21/2023

The new language was discovered in the UNESCO World Heritage Site Boğazköy-Hattusha in north-central Turkey. This was once the capital of the Hittite Empire, one of the great powers of Western Asia during the Late Bronze Age (1650 to 1200 BC).

Excavations in Boğazköy-Hattusha have been going on for more than 100 years under the direction of the German Archaeological Institute. The site has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1986; almost 30,000 clay tablets with cuneiform writing have been found there so far. These tablets, which were included in the UNESCO World Documentary Heritage in 2001, provide rich information about the history, society, economy and religious traditions of the Hittites and their neighbours.

Yearly archaeological campaigns led by current site director Professor Andreas Schachner of the Istanbul Department of the German Archaeological Institute continue to add to the cuneiform finds. Most of the texts are written in Hittite, the oldest attested Indo-European language and the dominant language at the site. Yet the excavations of this year yielded a surprise. Hidden in a cultic ritual text written in Hittite is a recitation in a hitherto unknown language.

Hittites Were Interested in Foreign Languages

Professor Daniel Schwemer, head of the Chair of Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU) Würzburg in Germany, is working on the cuneiform finds from the excavation. He reports that the Hittite ritual text refers to the new idiom as the language of the land of Kalašma. This is an area on the north-western edge of the Hittite heartland, probably in the area of present-day Bolu or Gerede.

The discovery of another language in the Boğazköy-Hattusha archives is not entirely unexpected, as Daniel Schwemer explains: "The Hittites were uniquely interested in recording rituals in foreign languages."

Such ritual texts, written by scribes of the Hittite king reflect various Anatolian, Syrian, and Mesopotamian traditions and linguistic milieus. The rituals provide valuable glimpses into the little known linguistic landscapes of Late Bronze Age Anatolia, where not just Hittite was spoken. Thus cuneiform texts from Boğazköy-Hattusha include passages in Luwian and Palaic, two other Anatolian-Indo-European languages closely related to Hittite, as well as Hattic, a non-Indo-European language. Now the language of Kalasma can be added to these.

More Precise Classification of the New Language is in Progress

Being written in a newly discovered language the Kalasmaic text is as yet largely incomprehensible. Daniel Schwemer’s colleague, Professor Elisabeth Rieken (Philipps-Universität Marburg), a specialist in ancient Anatolian languages, has confirmed that the idiom belongs to the family of Anatolian-Indo-European languages.

According to Rieken, despite its geographic proximity to the area where Palaic was spoken, the text seems to share more features with Luwian. How closely the language of Kalasma is related to the other Luwian dialects of Late Bronze Age Anatolia will be the subject of further investigation.

Sponsors

The work is taking place in Boğazköy-Hattusha as part of the general multidisciplinary research project funded by the German Archaeological Institute (DAI), the Thyssen Foundation, the GRH Foundation, the Volkswagen Foundation and the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Colleagues from the DAI and the Universities of Istanbul, Würzburg and Marburg are working together on the documentation and interpretation of the Text.

Daniel Schwemer and Elisabeth Rieken are members of the Mainz Academy of Sciences and Literature. They jointly lead the long-term project "Das Corpus der hethitischen Festrituale" (The Corpus of Hittite Festive Rituals) with workplaces in Mainz, Marburg and Würzburg within the framework of the Academies Programme of the Federal Government and the Länder.

Contact

Prof. Dr. Andreas Schachner, Director of the Boğazköy-Hattusha Excavations, German Archaeological Institute, Istanbul Department, Mobile: +90 (0)541 2323116, andreas.schachner@dainst.de

[Allen Hazen]

Neat find indeed, and thank you for posting it: I hadn't heard about this.
"Palaic," one of the other (Anatolian subfamily) Indo-European languages mentioned, is, I think, known ONLY from Hittite sources. I think the thinking behind the Hittite recording of other languages was that, when a new territory was added to their empire, they wanted to continue worshipping the gods worshipped there: I guess in the hope of getting divine approbation for their takeover. And part of that was to continue celebrating the rituals of these gods. In their original languages.
Just how different these languages were I don't know. There are some dramatic differences between Hittite and Palaic in things like the personal endings of the verbs, but whether a speaker of one could walk into a restaurant run by speakers of the other and order successfully I have no idea (and, given the limited documentation of Palaic, we may not know enough vocabulary to be able to make an educated guess).
--
Fantasy: a linguist in Siberia interviews an of lady in a village of some one of the Siberian aboriginal groups, and she says "When I was a little girl, my grandfather sometimes said things in another language that my mother said he had learned when he was a child: things like "" ... and comes out with something recognizable as Tokharian.

[Micael]

Neat find indeed, and thank you for posting it: I hadn't heard about this.
"Palaic," one of the other (Anatolian subfamily) Indo-European languages mentioned, is, I think, known ONLY from Hittite sources. I think the thinking behind the Hittite recording of other languages was that, when a new territory was added to their empire, they wanted to continue worshipping the gods worshipped there: I guess in the hope of getting divine approbation for their takeover. And part of that was to continue celebrating the rituals of these gods. In their original languages.
Just how different these languages were I don't know. There are some dramatic differences between Hittite and Palaic in things like the personal endings of the verbs, but whether a speaker of one could walk into a restaurant run by speakers of the other and order successfully I have no idea (and, given the limited documentation of Palaic, we may not know enough vocabulary to be able to make an educated guess).
--
Fantasy: a linguist in Siberia interviews an of lady in a village of some one of the Siberian aboriginal groups, and she says "When I was a little girl, my grandfather sometimes said things in another language that my mother said he had learned when he was a child: things like "" ... and comes out with something recognizable as Tokharian.

