Hittite tablets proved a sound that Saussure had only predicted
In 1879 the young linguist Ferdinand de Saussure argued that the ancestor of most European and Indian languages once had sounds that had vanished from every known descendant. Decades later, clay tablets dug up from 1906 onwards revealed a Bronze Age language that still wrote them down. That language was Hittite, the oldest recorded Indo-European tongue.
Hittite was spoken in Anatolia, modern Turkey, and survives in cuneiform texts mostly from the archives of the capital Hattusa, dating from the 17th to the 13th century BC. Scattered Hittite names and words turn up even earlier, in Old Assyrian merchant records from the town of Kanesh around the 20th century BC. The Hittites themselves called their speech nesili, the language of Neša, another name for Kanesh. The modern label comes from linking their kingdom of Hatti with the Hittites of the Bible, an identification that seems to be mistaken; the Hattians were actually an earlier people with an unrelated language.
Saussure had reasoned from vowel patterns that Proto-Indo-European had sounds now called laryngeals. Hittite kept two of the three as a sound written with the letter ḫ, directly confirming his theory. Hittite also lacks features found in Sanskrit, Greek and Latin: it has no masculine and feminine genders, only an older split between animate and inanimate nouns, and no subjunctive or optative moods.
Those gaps sparked a long debate. Edgar Sturtevant and Warren Cowgill proposed that Hittite was a sister rather than a daughter of Proto-Indo-European, both descending from an Indo-Hittite parent that lacked those features. Rivals favoured the loss hypothesis, in which Hittite inherited the full system and simplified it. The prevailing view, as Craig Melchert described it in 2012, is that the Anatolian branch split away very early, missing innovations the rest of the family later shared while preserving archaic traits.
Reading it is tricky. The Hittites borrowed a form of Akkadian cuneiform from northern Syria, a mostly syllabic script built for a different language, so exact pronunciation remains uncertain. They also absorbed religious vocabulary from Hurrian and Hattic. By the 13th century BC even Hattusa seems to have spoken mostly Luwian, a close relative, and after the Late Bronze Age collapse Hittite disappeared.
Source: Hittite language
