HATTIC LANGUAGE

also called Khattic, or Khattish, non-Indo-European language of Anatolia that was spoken before the period of the Hittite New Empire (c. 14001190 BC). Passages in the language occur in the Hittite cuneiform texts discovered in the ruins of the Hittite archives at Bogazky (the ancient Hattusa, in modern Turkey) and are usually preceded by the designation hattili. This word is the source for the term Hittite, which was applied to the later Indo-European settlers in the region. The texts are primarily concerned with religion and include myths, litanies, and incantations. It is not known how long the Hattic speakers had lived in this region before the advent of the Indo-European Hittites. A striking feature of the grammar of Hattic is its agglutination; it has both prefixes and suffixes. There are no formal marks to distinguish nouns from verbs.