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Doctoral Project by Jonas Döll

Investigations Into the Technical Language of Hittite Festival Rituals

The largest part of the Hittite corpus consists of descriptions of ceremonial ritual texts. They make up around 10,000 fragments of the total of around 30,000 fragments. They are regulations on how to celebrate the mostly annually recurring festivals for the numerous Hittite deities. The language of these texts can be classified as technical language, as they represent the communication between experts.

Specialist languages are linguistic varieties that are used to communicate about specific fields of activity. Although they differ from the common language, they are also influenced by it. In addition to the vocabulary, which has traditionally received more attention, modern research into specialized languages also focuses on the special features of morphological, syntactic, textual and pragmatic characteristics.

As part of my dissertation project, I am applying the concepts of modern technical language research to Hittite festival descriptions. The purpose of this endeavor is to work out text-type-specific features and thus achieve a better understanding of the texts in question. Diachrony is also taken into account within the study, as texts from all Hittite language periods are available. Comparisons will also be made with the rest of the corpus, i.e. with other text types. The following areas in which technical language can manifest itself are examined: Orthography, lexicon, morphology and syntax.