Hittite menahhanda.

• Author: Nikolaev, Alexander

The Hittite preverb or postposition menahhanda 'opposite, against, vis-a-vis, facing, toward', sometimes spelled Sumerographically as IGI-an-da, is well attested from OS on. Examples are now readily available in CHD (L-N: 274-88) and HED (6: 145-46); (1) here is a selection:

nu=ssi LU.KUR zahhiya menahhanda namma UL kuiski mazzasta "No enemy dared any longer (to go) against him in battle." (KBo 5.6 i 7-8) manahhanda[(=ya=sa)n k(urakki)] tapuwas ZAG-ni GUB-li nu kuwapiya QATAMMA 4 wallu[s dai] "Opposite the pillar, alongside, on the right, on the left-- everywhere in the same way [he deposits] four wallus." (KBo 4.1 rev. 3-4) nu=smas=za ziqqa assus es tuqq=at ICI-an-da assawes asandu "You be good to them, and let them be good toward you." (KBo 12.30 ii 10-11) 1 (LU) DAM.GAR-ma=kan LUGAL-i menahhanda arta "One merchant stands before/facing the king." (KUB 57.95 iv 5-6) mahhan=ma=mu=kan LU.MES (URU) Duqqamma menahhanda awer "When the men of D. saw me coming" (KBo 4.4 iv 18-19) kuedani=wa=za menahhanda ishamiskesi "To whom are you singing?" (KUB 36.12 ii 9) nu=mu MUNUS-TUM kuit menahhanda uet n=as=mu GIR.MES-as kattan haliyattat "Because the woman came to meet me, and prostrated herself at my feet" (KUB 14.15 iv 28-29) The word menahhanda has traditionally been compared with menali- n. (pl. tant.), mena-c. 'face, cheek", and this comparison is hard to deny. (2) The second part of menahhanda is, however, problematic. The word has been parsed into mena and hant-. The latter is a frequent Hittite word meaning 'forehead, front' and the usual assumption has been that menahhanda is a compound of two nouns in allative case, 'face' and 'forehead'. (3)

Such segmentation appears questionable on several counts; first of all, this analysis fails to provide a principled explanation of the meaning: it is a priori not clear how a compound 'face-forehead' came to mean 'facing'. Since hant- (c. and n.) never means 'face', but only 'forehead' or 'front", (4) English "face-to-face" and French "vis-a-vis" are not real parallels.

The nature of the relationship between the two members of this alleged compound is unclear, too. Hittite has a few endocentric determinative compounds, tatpurusaa and karmadharayas (e.g., pappaneknes 'brothers having the same father' from pappa 'father' + negna- 'brother"; tuzziyasessar 'settlement of an army' from tuzzi 'army' + asessar 'settlement' (5)), but even under the assumption that hant- (as nomen regens) is used in its lexical meaning 'forehead, front', the meaning 'into the forehead/front of the face' simply does not make a lot of sense. Neither does menahhanda easily lend itself to an analysis in terms of a copulative compound 'into the face and into the front". Although Hittite has a few compounds of this type (e.g., hassahanzassa- 'grand- and great-grandsons'), (6) one has a hard time perceiving virtual (*) menahhand- as a partes-pro-toto synecdoche (so HED 6: 147), since the original meaning of menali- is already 'face'! In fact, Hittite itself provides an example of how a name for a body part can be construed through a synecdochical combination of two parts, namely, a copulative compound sakuissa- that likely means 'face' and is formed from saku- 'eye' and ass-liss- 'mouth'. (7)

