Kalašma

I'd thought we were done cataloguing and editing the Hattusas tablets but - it seems not. Here is a new one, announced late last night Western time. In a newly-described language: Kalašmaunili.

Like a lot of not-Knesian, not-Akkadian text at Hattusa this is a ritual from some other city. It is introduced as from Kalašma. Daniel Schwemer and Elisabeth Rieken reckon that it is an Anatolian language, more like Luwian than like Knesian or Palaumnili "Palaic". Kalašma is supposed to be northwest like Pala, so - a Luwian dialect isn't what we'd expect over there.

How they can tell - unsure. They know it is a ritual text. They may be able to tell it is parallelic and poetic. They may also be able to tell sentence-structure and morphology as looking Luwian-like. Synonyms should be easy to piece out from the babble. On the other hand... it may also be full of jargon not spoken in proper Luwian or Knesian - nor in Palaic. (I am guessing that "Kalašmaunili" is what the Knesians of Hattusas called this language.) Hence why they cannot just read it (bro); if it were simple Luwian, that should be easy by now.

There is a lot of hype about it being "IndoEuropean" but Anatolian is properly a sister to IndoEuropean as classically delineated blah blah blah you've read me say that before. What we might get, from Kalašmaic, is further constraint on the proto-Luwian language, and more clarity on Anatolian as a whole.