Hittite

Assembled from 30 blocks · 2 evidence · 21 related

1. Story
2. The language of the Hittite state of central Anatolia in the second millennium BCE, written in cuneiform on clay tablets and the earliest substantially attested Indo-European language. It was unknown as an Indo-European language until Bedřich Hrozný announced the identification in 1915, working from tablets excavated at Boğazköy less than a decade earlier; the argument turned on recognising Indo-European inflectional endings and vocabulary inside a text otherwise written in a familiar script but an unfamiliar tongue. Its consequences for reconstruction were immediate and structural. Hittite preserved a consonant, conventionally transcribed h, in a large share of the positions where Saussure had in 1879 posited abstract elements on purely internal grounds — a prediction made forty years before the evidence existed and confirmed by a spade. Hittite also proved archaic in ways that forced the family tree itself to be redrawn: it lacks features previously assumed to be Proto-Indo-European, and Anatolian is now widely treated as the first branch to separate, which makes the reconstructed ancestor of the other branches a later stage than the ancestor of all.
3. Knowledge
4. Laryngeal theory
5. Indo-European
6. Hittite
7. Connections
8. Laryngeal theory
9. Indo-European
10. Hattusa (Boğazkale)
11. The Boğazköy tablet archives are excavated
12. Hrozný identifies Hittite as an Indo-European language
13. Kuryłowicz matches Hittite h to Saussure's coefficients
14. Ferdinand de Saussure
15. Hittite
16. Saussure posits consonants no language attests
17. Kuryłowicz matches Hittite h to Saussure's coefficients
18. Proto-Indo-European
19. Uralic
20. Trans-New Guinea
21. Dravidian
22. Hittite
23. Sanskrit
24. Jones states the Indo-European hypothesis in Calcutta
25. Hrozný identifies Hittite as an Indo-European language
26. Proto-Indo-European is spoken
27. Phylogeography puts the Indo-European homeland in Anatolia
28. Evidence
29. Supports the identification of Hittite as an Indo-European language, announced in 1915 and set out in full in this volume. V55 verification basis: this session had no access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked for every host attempted and the WebSearch budget was exhausted before authoring — so the cited work was not retrieved, and no page, volume or figure quoted from it was re-checked. The 1915 announcement date and the 1906 excavation date under Winckler are given from standing knowledge of the history of the decipherment, not from this volume.
30. Supports the identification of the Hittite laryngeal with Saussure's posited coefficients, which is the corroboration of laryngeal theory. V55 verification basis: this session had no access to any source — WebFetch was egress-blocked for every host attempted and the WebSearch budget was exhausted before authoring — so the cited work was not retrieved, and no page, volume or figure quoted from it was re-checked. Cited without pagination; the title is given in the form conventional in the Indo-European literature and was not verified against the volume.