A different solution involving hant- has been proposed: it has been maintained that hant-or, rather handa, is used here not in the meaning 'front', but rather in its adverbialized locative meaning 'in front of (so prominent among other descendants of Indo-European *[h.sub.2]ent-). (8) However, this theory does not solve the problem at hand either. While Hittite hanti 'opposite, against' has a good chance of being an inherited adverb (cf. Greek [alpha]v[tau]i 'in front of", Latin ante 'before', Sanskrit anti 'id.' (9)), there is no reason or comparative evidence that would allow us to make the same assumption in the case of other adverbial offshoots of hant -'forehead', namely, handas, hanza(n), hantaz, or handa, all of which are best accounted for as later lexicalizations of inflected forms of the base noun hant-. The adverb handa is attested from MH/MS on and the word normally means 'for the sake of, in view of' (a meaning of course incompatible with the meaning of menahhanda). (10) It would therefore be methodologically unsound to assign to Hittite handa a meaning 'against' or 'in front of' based on the root etymology alone and claim that this etymological meaning of handa has only been preserved in menahhanda.

An alternative analysis is thus desirable. My own proposal builds on the idea of Duchesne-Guillemin (1947: 75), who argued in passing that the second part of the word menahhanda is the well-known Hittite postposition anda 'into'.

It is worth noting that there is a piece of Anatolian evidence not known to Duchesne-Guillemin that seems to support his solution: if analyzed as menahh=anda, the Hittite word is reminiscent of its near-synonym in Lycian, namely ntewe 'facing, opposite; toward', in origin a compound of *en and tewe* 'eye'. (11) Even more important is the complete match between the formal structure of Hittite menahh=anda and Lycian (x) tewe nte TL 44a,53 'facing'

Nevertheless, at the time when Duchesne-Guillemin proposed his solution, his case was very weak, since he had to leave open the question of the morphology of the first part, menahh-; for this reason his suggestion has been largely neglected in later scholarship. It therefore behooves us to say a few words about the origin and morphological history of the stem menali- 'face, cheek' first.

The following forms of this word are attested: nom.-acc.sg. neut. meni (3x; e.g., me-e-ni-i=m-mi-it KBo 3.22 rev. 52 [OS]) and mena, loc. sg. meni, and ace. pl. comm. menus. (13) This allomorphy is best explained with E. Rieken (1994: 51; 1999: 56-58), who traced the stem-final -i- to an old athematic dual ending *-i[h.sub.1]) (of the type we find in Homeric [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]: from the root noun *[h.sub.3][ek.sup.w]-'eye'); indeed, a dual form must have been quite frequent with a word one of whose meanings is 'cheek'. The pre-Hittite paradigm of this word would therefore include an animate root noun *men- (14) and a dual *meni the thematic stem mena- (acc.pl.c. me-nu-us) is easily explainable as an innovation whose starting point would be the reinterpretation of ace. sg. *menan as a thematic form.

There is an important consequence of this morphological analysis for our purposes. If the thematic stem mena- is an inner-Hittite innovation, the adverb menahhanda (OS+) would be unlikely to contain this stem as its first member. (15) This means that if menahhanda is to be segmented as menahh=anda, its first part has to be an allomorph made from an athematic stem *men-.

The problem of menah can now be revisited: in my opinion, menah is an archaic allative form meaning 'to the face'. The resulting meaning of univerbated menahh=anda is then 'into the face', which is effectively what the word means. (16) However, as is well known, the Hittite allative has an ending -a, not -ah; therefore in order to explain how the new solution is going to work, a brief excursus into the origin of this case ending is required.

The allative case (17) (also known as directive, Richtungskasus, or Terminativ) was identified at the very beginning of Hittite studies. (18) Well attested in Old and Middle Hittite, it marks the goal towards (or into) which the movement is directed; aside from a few frozen archaisms, this case was lost in New Hittite and its functions were taken over by the dative-locative. (19)

This case has no direct correspondences in the morphological systems of other ancient Indo-European languages, but it is not isolated within the Anatolian family: locatives in -a are attested in Palaic, (20) and Luvian also shows occasional locatives in -a beside usual dative-locative singular forms in -i. (21) Further, in Luvian we find infinitives in -una (e.g., aduna 'to eat', karsuna 'to...