A New Phonological Feature Obtained from Hittite Cuneiform Clay Tablets: The Linguistic Contrast between Single and Double Affricates

<p>There is no positive evidence that Hittite scribes employed the signs including voiced and voiceless consonants in a contrastive manner to distinguish between voiced and voiceless values. What the Hittite scribes tried to show by orthography was a linguistic contrast between single and double consonants in intervocalic position. Single and double consonants indicate lenited and unlenited (or short and long) qualities, respectively. The Proto-Indo-European contrast of voiced/voiceless consonants, inherited also in Proto-Anatolian, was reinterpreted as one of lenited/unlenited (or short/long) in Hittite. This contrast is observed in stops, fricatives, laryngeals and sonorants. It is, however, traditionally assumed that the same contrast is not observed in affricates. We discuss this problem in this paper by analyzing the distribution of the 3 sg. present active endings, -Vzzi and -Vzi.</p><p>　　There are a small number of verbs which show the single -z- intervocalically in Old Hittite, as represented by ú-e-mi-zi (< *au-ém-i̯e-di < *au-ém-i̯e-ti) ‘finds’ and arnuzi (< *h₁r̥-né-u-di <*h₁r̥-né-u-ti) ‘(re)moves’. The relevant verbs all go back to the Proto-Anatolian forms characterized by the ending with voiced *d created by lenition rules. An obvious inference to be drawn from this fact is that the single -z- in these verbs reflects the lenited quality produced from *d by affrication before *i in its prehistory. Although the lenited *-dzi was replaced by the corresponding unlenited *-tsi (< *ti) to a large extent, the Old Hittite verbs in -z- preserve a notably archaic feature speaking for the linguistic contrast between the lenited and unlenited affricates. This claim is supported by some further pieces of evidence.</p><p>　　In the case of the historical study of dead languages, written documents are virtually the only sources of linguistic information. Furthermore, written documents are recorded by means of letters, which are nothing more than tools for indirectly representing phonetic information. In spite of these inherent difficulties, the techniques of historical linguistics enable us to obtain evidence useful for inferring language change. In this paper we have discussed a case in which markedly improved philological analyses contribute to inferring linguistic changes that occurred in the internal history of the language as well as in its prehistory.</p>