Re: [tied] Re: Hittites and others

This points to a question: was Hittite written records representative of
popular language? Is it possible that the "elite" spoke a
Sumerian-influenced language while the people spoke a more genuine Hittite
one? Like the Normand elite in England?

----- Original Message -----
From: Miguel Carrasquer Vidal <mcv@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Friday, October 19, 2001 7:20 PM
Subject: Re: [tied] Re: Hittites and others


> On Fri, 19 Oct 2001 11:43:06 -0700 (PDT), george knysh
> <gknysh@...> wrote:
>
> >I like MCV's reading of the
> >Sumerogram as "donkey from foreign parts". This sounds
> >EXACTLY like the sort of thing locals might have
> >called this exotic beast. And there is little
> >difficulty in seeing the incoming proto-Hittites
> >adopting the established local term instead of their
> >own (if that was the same as or close to Luwian) as
> >part of their acculturation process.*****
>
> But let me say it again: WE DON'T KNOW THE HITTITE WORD FOR HORSE.
> They wrote it 302-329-233, but whether they pronounced it /sisu/ or
> /aswa/ or something completely different is completely unknown. It's
> pretty certain, though, that they didn't use the circumlocution <ans^e
> kurra>, because no-one spoke Sumerian anymore at the time (or had
> spoken it as a living language for centuries). Besides, Sumerian was
> never spoken in Anatolia, so it cannot have supplied the established
> local term in Anatolia (in the unlikely case that there was one).
>
> Note that the Indo-European Armenians, when they entered Anatolia,
> took the word *ek^wos with them, and it ended up as Classical Armenian
> <e:s^> "donkey".
>
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