The Palaic language, which appears as palaumnili ‘language of the Palaite’ in Hittite cuneiform texts, was the language of the region of Palā in northwest Anatolia from the 2nd millennium bce (Palā approximates the location of Blaëne in the Greek period and Paphlagonia in the Roman). Palā, Luwiya, and Hattusa formed the three major Anatolian provinces of the Old Hittite kingdom, but, from the intermediary Dark Age onward, Kaska nomads engaged in raids against the settlements of northern Anatolia, and Palā declined in importance.
Palaic is preserved only in a few liturgical fragments from Hattusa that were dedicated to the cult of the Hattian god Ziparwa. Palaic was surely extinct as a spoken language by the 13th century bce and may have already been so by the 16th century, the period attributed to the earliest preserved texts in the language.
The Indo-European character of Palaic was first advocated by Assyriologist Emil Forrer in 1922. As with Old Hittite, part of the Palaic material is preserved on tablets written in a hand known as “old ductus.” The knowledge of the limited vocabulary leaves much to be desired, but, despite some unmistakable influences from the non-Indo-European Hattian, several parallels—especially in the inflection of the noun, the forms of the demonstrative, relative, and enclitic pronouns, and the verbal endings—vouch for a close relationship to Hittite and Luwian.
Luwian
The Luwian (or Luvian) language was spoken in southern Anatolia and in the Hittite provinces and allied states of northern Syria. Its status as a spoken language in western and central Anatolia is an unresolved question. Various writing systems exist for the language. Cuneiform Luwian refers to the language recorded in the Hittite cuneiform archives from Hattusa; it is found in ritual passages and loanwords throughout the Hittite texts of the 16th–13th centuries bce.
The hieroglyphs that came to be used to write Luwian were devised in Anatolia sometime early in the 2nd millennium and had already appeared on personal seals during the Old Hittite empire (1650–1500 bce). During the Dark Age of the 16th and 15th centuries bce, the early hieroglyphic writing grew into a fully developed system with logograms (word-signs), syllabic values, and auxiliary signs. During the New Empire (1400–1190 bce), the hieroglyphic script was in use for a multitude of purposes, including rock inscriptions and seals. From the early 12th-century demise of the empire into the 8th century bce, the language remained in use in the Neo-Hittite states of southern Anatolia and Syria. Although Hieroglyphic Luwian is more widely attested than Cuneiform Luwian, radical revisions in the understanding of many hieroglyphic signs have shown that the two written forms of the language represent two very similar dialects whose precise relationship requires further research.
As in the case of Palaic, the pioneering work on Cuneiform Luwian was done by Emil Forrer in 1922. New text materials were published in 1953, closely followed by both grammatical and vocabulary studies as well as a standard dictionary of the language (1959). The first attempts to decipher Hieroglyphic Luwian, made by archaeologist Archibald H. Sayce in the 1880s, were fortunate in some fundamental details. However, it was not until the 1930s that systematic and mutually stimulating research by scholars of several countries led to the establishment of a number of syllabic values for the characters as well as to a correct analysis of the sentence structure of the inscriptions. In his publication of the (bilingual) Hittite royal seals (in 1940 and 1942), pioneering Hittitologist Hans G. Güterbock bridged the gap between the inscriptions of the empire period and the late Neo-Hittite states; the seals found in the French excavations at Ugarit (in northern Syria) served a similar purpose. The most important finding of the mid-20th century was the discovery in 1947 by Helmuth T. Bossert, an archaeologist and philologist, of the Karatepe bilingual inscriptions, written in Phoenician and Hieroglyphic Luwian.
On many points the Luwian vocabulary is still an enigma. The unity between the various Luwian dialects and the close relationship of Luwian to Hittite, Palaic, Lycian, and Lydian, however, are secured by several linguistic parallels, especially in the singular inflection of the noun, the forms of certain pronouns, the verbal endings, and a number of lexical (vocabulary) correspondences.