Tag: Hittite

Daily Gleanings: Hittite (18 September 2019)

Alwin Kloekhort’s 2007 dissertation from Leiden University, “The Hittite Inherited Lexicon,” is openly available online via Leiden University’s scholarly repository. Per the project’s abstract,

In over 1200 pages this dissertation describes the history of Hittite in the light of its Indo-European origin.… Part One, ‘Towards a Hittite Historical Grammar’, contains a description of the Hittite phoneme inventory and a discussion of the sound laws and morphological changes that have taken place between the Proto-Indo-European and the Hittite language stage. Part Two, ‘An Etymological Dictionary of the Hittite Inherited Lexicon’, contains etymological treatments of all Hittite words of Indo-European origin. One of the most important conclusions of this dissertation is that the Anatolian language group was the first one to split off from Proto-Indo-European and that all other Indo-European branches have undergone a period of common innovations. Therewith Anatolian, and especially Hittite, occupies a very important position within comparative Indo-European linguistics as it sometimes has retained linguistic information that has been lost in all other Indo-European languages.

HT: AWOL

Daily Gleanings: Finds from AWOL (11 July 2019)

Oğuz Soysal and Başak Yıldız Gülşen’s Unpublished Bo-Fragments in Transliteration II (Bo 6151–Bo 9535) is freely available via open access from the University of Chicago. The description comments in part,

The monograph offers a large number of unpublished text fragments in photo and transliteration and gives succinct philological notes to these fragments. The fragments are part of a large collection that had been found during the early Turkish-German campaigns at the Hittite capital Hattusa before the Second World War.

…

Oğuz Soysal, a Hittitologist, and Başak Yıldız Gülşen, a curator of the Ankara Museum, provide photographs and transliterations of each piece.… Photos offer the users of his book all the information needed on the sign forms of the fragments, and the transliterations show how the authors have interpreted those signs. Wherever necessary, the authors give philological notes to explain certain forms or to present relevant text variants. Each fragment, if possible, is accompanied by information on its assignment to a Hittite text or text genre, the date of the composition, the fragmentʼs measurements, and previous bibliography.

HT: AWOL

Per the Digital Classicist Wiki,

Scholarship in classics frequently involves dealing with unusual alphabets, scripts, and letterforms. The Unicode standard is designed to encode the characters of the world’s writing systems (living and ancient), but it does not attempt to encode glyphs, which have been ceded to fonts and type design.

The wiki provides a helpful list of “pages dealing with fonts and specialized typographic needs of classicists.”

For more about Unicode, see “Typing Biblical Languages in Unicode.”

HT: AWOL