Hittite language
extinct Bronze Age Indo-European language
Hittite, also known as Nesite (Nešite/Neshite, Nessite), is an extinct Indo-European language that was spoken by the Hittites, a people of Bronze Age Anatolia who created an empire centred on Hattusa, as well as parts of the northern Levant and Upper Mesopotamia.
![]() |
This theme article is a stub. You can help out with Wikiquote by expanding it! |
Quotes
edit- Nasili cannot be accepted without qualification as Aryan. ... The deviations in the inflection are puzzlingly numerous. ... Again the number of Indo-European words and stems identified in the vocabulary is but small. Finally, the syntax remains essentially un- Aryan... Now if these documents dated from the 14th century AD, few would hesitate to declare that they were written in an Indo-European language and explain the discrepancies as due to the familiar phenomena of decay, assimilation of forms, and foreign borrowing. But the texts... are many centuries older than the oldest written memorials of Sanskrit or Greek. Yet their language diverges from the hypothetical original Aryan tongue far more than Greek or Sanskrit differs from the parent speech or from one another. It is a fact impossible to believe that a truly Indo-European language would look so odd in the 14th century before our era.
- The Aryans: A study of Indo-European origins, by Childe, V Gordon. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926. [1] quoted in S. Talageri, The Aryan Invasion Theory and Indian Nationalism (1993)