Hittite

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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.