{"id":2075,"date":"2012-05-05T10:00:58","date_gmt":"2012-05-05T08:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elanguage.net\/blogs\/booknotices\/?p=2075"},"modified":"2012-05-03T09:33:40","modified_gmt":"2012-05-03T07:33:40","slug":"sociolinguistics-of-the-luvian-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/?p=2075","title":{"rendered":"Sociolinguistics of the Luvian language"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Sociolinguistics of the Luvian language<\/strong>. By Ilya Yakubovich<\/strong>. Lieden: Brill, 2009. Pp. xvi, 454. ISBN 9789004177918<\/a>. $207 (Hb).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Reviewed by Thomas R. Wier<\/strong><\/a>, University of Chicago<\/em><\/p>\n

In modern sociolinguistic models of how languages are distributed around the world and how they interact, it is usually implicit that both the data and analysis are drawn from case studies of contemporary societies. This new work by Ilya Yakubovich illustrates that this assumption is not a necessary one: with a sufficient number of textual attestations and attention to detail, the same principles can also be applied to the languages spoken in remote antiquity with no living speakers.<\/p>\n

Y focuses his attention on the Luvian language, an Anatolian language closely related to Hittite once spoken in what is now southwest-central Turkey between the late third and early first millenniums B.C. Though less well-known than their Hittite relatives and their eponymous empire, the Luvians actually outlived them by a number of centuries and probably already by the time of the Hittite New Kingdom (fourteenth\u2013early twelfth centuries B.C.) constituted the largest ethnolinguistic groups of Bronze Age Anatolia. After the empire\u2019s fall, Hittite disappeared entirely from the written corpus of cuneiform texts, and it is the possible implications of this fact that Y explores in detail. Did the collapse of the empire, precipitating the disappearance of bureaucratic records written in Hittite, leave behind illiterate native speakers, or had the language already died out even before the elite culture that protected it?<\/p>\n

Y begins his answer to this question in Ch. 1 with a close look at the paleographical record of Luvian, illustrating the differences between various Anatolian Indo-European languages, as well as dialectal variation within Luvian. These will form the foundation for his later argument that, towards the late Hittite New Kingdom, probably all speakers of Hittite were also speakers of Luvian, as evidenced by various forms of lexical and morphological borrowing as well as converging patterns of morphological syncretism. In Ch. 2, Y tries to sort out the social history behind these changes by looking at the complicated and poorly documented ethnographic literature of western Anatolia, including a fascinating excursus on the possible equation of Wilusa\/Tarwisa in Hittite texts with Classical Ilium\/Troy. Ch. 3 examines in detail prehistoric contact between the Hittite and Luvian languages, illustrating how the changing parallel patterns of syncretism of pronominal clitics in Luvian and Hittite only make sense in a context of persistent bilingualism of the two language communities. In Chs. 4 and 5, Y treats the historical sources of contact of Anatolian communities before and after the establishment of a unified Hittite Empire, respectively, through prosopographic analysis, lexical borrowing, structural interference, the direct assessment of historical information, and the analysis of acronymic values assigned to Anatolian hieroglyphic syllabograms.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, what makes this book interesting is the light it sheds on a society separated from us by not one but two Dark Ages, through the lens of languages whose very names had been forgotten in the intervening three millennia. Thoroughly grounded in a detailed understanding of that world, Y\u2019s prose allows us to hear those voices clearly and articulately from across that abyss of time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sociolinguistics of the Luvian language. By Ilya Yakubovich. Lieden: Brill, 2009. Pp. xvi, 454. ISBN 9789004177918. $207 (Hb). Reviewed by Thomas R. Wier, University of Chicago In modern sociolinguistic models of how languages are distributed around the world and how they interact, it is usually implicit that both the data and analysis are drawn from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2075"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2075"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2075\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2076,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2075\/revisions\/2076"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}