Yeah it’s very interesting when we’re able to get another glimpse into the past, and are able to further our understanding of the linguistic developments and what twists and turns related languages took that made them differ from one another.

One personal dream of mine is that we somehow manage to figure out what kind of a language was spoken here in Scandinavia prior to the Germanic one. There’s a bunch of surviving placenames that somewhat suggests a non-Germanic language preceeded it (ie we don’t really understand what the placenames might mean), but I don’t believe anyone has managed to make a qualified guess as to what kind of a language it might have been yet. I guess the only realistic avenue there would be if someone manages to connect them to a known language such as Celtic.

[Zen9]

Neat find indeed, and thank you for posting it: I hadn't heard about this.
"Palaic," one of the other (Anatolian subfamily) Indo-European languages mentioned, is, I think, known ONLY from Hittite sources. I think the thinking behind the Hittite recording of other languages was that, when a new territory was added to their empire, they wanted to continue worshipping the gods worshipped there: I guess in the hope of getting divine approbation for their takeover. And part of that was to continue celebrating the rituals of these gods. In their original languages.
Just how different these languages were I don't know. There are some dramatic differences between Hittite and Palaic in things like the personal endings of the verbs, but whether a speaker of one could walk into a restaurant run by speakers of the other and order successfully I have no idea (and, given the limited documentation of Palaic, we may not know enough vocabulary to be able to make an educated guess).
--
Fantasy: a linguist in Siberia interviews an of lady in a village of some one of the Siberian aboriginal groups, and she says "When I was a little girl, my grandfather sometimes said things in another language that my mother said he had learned when he was a child: things like "" ... and comes out with something recognizable as Tokharian.

Ysah it’s very interesting when we’re able to get another glimpse into the past, and are able to further our understanding of the linguistic developments and what twists and turns related languages took that made them differ from one another.

One personal dream of mine is that we somehow manage to figure out what kind of a language was spoken here in Scandinavia prior to the Germanic one. There’s a bunch of surviving placenames that somewhat suggests a non-Germanic language preceeded it (ie we don’t really understand what the placenames might mean), but I don’t believe anyone has managed to make a qualified guess as to what kind of a language it might have been yet. I guess the only realistic avenue there would be if someone manages to connect them to a known language such as Celtic.

Residues of such throughout Western Europe.
But only the Aquitainian remnant known as the Basque dialects remain.

[Allen Hazen]

Place names seem to be a standard sort of "linguistic fossil" preserving previous languages: apparently when speakers of something new move into a territory, they adopt very little of the "aborigines'" language, but find it convenient to continue to use the "aboriginal" name for, e.g., a river. Even in the U.S.: American English has very little vocabulary from Native American languages, but lots of American rivers have "Indian" names.
Sometimes even closely related Indo-European language can be distinguished in fossil river names: river names are the primary evidence that Baltic languages (= languages in the Indo-European subfamily Lithuanian and Latvian belong to) were formerly spoken in a large area of Russia.

[Zen9]

However we see other linguistic features amongst Western Indo-European (IE) languages that imply influence of other likely non-indo-european languages on them.
It's a controversial subject but does explain why they differ from what is agreed reconstruction of Proto-indo-european (PIE)
Chief easy example is the term "geschwister" (siblings), which is curiously not normal in IE languages.
Another curiosity is Pictish Matralinial inherentance practices.
Certain figures propose the reason for Inguaevonic diverging from Proto-west-germanic is such a non-IE influence.

[Allen Hazen]

From a linguistics blog:
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/? ... more-60750
Doesn't tell us much more than Micael's first post, but (i) professionals in the field seem to be impressed (and inclined to trust the judgment of the person who identified it as Indo-European), (ii) they are hoping for a more detailed publication next year, and (iii) the big question is how large the sample is: our knowledge of the Palaic language (another Anatolian I-E language known from similar Hittite sources) is seriously limited because of the small sample.
Zen9: Yes. I've seen suggestions that some of the weirdnesses of at least some of the Celtic languages are due to contact with non-I-E languages. And the Germanic languages in general seem to differ in some ways from the other I-E subfamilies: Germanic "idiosyncrasies" have also been linked to contact with non-I-E speakers.

[Belushi TD]

Place names seem to be a standard sort of "linguistic fossil" preserving previous languages: apparently when speakers of something new move into a territory, they adopt very little of the "aborigines'" language, but find it convenient to continue to use the "aboriginal" name for, e.g., a river. Even in the U.S.: American English has very little vocabulary from Native American languages, but lots of American rivers have "Indian" names.
Sometimes even closely related Indo-European language can be distinguished in fossil river names: river names are the primary evidence that Baltic languages (= languages in the Indo-European subfamily Lithuanian and Latvian belong to) were formerly spoken in a large area of Russia.

A fairly obvious example of this can be found in Alaska. There's three obvious types of names.

1. Native name - Something from one of the native languages, like Aleut or Athabaskan or something like that. Yup'ik is another one, I think. Dates from time immemorial until about the 1780's or so. An example would be the village of Kwethluk.
2. Russian name - An obvious russian name, like Baranov bay or Kotzebue (Which is an interesting one, as its named after one of the Volga Germans, rather than an actual Russian! Dates from the 1780's until 1867.
3. American names - Obviously the least amount of thought put into any of these. Nome - A misspelling from an early map, where it was meant as a question. Supposed to be "Name?". Circle, Chicken and Y are other examples.

Belushi TD