The recently discovered language remains largely incomprehensible, but researchers said it belongs to the Indo-European family.

without the filler:

Excavations have been taking place at Boğazköy-Hattusha for more than century under the direction of the German Archaeological Institute (DAI).

Around 30,000 clay tablets have been found at the site to date, which have shed light on various aspects of life during the Hittite period, according to the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg. The tablets contain inscriptions in cuneiform—what is generally considered to be the oldest known writing system. Developed by the ancient Sumerians of Mesopotamia more than 5,000 years ago, cuneiform is a script that was used to write several languages of the ancient Near East.

Most of the inscriptions found at Boğazköy-Hattusha record the extinct Hittite language, which is the oldest attested member of the Indo-European family. Other languages, such as Luwian and Palaic, are also represented at the site.

However, excavations conducted this year, led by professor Dr. Andreas Schachner of the DAI’s Istanbul Department, surprisingly uncovered a recitation of a previously unknown extinct language. The language was hidden on a cuneiform tablet containing a ritual text written in Hittite. The Hittite ritual text refers to the lost tongue as the language of the land of Kalašma, an area that likely corresponds to where the towns of Bolu or Gerede in northern Turkey are located today.

“The new language was written in cuneiform,” Schachner told Newsweek. “It is the same writing system the Hittites used. The text is part of a longer text starting in Hittite. As it continues it says at one point: ‘Continue in the language of the Land [of] Kalašma.’”

“The Hittites were uniquely interested in recording rituals in foreign languages,” Daniel Schwemer, head of the Chair of Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, said in a press release.

The recently discovered language remains largely incomprehensible. However, Professor Elisabeth Rieken with the Philipps University of Marburg, Germany, a specialist in Anatolian languages, has confirmed that the Kalasmaic tongue belongs to the Indo-European family, according to Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg.

EDIT: a more readable article with some other details here - https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/news-and-events/news/detail/news/new-indo-european-language-discovered/

  • nyoooom
    4•8 months ago

    The more I read into your comment, the less words I understand, but it was interesting nonetheless, thanks!

    • LvxferreM
      9•8 months ago

      Sorry. I have a nasty habit to dig into posh vocab without explaining it. I’ll try to unpack it, feel free to ask questions as I know that this will be still a bit messy.

      IE = Indo-European = a fucking huge family of languages. It includes Russian, Hindi, English, Italian, Greek, plus a lot more. The common ancestor of all those languages was nicknamed “Proto-Indo-European”, or PIE for short.

      After people coined the term “Proto-Indo-European”, they realised that PIE was actually two languages:

      • Early PIE - ancestor of Late PIE and Proto-Anatolian
      • Late PIE - ancestor of the five languages I mentioned above

      Proto-Anatolian is the ancestor of a bunch of dead languages from what’s today Turkey. For example: Hittite, Palaic, Luwian… and likely the language just discovered, nicknamed “Kalasmaic” (after the Kalasma principality from ~3500 years ago).

      Palatalisation is a sound change. Usually it’s some sound like /t/ or /k/ being pronounced as /tʃ/ (as in church) or similar. It happens extremely often: Latin did it, Japanese did it, English did it, my dialect of Portuguese did it, etc.

      *ḱ ǵ ǵʰ k g gʰ kʷ gʷ gʷʰ are nine sounds reconstructed for early and late PIE. Nobody knows exactly how they were pronounced (but everyone has a guess about it), that’s why they’re annotated with Zalgo-like diacritics. The asterisk means “we did not attest this directly”.

      Centum and satem are groups of Indo-European languages, based on what happened with those nine sounds:

      • satem - merged *k g gʰ with *kʷ gʷ gʷʰ; palatalised *ḱ ǵ ǵʰ
      • centum - merged *k g gʰ with *ḱ ǵ ǵʰ; kept *kʷ gʷ gʷʰ alone

      Note that in both cases *k g gʰ merged with something different.

      Traditionally Hittite and other Anatolian languages are classified as centum. However, this division might not apply well to them, because maybe the sound changes above happened to Late PIE, after Hittite and co. branched off. Luwian happened to palatalise a lot of sounds, but that was a later sound change, unrelated to the one that the satem languages went through.

      I was wondering if Kalasmaic underwent the same palatalisation as Luwian, and how much. It would be specially useful if it kept all three trios somehow distinct - because then we can say “yup, centum/satem does not apply to Anatolian languages”, and date the change to after Late PIE and Proto-Anatolian diverged.

      • nyoooom
        1•8 months ago

        Thanks for the explanation, it’s really a super interesting topic