Luwian
Spoken in:	Anatolia
Language extinction:	around 600 BC
Language family:	}}}  Anatolian   Luwian}}}
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	none
ISO 639-2:	—
ISO 639-3:	either: xlu —  hlu —

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 by population groups in Arzawa, to the west or southwest of the core Hittite area. In the oldest texts that area was referred to as Luwia. Much later, this same area came to be known as Lydia (or Ludia). Luwian is either the direct ancestor of Lycian or a close relative of the ancestor of Lycian. Luwian is one of the likely candidates for the language spoken by the Trojans, alongside a possible Tyrrhenian language related to Lemnian.

From this homeland, Luwian speakers gradually spread eastward through Anatolia and became a contributing factor to the downfall after circa 1180 BCE of the Hittite Empire, where it also seems to have been widely spoken by this time. Luwian was the language of the Neo-Hittite states of Syria such as Milid and Carchemish, and also of the central Anatolian kingdom of Tabal that flourished around 900 BCE.

Luwian has been preserved in two forms named after the writing systems used to represent them, Cuneiform Luwian and Hieroglyphic Luwian.

Cuneiform Luwian

Cuneiform Luwian is the form of the Luwian language 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, its corpus runs from CTH 757-773, mostly comprising rituals.

Hieroglyphic Luwian

Main article: Hieroglyphic Luwian

Hieroglyphic Luwian is a form of Luwian written in a native script, known as Anatolian hieroglyphs.^{[1] [2]} 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 first report of a monumental inscription dates to 1850, when an inhabitant of Nevşehir reported the relief at Fratkin. 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 in its hieroglyphic stage could have been influenced from Hittite and perhaps also Greek, which had spread to Late Minoan II Crete by the 15th century BCE.

Relationship to preceding languages

Indo-European topics
Indo-European languages
Albanian Anatolian Armenian Baltic Celtic Dacian Germanic Greek Indo-Iranian Italic Phrygian Slavic Thracian Tocharian
Indo-European peoples
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Proto-Indo-Europeans
Language Society Religion
Urheimat hypotheses
Kurgan hypothesis Anatolia Armenia India PCT
Indo-European studies

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

Craig Melchert in Studies in Memory of Warren Cowgill (1987; pp 182–204) used Luwian to propose 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 kaluti, which means "turn" or "circle". Many linguists claim 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.

Non-Indo-European survivals in Luwian

In addition, Luwian and its descendants in general reflect survivals of a non-Indo-European type in western Anatolia. Where Hittite, with some Hieroglyphic Luwian and Palaic language texts, allow for the classically Indo-European suffix -as for the singular genitive and -an for the plural genitive, the "canonical" Luwian as used in cuneiform (with some Palaic rituals) employed instead an adjectival suffix -assa. Given the prevalence of -assa place-names and words scattered around all sides of the Aegean Sea, this suffix is considered evidence of a shared non-Indo-European language or at the very least an Aegean Sprachbund preceding the arrivals of Luwians and Greeks. This feature of Cuneiform Luwian may have been a deliberate archaism, to emphasise their roots in that land; or else the Luwians may have genuinely forgotten the Indo-European genitive only to pick it up later for Hieroglyphic Luwian.

Notes

References

• Laroche, Emmanuel. Catalogue des textes hittites 1991.
• 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. 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.

External links

• 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