A Comparative Linguistic Study of Hieroglyphic Luvian

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The Indo-European languages used in ancient Anatolia represented by Hittite, Cuneiform Luvian, Hieroglyphic Luvian, Lycian, etc., preserve a lot of archaic linguistic features which probably go back to Proto-Indo-European. Hieroglyphic Luvian shows an interesting phenomenon so called "rhotacism", where t altemates with r. In this study forms having this r have been collected and analyzed in connection with their corresponding forms in other Anatolian languages and ancient Indo-European languages from a viewpoint of comparative linguistics. As a result it has become clear that there are two cases where rhotacism occurred. One case is observed after accented long vowels ; e.g., Hieroglyphic Luvian a-a+ra/i, Cuneiform Luvian a-ta ‘made', Lycian adi/edi, ade/ed<^*ioe-ti<ieh_1-ti. The other case is observed between unaccented short vowels ; e.g., Hieroglyphic Luvian tu-pi-ti, tu-pi-ri+i "strike"', Cuneiform Luvian du-u-pi-ti, Lycian tubidi<^*-di<'-ie-ti. These two cases, unrelated to each other as they seem at first sight, can be collapsed into a single rule, by which stop consonants became lenited after an unaccented mora. This study demonstrated that even information on prosodic features such as an accent can be obtained by applying a comparative method to dead languages where no prosodic information is available from written documents.