Twentieth-century Discoveries.

Besides the nine branches described above, discoveries in the twentieth century added two new groups to the family: Hittite and Tocharian. Until recently the Hittites have been known to us chiefly from references in the Old Testament. Abraham bought the burial place for Sarah from a Hittite (Gen. 23), and Bathsheba, whom David coveted, was the wife of Uriah the Hittite (2 Sam. 11). Their language was preserved only in a few uninterpreted documents. In 1907, however, an archaeological expedition uncovered the site of the Hittite capital in Asia Minor, at Boghazköi, about ninety miles east of Ankara, containing the royal archives of nearly 10,000 clay tablets. The texts were written in Babylonian cuneiform characters, and some were in the Babylonian language (Akkadian), the diplomatic language of the day. Most of the tablets, however, were in an
unknown language. Although a number of different languages seem to have been spoken in the Hittite area, nine-tenths of the tablets are in the principal language of the kingdom.

It is apparently not the original language of the district, but it has been given the name Hittite. The sudden opening up of so extensive a collection of texts has permitted considerable progress to be made in the study of this language. The most remarkable effect upon Indo-European studies has been the confirmation of a hypothesis made by Ferdinand de Saussure in 1879. On the basis of internal evidence Saussure had proposed for Indo-European certain sound patterns that did not occur in any of the languages then known. Twenty years after the discovery of the Hittite tablets it could be demonstrated that Saussure’s phonological units, which had become known as “laryngeals,” occurred in Hittite much as he had proposed for Indo-European. The number and phonetic features of laryngeals in Indo-European are still a matter of debate, but there is general agreement that at least one laryngeal must be posited for the parent language.10 In the reconstruction of Indo-European syntax, Hittite has provided invaluable evidence. A strong argument can now be made that Hittite and the oldest hymns of the Rig-veda represent the Object- Verb structure of Indo-European, which by the time of Classical Greek and Latin had been largely modified to a Verb-Object pattern.11 A large proportion of the Hittite vocabulary comes from a non-Indo-European source. The blending with foreign elements appears to be as great as in Albanian. By some scholars Hittite is treated as coordinate with Indo-European, and the period of joint existence is designated Indo-Hittite. It is sufficient, however, to think of Hittite as having separated from the Indo-European community some centuries (perhaps 500 years or more) before any of the other groups began to detach themselves.

Tocharian is the name given to the language in which some fragmentary texts were discovered in the early part of the present century in western China (Xinjiang Uygur). Some of them contain the name of a king who according to Chinese evidence reigned in the early part of the seventh century of our era. To the philologist the discovery is of some importance because the language belongs with the Hellenic, Italic, Germanic, and Celtic groups as a centum language rather than with the eastern or satem groups, with which we should expect it to be most closely related.