Who needs the Hittite corps?

It is known that a real scientist is able to explain to the child what he works on, in five minutes in simple words. But in fact, this is such a psychological trap: you can engage in very necessary serious things with great potential for the future of mankind, but not always have the answer to the questions "What is it?" And "who needs it right now?" So you are completely lost when they ask why to study languages-not English or German, but something completely not in demand when building a career, some kind of Izhora or, say, the language of helmets attacked poor Hittites 3500 years ago. We and the Hittites themselves, properly, began to find out only 100 years ago, except for rare excerpts from the Bible. But it was a huge powerful Hittite Empire, one of the great kingdoms of the Bronze Age, which occupied most of modern Turkey and Northern Syria, and then once disappeared from the history of our civilization at the beginning of the Iron Age.

Take the language of one of the small nationalities of Russia, the last media of which are about to die and linguists are trying to have time to write down their speech on the recorder, decipher, fix in linguistic buildings. Why is this necessary? Okay, they will tell me, Izhora - part of the domestic cultural heritage. But the Hittite - part of our common cultural heritage is the oldest Indo -European language recorded in writing, a relative of English and Russian. Do you know that the double -headed eagle on the Russian coat of arms has the most Hittic origin? From the Hittites, he went a long road, including through Byzantium, and entered our statehood. Do you know what is the most common word in the Hittites speech? A small word “well” from which the proposal begins. Just like in Russian - "Well, I went!" - Nu Paimi (Hitt. "I will go"). This initial particle means practically nothing, except that a new proposal begins, it is a phrasal connector, as linguists say. It is very similar in its functions to sounding in the same way the Russian particle.

The continuity of the tradition of depicting a double -headed eagle on public papers (and the Hittites were put on the lack of paper on clay cuneiform signs) is confirmed by historians' research. So, the historian from the Russian State Humanitarian University Evgeny Lake 1 wrote a whole book about the Russian coat of arms, where he emphasizes this connection of times. Whether the Russian interjection of “well” and the Hittite NU are precisely connected, to say much more difficult to say. Rather, by default, linguists believe that these two words coincide with accidentally. Is it possible to prove or refute their genetic connection, given that we do not even know where the stress was put in Hittic speech? The fact is that the Hittites recorded their texts without punctuation marks, thank you that even the gaps between the words put it. Unfortunately, without a time of time, we are not able to understand how and with what intonation they spoke Hittites, for example, whether, like us, a pause after “well”. However, we are still able to find out something about the sound of dead languages, in which people have not spoke for three thousand years and from which we only got fragments of clay tablets-this is something like to calculate in the footsteps in the photographs of the sky, whether there are planets from a distant star.

In order to understand the functions of the Hittite NU , first you need to find all the sentences that it starts, see what frequency it meets, which means the words surrounding this particle. But it is impossible to reconsider the sketches of all the cuneiform signs in the Hittite language only for the sake of NU - too much time will take such work, and the results are too insignificant to take on it. The linguistic corps can come to the aid here - the database in which all Hittite texts are collected without exception (for example, to begin with at least texts of a certain time or genre). Further, they should be recorded in a translicified form - in such a graph that it is easy to read - for example, Latin. The word forms must be digitized and indexed - and then we will simply type in the search interface of the desired NU and get a sample of all the contexts in which it is found. The task of analyzing the meaning and function of a small particle, so reminiscent of the Russian initial “well”, is becoming much easier. Linguists from the sector of the Anatolian and Celtic languages ​​of the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences have already conducted a preliminary analysis, which showed that about half of the Hittite proposals begin with NU . Imagine that every second word in your story will begin this way: “Well, Petya enters the room; Well, went to the table; Well, I took an apple; Well, ate it; And here-ah-and fell dead, the apple was poisoned! "

