3 ms·
The cuneiform tablets are written in Assyrian (Akkadian, East Semitic): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkadian_language#Dialects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
by mikhailfranco 3y ago
The cuneiform tablets are written in Assyrian (Akkadian, East Semitic):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkadian_language#Dialects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akkadian_language#Dialects
They also contain some loanwords from the local language of Kanesh (Kaneš, Kültepe 'ash hill' in Turkish), which is the earliest record of any Indo-European language:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%BCltepe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%BCltepe
- wl 3y agoIf you'd like to learn to read that language, Hittite is fairly well-understood. And there's a college-freshman-level grammar out since 2011. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/elements-of-hittite/6FC9DEB8C9294ABB0054AC81F8D018BD#fndtn-information https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/elements-of-hittite/6FC...
- OfSanguineFire 3y agoThe Kanisite Hittite that the GP describes isn't the Hittite taught in textbooks. It is a handful of Indo-European names in otherwise non-Indo-European text. For specialists only.
- wl 3y agoI am aware. But the fragments of Hittite attested in these Old Babylonian texts predate the earliest bits of the extant Hittite corpus by about a century. Given what we know about how the Hittite language evolved when it is well-attested, the differences are unlikely to be substantial. My point remains: If you want to study the earliest attested Indo-European language, there's a good freshman-level grammar out there.