| Group |
Anatolian (with Hittite, Lydian
etc.), Early Anatolian (with Hittite and Luwian) |
| Geography |
Spoken in the country named Pala, north to the Hittite state, in Central
Anatolia. |
| History |
Palaic cuneiform tablets date back to the 17th-14th centuries BC. It
was influenced greatly by the Hatti language, and after the 14th century
fell out of use, assimilated by Hatti, though was still used as a cult
language until the 13th century BC. |
| Phonetics |
The transition of e into a was not strict,
and a lot of ancient roots with e were preserved (e.g. wete-
'to build' from IE *wedh-). k became a spirant
between vowels. |
| Nominal Morphology |
The common Anatolian type of declension is used, but many case inflections
were replaced by adjectival suffixes or not used at all. Together with
the Luwian language, Palaic was already about to become an agglutinative
language and to drop the Indo-European inflections. |
| Verbal Morphology |
In the conjugation, the two series of Anatolian personal endings are
seen. The 3rd person plural past tense ending is -nta which
differs from the Hittite -r. The verb was usually used at
the end of the sentence. |
| Lexicon |
Of all 250 known Palaic words, just 10 or 20 are exactly Indo-European.
There are also about 100 words which cannot be deciphered yet. |
| Writing |
Cuneiform |
| Close Contacts |
Scientists sometimes claim that Hittite and Palaic once made a single
subgroup after Luwian moved apart. The Hatti language influenced the lexicon
very much. |
| Picture |
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| More info |
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