Sociolinguistics of the Luvian Language.

• Author: Teffeteller, Annette
• Position: Book review

Sociolinguistics of the Luvian Language. By ILYA YAKUBOVICH. Brill's Studies in Indo-European Languages and Linguistics, vol. 2. Leiden: BRILL, 2010. Pp. xvi + 454. $216.

Known only since the discovery of the Hittite archives in the early years of the last century. the Luvians are not well known even today. more than a century later. Although great progress has been made in understanding the language and particularly the Hieroglyphic script, many questions remain. Who are these enigmatic people whose magic spells and sacred songs are recorded in Hittite ritual and festival texts? Where are they to be located? Why did the Hittites, and especially the Neo-Hittites. write their monumental public inscriptions in Luvian? Were the latter-day Hittites in fact Luvians? Ilya Yakubovich takes on these questions and many others in a book bursting with brilliant insight and polemical argumentation, certain to stimulate lively debate and also certain to provoke prolonged controversy. A revision of the author's 2008 University of Chicago dissertation, written under the supervision of Theo van den Hout, this sociolinguistic study of the Luvian language posits extensive linguistic and historical contacts between Hittite and Luvian and. in firm opposition to the prevailing view. no significant contact between Luvian and Greek.

Rejecting the received view of the early presence of Luvians on the west coast of Anatolia and an eastward migration (e.g., Bryce 2003), Yakubovich locates the Anatolian "home area" of the Luvians on the Konya Plain and sees their spread to the west and southeast as dependent on their participation in the political and military expansion of the Hittites, who eventually succumbed to the linguistic dominance of the more populous Luvians. The scenario presented here has (proto-)Lydian on the west coast of Anatolia from an early period, with the Luvic groups later spreading west along the Mediterranean coast, perhaps in the late third millennium, the (proto-)Lycians staying in the south and the (proto-)Carians moving up the western coast to eventually dominate the Lydians and found the kingdom of Arzawa. Some limited Greek-Luvian contact is allowed along the southern coast, none in the west: "there are no Luvian lexical borrowings into Greek that would support an Aegean contact zone" (p. 157).

Mycenaean di-pa-, later Greek [delta][epsilon][pi][alpha][zeta], 'cup', is dismissed in one brief paragraph as an "isolated and uncertain borrowing" on the grounds that "since Luv. tappas-lti-pa-s[degrees] is not directly attested with the meaning 'bowl', the Anatolian origin of Myc. di-paremains...