Anatolian languages

The Anatolian languages are an extinct branch of the Indo-European family, attested in ancient Anatolia and including Hittite, Luwian, and Lycian.

Indo-European languages: A language family extending from prehistoric roots to languages spoken across Europe and parts of Asia. Anatolian is one of its earliest-attested branches.
Comparative method: A procedure for reconstructing language history by comparing systematic correspondences among related languages. It establishes which Anatolian forms are inherited from earlier Indo-European.
Hittite archives: Cuneiform tablets recovered from Hittite administrative, religious, and diplomatic centers in Anatolia. These archives provide the main documentary foundation for early Anatolian language history.
Luwian language: An ancient Anatolian language attested in cuneiform and Anatolian hieroglyphic inscriptions. Luwian was widely used across southern and western Anatolia.
Hittite discovery: The identification of Hittite as an Indo-European language after the decipherment of its cuneiform tablets. Recognizing Hittite’s relationship to Indo-European transformed comparative scholarship.
Proto-Indo-European language: The reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages. Comparisons with this reconstructed language reveal Anatolian retentions and innovations.
Laryngeal theory: A theory positing consonants in Proto-Indo-European that explain vowel patterns in its descendants. Hittite evidence helped confirm consonants earlier reconstructed from indirect vowel effects.
Hattusa: The capital of the Hittite kingdom, located at modern Boğazkale in central Turkey. Its excavated tablets include the largest body of Hittite texts.
Lycian language: An ancient language of southwestern Anatolia, known mainly from inscriptions in its own alphabet. Lycian shows the branch’s diversity in the first millennium BCE.
Bedřich Hrozný: A Czech Assyriologist who demonstrated in 1915 that Hittite was an Indo-European language. His decipherment opened Hittite texts to historical linguistic analysis.

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