Hittite Indo-European & Proto-Semitic Language

Hittite is the modern scholarly name for the language, based on the identification of the Hatti (?atti) Kingdom with the Biblical Hittites (Biblical Hebrew: ?ittim), although that name appears to have been questionably applied: The term Hattian refers to the indigenous people who supposedly preceded the Hittites, allegedly speaking a non-Indo-European Hattic language.

Hattian language, also called Hattic or Khattic or Khattish was portrayed by some to be an ergative, agglutinative language with weakly developed suffixation but heavy prefixation. Verbs contained a string of prefixes with fixed order, expressing different grammatical relations. The verbal roots were predominantly monosyllabic or disyllabic. The verbal forms could express at least two grammatical persons by means of personal prefixes.

Studying the Hittite language and culture brings to light some of the foundations of the modern Western civilization. Hittite is the oldest Indo-European language known — older than Greek, Latin, or Sanskrit.

As an Indo-European language, it is related to modern-day languages like English: the Hittite word for “water” is watar! But it is not always that transparent. According to the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.

The Hittite language, (natively ni?ili / "the language of Ne?a", or ne?umnili "the language of the people of Ne?a"), also known as (Ne?ite / Neshite, or Nessite), was the most important of the extinct Indo-European languages of ancient Bronze Age Anatolia.

Little can be said with certainty about the phonetics and the phonology of the Hittite language, which was closely related to Carian, Luwian, Lydian, Lycian, and Palaic. It is known primarily from the approximately 30,000 cuneiform tablets or fragments of tablets preserved in the archives of the Hittite capital city, Hattusa (near the modern town of Bo?azkale, formerly Bo?azk?y, Turkey), and various provincial centers; the majority of the tablets are from the period of the Hittite empire (c. 1400–1180 BC).

Hittite although the oldest recorded Indo-European language, had remained completely unknown during the period in which Indo-European linguistics developed because its records are on clay tablets that were excavated only at the end of the 19th century. Even then, it was not identified as Indo-European until 1915, when Bed?ich Hrozny documented it in a book of 1917 entitled “Die Sprache der Hethiter”. But it was not until 1951 that a comprehensive grammar was produced in, “A Comparative Grammar of the Hittite Language” by Edgar H. Sturtevant.

Indo-Semitic hypothesis maintains that a genetic relationship exists between Indo-European and Semitic and that the Indo-European and the Semitic language families descend from a prehistoric language ancestral to them both.

The term "Indo-Semitic" was first used by Graziadio Ascoli (Cuny 1943:1), a leading advocate of this relationship. Although this term has been used by a number of scholars since (e.g. Adams and Mallory 2006:83), there is no universally accepted term for this grouping at the present time.

Ancient Semitic-speaking peoples or Proto-Semitic people were people who lived throughout the ancient Near East, including the Levant, Mesopotamia, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Horn of Africa from the 3rd millennium BC until the end of antiquity.

Their languages are usually divided into three branches: East, Central and South Semitic languages. The Proto-Semitic language was likely spoken in the 4th millennium BC, and the oldest attested forms of Semitic date to the mid-3rd millennium BC (the Early Bronze Age).

Speakers of East Semitic include the people of the Akkadian Empire, Assyria and Babylonia. Central Semitic combines the Northwest Semitic languages and Arabic. Speakers of Northwest Semitic were the Canaanites (including the Phoenicians and the Hebrews) and the Arameans. South Semitic peoples include the speakers of Modern South Arabian languages and Ethiopian Semitic languages.

Dr. Zaidan Ali Jassem, Professor at Department of English Language and Translation, Qassim University, KSA (2012a-f, 2013a-q, 2014a-k, 2015a-g) has shown in forty one studies so far that Arabic, English, German, French, and the so-called Indo-European languages in general are genetically related very closely phonetically, morphologically, grammatically, and semantically or lexically to such an extent that they can all be regarded as dialects of the same language…

Food for thought!