Luwian
luwili
Luwian hieroglyph
Spoken in	Hittite Empire, Arzawa, Neo-Hittite kingdoms
Region	Anatolia, Northern Syria
Extinct	around 600 BC
Language family	Indo-European Anatolian Luwic Luwian
Language codes
ISO 639-3	Either: xlu – Cuneiform Luwian hlu – Hieroglyphic Luwian
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Distribution of the Luwian language

Luwian (sometimes spelled Luvian), rarely Luish, is one or more extinct languages of the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European language family. The term is ambiguous in meaning depending on how it is being used. In one sense it refers to language written in two different scripts, Cuneiform Luwian, or CLuwian, and Hieroglyphic Luwian, or HLuwian. As to whether the language represented by both scripts was one, one with two dialects, or two, there is no consensus, except that any tree in which they appear as different branches presumes two languages. It must therefore have had a root language; however, many think it was a dialect continuum, which is still consistent with a division into languages. The spoken language would have evidenced the continuum. The scribes wrote conventional languages defined in it.

Several other languages in Anatolia have been identified as being most similar to Luwian, which suggests that they belong in their own branch with CLuwian and HLuwian. Some linguists name the branch "the Luwian Group" or just "Luwian," and in that sense Luwian means all the Luwian languages. Other linguists, following Melchert, prefer to use Luwic for the branch and Luwian for CLuwian and HLuwian.^[1] Proto-Luwian can mean the common ancestor of the two, or the common ancestor of the several, although, in the tree-naming conventions, if the branch is to be called Luwic, its ancestor should be Proto-Luwic or Common Luwic.

Classification[link]

Anatolian[link]

Luwian is closely related to Hittite.

Trojan hypothesis[link]

Luwian is closely related to, though not the direct ancestor of Lycian.^[2] Luwian has also been adduced as one of the likely candidates for the language spoken by the Trojans.^[3]

Fringe hypothetical connections[link]

Some fringe hypotheses rejected by the mainstream historical linguists are a possible Tyrrhenian language connection (related to Lemnian), a Thracian connection, and a Greek connection.

Geography[link]

Luwian was among the languages spoken during the second and first millennia BC by population groups in central and western Anatolia and northern Syria.^[4] In the Old Hittite version of the Hittite Code, all or some Luwian-speaking areas were called Luwiya. One scholar has argued that the Mycenaean Greek term ru-wa-ni-jo, attested in Linear B syllabic script refers to the same area.^[5] The general consensus amongst scholars is that Luwian was spoken—to a greater or lesser degree—across a large area of western Anatolia, including (possibly) Wilusa (= Troy), the Seha River Land (to be identified with the Hermos and/or Kaikos valley), and the kingdom of Mira-Kuwaliya with its core territory of the Maeander valley.^[6] This is suggested by, among other things, an admittedly corrupt late copy of the Hittite laws in which the geographical term Luwiya is replaced with Arzawa,^[7] a western Anatolian kingdom corresponding roughly with Mira and the Seha River Land (although one scholar has argued that a chain of scribal error and revision led to this substitution, and that Luwiya was not coterminous with Arzawa but was further east in the area of the Konya plain^[8]). 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. The name Lydia has been convincingly derived from the name Luwiya (Lydian *lūda- < *luw(i)da- < luwiya- with the regular Lydian sound change of y > d), which further argues in favour of the location of Luwiya in the west.^[9]

Beginning in the fourteenth century BC, Luwian native speakers came to constitute the majority of the population of the Hittite capital Hattusa.^[10] It appears that by the time of the collapse of the Hittite Empire ca. 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.^[11]

Cuneiform Luwian[link]

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.^[12] In Laroche's Catalog of Hittite Texts, the corpus of Hittite cuneiform texts with Luwian insertions runs from CTH 757-773, mostly comprising rituals.^[13] Cuneiform Luwian texts are written in several dialects, of which the most easily identifiable are Kizzuwatna Luwian, Istanuwa Luwian, and Empire Luwian.^[14] The last dialect represents the vernacular of Hattusan scribes of the 14th-13th centuries BC and is mainly attested through Glossenkeil words in Hittite texts.

Hieroglyphic Luwian[link]

Hieroglyphic Luwian is a term that refers to the corpus of Luwian texts written in a native script, known as Anatolian hieroglyphs.^[15][16] 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 travelers 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, in 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.^[17]

Relationship to preceding languages[link]

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

Craig Melchert^[18] used Luwian to support the view 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 kalut(t)i(ya)-, which means "make the rounds of" and is probably derived from *kalutta/i- "circle".^[19] It has been argued^[who?] 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[link]

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 -assanz- 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.^[20] The possessive adjectives are pervasive in Kizzuwatna Luwian cuneiform texts, but in Iron Age texts in hieroglyphic transmission they compete with the inherited genitives.^[21] 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.^[22]

	Languages portal
	Ancient Near East portal

See also[link]

• Sa-sub4 (Luwian hieroglyph)
• Pre-Greek substrate

Notes[link]

References[link]

