Hattic Language - Corpus

Corpus

No documents have been found in which the native Hattic speakers wrote their own language. Scholars today rely on indirect sources or mentions by their neighbours and successors, the Nesian-speaking Hittites. Some Hattic words can be found in religious tablets of Hittite priests, dating from the 14th and 13th centuries BC. Those passages contained between the lines of the text signs with the explanation "the priest is now speaking in Hattili".

Roots of Hattic words can also be found in the names of mountains, rivers, cities and gods. Other Hattic words can be found in some mythological texts. The most important of these is the myth "The Moon God who fell from the Sky", written in both Hattic language and Hittite.

The catalogued Hattic documents from Hattusa span CTH 725-745. Of these CTH 728, 729, 731, 733, and 736 are Hattic / Hittite bilinguals. CTH 737 is a Hattic incantation for the festival at Nerik. One key (if fragmentary) bilingual is the story of "The Moon God Who Fell from the Sky".

There are additional Hattic texts in Sapinuwa, which had not been published as of 2004.

The conservative view is that the Hattic language is a language isolate and it is completely different from neighbouring Indo-European and Semitic languages, though, based on toponyms and personal names, it may have been related to the otherwise unattested Kaskian language. Certain similarities between Hattic and both Northwest (e.g., Abkhaz) and South Caucasian (Kartvelian) languages have led to assumptions by some scholars about the possibility of a linguistic block stretching from central Anatolia to the Caucasus.

Known words include:

• alef = 'word'
• ashaf = 'god'
• fa-zari = 'humankind, population'
• fel = 'house'
• *findu = 'wine' (found in the compound findu-qqaram "wine-ladle")
• fur = 'land'
• Furun-Katte = 'King of the Land', the Hattic war god
• Furu-Semu = Hattic sun goddess
• Hanfasuit = Hattic throne goddess
• hilamar = 'temple'
• Kasku = the Hattic moon god
• katte = 'king'
• -nifas = 'to sit'
• pinu = 'child'
• zari = 'mortal'
• -zi = 'to put'

Hattic formed a collective plural by attaching the prefix fa-: e.g., fa-shaf "gods". It formed conventional plurals with a le- prefix: "children" = le-pinu. The genitive case, which signifies 'of' in English, was declined with the suffix -(u)n (e.g. fur "land" but furun "of the land"). While some linguists like Polomé & Winter have claimed the accusative case was marked with es- (nb. the example they give is ess-alep 'word'), this has been identified as a pronominal clitic meaning 'their' by others.