THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN HIEROGLYPHIC & CUNEIFORM LUWIAN.
Channel: European Association of Archaeologists
Date: 04/04/2021

For a long time, the Anatolian hieroglyphics were considered »Hittite« and it was only in the 1970s, when the close relationship to the Luwian language was discovered by the redefinition of some phonetic values. Today we speak of Hieroglyphic Luwian as opposed to Cuneiform Luwian. Recently, however, the special relation to Luwian has been called into question again (Yakubovich). Be it as it may – the crucial question still remains: how exactly do Hieroglyphic and Cuneiform Luwian differ from each other and why? One variety is written with pictorial signs, the other in some Anatolian form of cuneiform writing. The details of the linguistic differences have long been well-known. The big problem, however, is still unresolved: how are these differences to be evaluated?

The difficulty here is the very fact that there is no sequence or dichotomy between Hieroglyphic and the Cuneiform Luwian in terms of time or space. In other words: they are neither two different dialects nor two different linguistical phases. So far, there have been surprisingly few concrete proposals to solve this problem. That they could be different sociolects, as suggested by Frank Starke in 1997, is very unlikely, since the producers of both groups of texts came from the same upper class of the Hittite Empire. In the present contribution, another variation linguistic approach is to be pursued, supplemented having a closer look at similar difficulties in other disciplines with pictorial writing systems (Egyptology, Maya Studies). After weighing up several approaches, the hypothesis is finally put forward that the two corpora are not just two types of writing systems but also different types of what generally is called functiolects.


Author(s): Breyer, Francis (University of Bonn)