Visible Sentences in Cuneiform Hittite

Abstract

On the premise that horizontal Hittite scribal rulings be taken seriously as punctuation, this study investigated their content and found that in fact they punctuate a structure similar to the periodic sentence in older Greek and Latin. As such they are to be compared with the oldest (alphabetic) Greek mark of punctuation, the paragraphos, which begins to be replaced in Alexandrian Greek by marks which segment the language on the basis of prosodic features, as in English. Hittite "visible sentences," moreover, signal in visual form underlying differences in language structure and cohesive basis which can be correlated with differences in word order type and changes which the genetically related Indo-European (IE) languages have undergone over a period of c. 4000 years of written attestation.