The good Dr. Tuna

[Ralf-Stefan Georg]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
 
>Where are the books on Sumerian?
>
>Where are all the books on Hittite? I have a batch of them. It took
>be 6 months to collect some and xerox the others. Does this mean that
>I must not trust that the OI has done poor work and that I should not
>rely "on others". What if I start to look at the original text?
>
>What exactly is there that is going to take 12 years to learn?
 
A textbook, or well a handbook of, say, Hittite is but a snapshot of common
knowledge about such a language at a very precise given point in time.
Just as an example: I consider myself well-trained in Indo-European and did
study Hittite (including cuneiform) for a while. Yet I'd not even think
about citing a Hittite form which may be crucial for some argument of mine
without consulting my Hittitologist friends before, who work night and day
with the actual texts. Hittite is language which is amply (re: the number
of texts), but still quite fragmentarily (re: its vocabulary and
morphology) attested. *Every day* during the summer campaigns new texts are
unearthed, transcribed, translated and eventually published. Every year at
least, some of them lead to sometimes considerable changes in our knowledge
of the language. Words are re-assigned to different inflectional classes,
meanings are fixed, even the *readings* of cuneiform signs are fixed
sometimes even today, previously well-known words, which already made it
into the dictionaries are unveiled as errors of previous investigators and
so on, and so on. It is quite unlikely that things like that happen too
often for languages like Danish, Mandarin Chinese or Guugu-Yimidhirr (one
modern language, for which a constant reanalysis of synchronic data is
however quite common is Ket), but for a language whose records are three
millennia old this is quite common and should surprise nobody.
The same holds for the other cuneiform languages, like Sumerian, Hurrian,
Urartaean aso. In the case of Hattic, one monograph published last year
manages to render almost the entirety of previous publications on this
language obsolete (yet Hattic had been assigned to various language
families before, too bad).
This has nothing to do with the languages being so utterly difficult and
unmanagable, the writing system is, the cultural setting of the texts is,
and the fragmentary nature of the stone tablets after so many centuries is
(there is actually *one* (1) entirely undamaged text of any interesting
length in Hittite, the famous bronze-tablet contract, found in the
eighties).
Learning Hittite does *not* take 12 years, it takes your whole life. Making
use of the present state-of-the-art (which may be different after two
years) for linguistic purposes takes a phone-call to the experts (but
having spent 12 years learning Hittite before that surely helps to
understand what they are talking about ;-).
 
St.G.
 
Stefan Georg
Heerstrasse 7
D-53111 Bonn
FRG
+49-228-69-13-32