• Beekes, R. S. P. 2003. ‘Luwians and Lydians.’ Kadmos 42:47–9.
• Hawkins, J. D. 1998. “Tarkasnawa King of Mira: ‘Tarkendemos’, Boğazköy Sealings, and Karabel.’ Anatolian Studies 48:1–31.
• Hawkins, J. D. 2009. ‘The Arzawa letters in recent perspective.’ British Museum Studies in Ancient Egypt and Sudan 14:73–83.
• Laroche, Emmanuel. Catalogue des textes hittites 1971.
• Melchert H. C. 2008b. 'Greek mólybdos as a loanword from Lydian.' In B. J. Collins et al., eds., Anatolian Interfaces, 153–7. Oxford.
• Melchert, H. C. 2008a. ‘Lycian’. In The Ancient Languages of Asia Minor, ed. R. D. Woodard, 46–55 at p. 46. Cambridge.
• Melchert, H. Craig (ed). The Luwians. Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2003. ISBN 90-04-13009-8.
• Melchert, H. Craig. Anatolian Historical Phonology. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994.
• Melchert, H. Craig. Cuneiform Luvian Lexicon. Chapel Hill: self-published, 1993.
• 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 (2012). "The Position of Anatolian". http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/Melchert/The%20Position%20of%20Anatolian.pdf. 
• Otten, Heinrich. Zur grammatikalischen und lexikalischen Bestimmung des Luvischen. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1953.
• Rosenkranz, Bernhard. Beiträge zur Erforschung des Luvischen. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1952.
• Singer, I. 2005. ‘On Luwians and Hittites.’ Bibliotheca Orientalis 62:430–51. (Review article of Melchert 2003).
• Starke, Frank. 'Troia im Kontext des historisch-politischen und sprachlichen Umfeldes Kleinasiens im 2. Jahrtausend. Studia Troica 7:446–87.
• Starke, Frank. Die keilschrift-luwischen Texte in Umschrift (StBoT 30, 1985)
• Starke, Frank. Untersuchungen zur Stammbildung des keilschrift-luwischen Nomens (StBoT 30, 1990)
• Watkins, C. 1995. How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics. New York and Oxford.
• Watkins, C.1994. ‘The Language of the Trojans.’ In Selected Writings, ed. L. Oliver et al., vol. 2. 700–717. Innsbruck. = Troy and the Trojan War. A Symposium held at Bryn Mawr College, October 1984, ed. M. Mellink, 45–62. Bryn Mawr.
• Widmer, P. 2006. 'Mykenisch ru-wa-ni-jo, "Luwier".' Kadmos 45:82–84.
• Woudhuizen, Fred. The Language of the Sea Peoples. Amsterdam: Najade Pres, 1992.
• Yakubovich, Ilya. Sociolinguistics of the Luvian Language. Leiden: Brill, 2010
• 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.

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Luwian language

• 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: texts in other languages
• Genitive Case and Possessive Adjective in Anatolian
• Melchert homepage on Anatolian tongs

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Map of Kurds of Central Anatolia

Kurds of Central Anatolia^[1] (Kurdish: Kurdên Anatoliya Navîn, Turkish: Orta Anadolu Kürtleri^[2] or İç Anadolu Kürtleri^[3]), Kurdish people who have immigrated and been in Central Anatolia (present day Aksaray, Ankara, Çankırı, Eskişehir, Karaman, Kayseri, Kırıkkale, Kırşehir, Konya, Nevşehir, Niğde, Sivas, Yozgat provinces) since about 16th century.^[4][5]

The core of the Kurds of Central Anatolia is formed by Tuz Gölü Kürtleri (Kurds of Lake Tuz) who live in Ankara, Konya and Aksaray provinces.^[6] Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) mentioned them as "Konya çöllerindeki Kürtler" (Kurds in the Konya deserts) in the interview with Ahmet Emin (Yalman) dated January 16/17, 1923.^[7]

History[link]

The first Kurdish tribe that arrived at Central Anatolia is Modanlı tribe. They settled in Haymana in 1184^[8] and spread to not only different places of Central Anatolia but also to Hasha-i İstanbul and Rumeli: Aksaray, Kütahya, Rumeli, Çatalca, Koçhisar, Haymana, Ipsala and Evreşe. And Modanlı tribe belonged to Merdisi tribe.^[9] The first Central Anatolian Kurdish village named Kürtler (Kurds) was founded in Yabanâbâd (present day Kızılcahamam-Çamlıdere, Ankara) in 1463.^[10]

According to Mark Sykes, first Kurdish exile to the Central Anatolia was carried out during the reign of Selim I (1512–1520).^[11]

According to Hermann Wenzel, original growers of Angora goat are these Kurdish people of the Inner Anatolia.^[12][13]

Tribes[link]

Largest tribes of the Kurds of Central Anatolia are Şeyhbızın, Reşvan and Canbeg.^[14]

Languages[link]

Generally, their mother languages are Kurdish (Kurmanji) and Kurmanji-speaking people have difficulty to understand the language spoken in Haymana where Şeyhbızın (Şêxbizinî) tribe members live in^[15]. It is said that the new generation of Kurdish people in some settlements no longer speak Kurdish language^[16].

Notable figures[link]

• Ömer Kart (one of the founders of National Party, deputy of the Republican National Party)
• Musa Kart (Ömer Kart's son, caricaturist)
• Vedat Yıldırım (one of the soloist singers of Kardeş Türküler)

Resources[link]

See also[link]

• Kurds of Khorasan

External links[link]

• Bîrnebûn
• Veger
• Kurdên Kirşehîrê (Kurdish / Turkish)
• Asemblee Parlementaire, Documents De Seance: Session Ordinaire D'octobre 2006