The Hittite Claus Corps, which is made in Iyaz RAS, is needed, of course, not only for the study of NU . With it, you can answer questions that you can’t get to otherwise. One of the key areas of the Hittite syntax study is to study the word order. The order of words is when a subject (subject), an object (direct addition) and a verb (predicate) are found in a language in a certain sequence. There are languages ​​with the free order of words - like Russian, in which one can say “Masha ate porridge” and “Masha ate porridge”, and “Eata Masha”, and “Eata Masha Porridge”. You can say something, but it seems that the meaning of these phrases is slightly different. Indeed, there is a feeling that only the first phrase is pronounced in a relatively flat tone; It is already clear in the second that it is important for the speaker to emphasize exactly who ate this very porridge; in the third - depending on the intonation - either who ate porridge, or the essence of the machine breakfast; And the fourth phrase as if starting a story in which breakfast cars should be interrupted in the most unexpected way 2 . There are languages ​​in which the word order is formal and tough - so, in English it is very important that the subject is the first to go. There, intonation strategies can be implemented, for example, in phrases brought forward: a man kissed a woman. - IT WAS A Man Who Kissed a Woman . Which word order for the language is normal, which order is burdened with what additional meanings, usually revealed with the help of language experiments, through the definition of negative examples (“so to speak”).

In the Hittite language, as in some other ancient Indo-European languages, the most common word of words is SOV-subject-object-legol. But there are other rules of words, most often OSV-object-subject-legol. So, in one of the Novohta letters (shortly before the fall of the Hittite Empire), a situation is described when a certain named ATP is going to release hostages, but a man named Piamarad gave him a rebel Siggaunu and said to him: “The god of thunder awarded you. Why will you give the reward back? " And the ATPA in the end did not let go of the hostages. The proposal “God of the thunder, they say, awarded you” sounds as follows: tuk = wa tarhuntas piyanait , “God awarded the thunder”, that is, at the beginning of whom (object), then who (the god of thunder), then the verb. Why did such a word order arose here? What does it mean? Intonation secretion of the word "you"? Or the intonation secretion of the phrase "God of thunder"? If we can understand this, then we will actually be able to read aloud an offer that has not sounded for millennia. If we begin to confidently understand what the intonational strategies of Hittic speech were, perhaps we will be able to ever make their songs to sound-with the same reservations, with which the ancient Greek text can already be read aloud. Perhaps our culture will include not only the Homeric epic, but also the cycle of legends about the god Kumarby, borrowed by the Hittites from the Hurrites and recorded in the Hittite language. Part of this cycle of stories was most likely told by poems or even sang.

But we cannot look for negative examples in experiments with a dead language - alas, there are no longer those native speakers who could confidently say: “They don’t say that in our language.” The only way to check is that certain orders of words are possible, there is a case analysis: at least, we can calculate which sentences are found in the texts that have reached us, and which is not completely. For such a corps experiment, all words in all texts on all signs ideally should be translated into digital form, described and indexed. This is a very long and painstaking work, but its first results can already be partially seen if you set a search on the database posted on the HittiteCorpus.ru website.

Maria Molina,
scientific journalist, employee of the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences

1 Bee E.V. Russian State Emblem. Composition, stylistics and semantics in a historical context . M.: RSU, 2005: “ The connection of the eagle with the tsarist power is mentioned in the ancient Shatt rituals dating back to the 17th century BC ... Next, the continuation in the same area - Byzantium ... and in the Holy Roman Empire .”
His colleague from the St. Petersburg Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences Georgy Vilinbakhov in the 2003 doctoral dissertation on the topic “ State Heraldry in Russia: Theory and Practice ” recalls that the image of the two-headed eagle was found at a stone relief in Aladzha-Hyuyuk (Central Anatoly), where it can still be seen: “ Later, the images of the double-headed eagle meet in various various cultural and historical regions. In the East, this tradition was supported in the Sassanids state in the VI century, in the Arab world from the XII to the XIV century. The appearance of a double -headed eagle in Europe as a heraldic sign is usually associated with the Crusades. Under the influence of Byzantium, the two -headed eagle appeared as a symbol of statehood and independence in Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro, Albania, Romania. In Russia, the two-headed eagle appeared on the princely seal of John III Vasilyevich in the 1490s . "

2 Read more about the intonational strategies of Russian speech in the book Yanko T.E. Intonation strategies of Russian speech in a comparative aspect. - M.: Languages ​​of Slavic culture, 2008.