| Name | Luwian |
|---|
| Nativename | luwili |
|---|
| Familycolor | Indo-European |
|---|
| States | Hittite Empire, Arzawa, Neo-Hittite kingdoms |
|---|
| Region | Anatolia, Northern Syria |
|---|
| Extinct | around 600 BC |
|---|
| Fam2 | Anatolian |
|---|
| Lc1 | xlu|ld1=Cuneiform Luwian |
|---|
| Lc2 | hlu|ld2=Hieroglyphic Luwian |
|---|
| Posteriori | Inscriptions and names |
|---|
| Caption | Luwian hieroglyph |
|---|
| Map | Distribution of the Luwian language (after Melchert 2003) |
|---|
| Notice | nonotice |
|---|
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, e.g. the
Hittite Code, the Luwian-speaking areas were called
Luwiya and the
Mycenaean Greek term for these areas,
ru-wa-ni-jo (transliterated as "Luwia"), is attested in
Linear B syllabic script. 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), where the
Lydian language was in use.
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 in the 8th century 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
Hieroglyphic Luwian is 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 Northwest Semitic; the lexical borrowings from Greek are limited to proper nouns, although common nouns borrowed 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 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 > Luwian
z (probably ); >
k; and >
ku (probably ).
Luwian has also been enlisted for its verb kalut(t)i(ya)-, which means "make the rounds of" and is probably derived from *kalutta/i- "circle". It has been argued 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.
, 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 cuneiform texts, but in Iron Age texts in hieroglyphic transmission 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.
See also
Sa-sub4 (Luwian hieroglyph)
Pre-Greek substrate
Notes
References
Laroche, Emmanuel. Catalogue des textes hittites 1971.
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. Cuneiform Luvian Lexicon. Chapel Hill: self-published, 1993.
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. "The Origin of Luwian Possessive Adjectives". In Proceedings of the 19th Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference, Los Angeles, November 3–4, 2007, ed. K. Jones-Bley et al., Washington: Institute for the Study of Man, 2008.
Yakubovich, Ilya. Sociolinguistics of the Luvian Language. Leiden: Brill, 2010
External links
Luwian Swadesh list of basic vocabulary words (from Wiktionary's Swadesh list appendix)
Arzawa, to the west, throws light on Hittites
Alekseev Manuscript
Hieroglyphic Luwian Phonetic Signs
Catalog of Hittite Texts: extes in other languages
Genitive Case and Possessive Adjective in Anatolian
Melchert homepage on Anatolian tongs
Category:Ancient languages
Category:Extinct languages of Asia
