KBo 18.151 again

Last July, we brought an Old Hittite tablet, KBo 18.151. Most documents in Hattus(as) and Sapinuwa got written in "Nesili", the Anatolian language of old Kanesh. Hattusa and Sapinuwa, however, were not founded by the men of Kanesh. They occupied a nonAnatolian space - and the Hittites knew it, calling that language "Hattili". But Anatolians lived there too, whose language ended up taking on more Hattili than their descendents believed they should.

A lot of that was because of the history. The first kings of Hattusa were booted out, during the Thera era. On the glorious procession of the later kings back through the Lion Gate, they seem less-interested in local colour. Less Hattic; more Luwian and Hurrian.

Petra Goedegebuure has a followup. In her view KBo 18.151 is a draft. The king - Hattusili I - had asked a wise woman for divinations. The wise woman dictated her response. The draft was in poor Nesili. So a better edition (perhaps in proper dialect) was made for the king. We own only this draft. Goedegebuure is mostly using Soysal's work from the 2000s.

This new article argues for a Hattic case-system, suffixing. It's not just Indo-European, or that Anatolian sister-branch; Etruscan did this too. There are also genders. It is just that the genders differ, between Hattili and Nesili. Goedegebuure argues that KBo 18.151 - drafted in ostensible Nesili - is behaving too much like Hattili here.

Goedegebuure thinks the wise woman was a Nesili-as-a-second-language speaker. Alternatively, this draft was a team effort: the woman spoke her native Hattic whence her translator did a patchwork job, their scribe basically transliterating. The scribe then went home and fixed it up (this is the edition we don't got).