13
votes
Accepted
What is "=" in transcriptions of Hittite
Your guess is correct; the equals sign/double hyphen separates clitics from the words they attach to.
For example, from the Ten-Year Annals (KBo 3.4 ii 65):
nu=us=si=kan widār arha dahhun
Then I ...
- 69.5k
9
votes
Why are the Egyptian and Hittite versions of Tutankhamun's name different?
It's important to remember that hieroglyphic Egyptian usually makes the consonants clear, but not the vowels. Tutankhamun's praenomen is thus transcribed nb-ḫpr-(w)-rꜥ (or nb-xpr-(w)-rꜥ, depending on ...
- 69.5k
8
votes
Accepted
(How) did Hittite borrow words from Sumerian?
Firstly, even though Sumerian had died out by the time Hittite was spoken, the Akkadian priesthood kept using it for religious purposes, and so they would have preserved some knowledge of its ...
- 1,023
5
votes
How do we name a sign when we don't know any of its readings?
A relatively common convention (see e.g. the ETCSL sign list and Wikipedia) is to notate such "juxtaposed" compound signs by joining the component sign names with a period (.). That is, ...
- 1,291
5
votes
Is there good evidence for five vowel phonemes in Hittite?
There is circumstantial evidence from Elamite, where "ú" is /u/, but "u" is /aw/. These readings are very clear from the Elamite representation of Old Persian proper names.
- 24.6k
4
votes
Accepted
Are there non-binary or gender-neutral cuneiform determinatives?
If I'm not mistaken, the determiner DIŠ (which is literally just the sign for "one", a single cuneiform wedge) can sometimes be found also with female names. The double determiner DIŠ.MUNUS is also ...
- 1,291
4
votes
Accepted
Were long vowels distinguished in cuneiform?
In Akkadian, Ca-a, Cu-u, Ci-i are often used to indicate Semitic long vowels, but this is not consistent. For example, dabābu “word” is usually written as da-ba-bu, but sometimes it appears as da-ba-...
- 24.6k
3
votes
Accepted
Questions about clusters of two dental stops in PIE
The interpretation of Hittite /ts/ is still somewhat of an open question.
First, Hittite cuneiform could have distinguished voiced and voiceless stops in many positions…but it didn't. For example, the ...
- 69.5k
3
votes
Simplicity of the verb in Germanic languages
Ringe (2006) in From Proto-Indo-European
to Proto-Germanic discusses verb inflection and sub-grouping on p. 4-6. He states the consensus position that Anatolian split off first, leaving behind what he ...
- 83.4k
3
votes
(How) did Hittite borrow words from Sumerian?
dumumeššu and dingirmešša are not Hittite, nor are they Sumerian. They are Sumero-Akkadian heterograms for Hittite words.
- 24.6k
3
votes
Accepted
How do I know if a cuneiform character is a logogram or determinative?
As has already been noted, it's not always possible to be sure. Scholars can and do have legitimate disagreements on whether a particular sign in a particular context was read out loud, or whether it ...
- 1,291
3
votes
Accepted
What happened to "accented velars" in Anatolian?
Melchert argues that the "plain velars" and "accented velars" remained distinct in Proto-Anatolian, because they show different reflexes in Luvian: *k becomes Luvian k, while *ḱ becomes Luvian z.
He ...
- 69.5k
3
votes
What happened to "accented velars" in Anatolian?
Whether you believe that *k and *ḱ merged to a single phoneme in Anatolian, or that *k split into *k and *ḱ after the separation of Anatolian from IE - in both cases you will get the same result.
- 24.6k
3
votes
Accepted
Is there good evidence for five vowel phonemes in Hittite?
Kloekhorst's Etymological Dictionary of the Hittite Inherited Lexicon proposes that /o/ and /u/ are separate phonemes in Hittite, but that the distinction doesn't appear in all environments: it's ...
- 69.5k
2
votes
Accepted
Was the "a" glyph ever used for ajV in Hittite?
Sturtevant 1933 thought not (page 65, section 52).
The only vowel sign to be written twice in successtion is a, as in a-a-an-za 'hot', a-a-an-ni-in-ni-ya-mi-iš 'cousin', a-a-ra 'customary' (?), a-a-...
- 69.5k
2
votes
What is known about the voicing of Hittite consonants?
Melchert claims that "voicing" was not distinguished word-initially or word-finally, with word-initial stops ending up fortis (PIE *geis- > kiš- "become" > reduplicated ...
- 69.5k
1
vote
Accepted
How do I find cuneiform signs that aren't in the dictionary?
Short answer: Try another dictionary.
Remember that the same Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform signs used to write Hittite were also used for several other languages, most notably and obviously Sumerian and ...
- 1,291
1
vote
Does Hittite ever have "morphographemic writings"?
It's rare, but it does happen. For example, eš-er "they were" (be-3P.PRF) is normally written e-še-er, but can also be written e-eš-er, since there's a very transparent boundary between the ...
- 69.5k
1
vote
Accepted
What is known about the Hurrian "wa" compound signs?
Protohattisch is perhaps the Hattic language, the isolated languages which had been spoken on the territory of the Hittite kingdom before Hittites arrived and settled there. The language is known from ...
- 18.6k
1
vote
How can I find the word "behind" a cuneiform logogram?
This is a good list of logograms and their pronunciation and meaning that I have found helpful:
https://github.com/asahala/Cuneiformtools/blob/master/logograms-akkadian/logograms-akkadian.txt
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