The Language of Kalašma: A New Branch of Anatolian

The recent news regarding the discovery of a new Indo-European language is based on the finding of a cuneiform tablet at the Boğazköy-Hattusha archaeological site, the capital of the Hittites, during this summer's excavations by the team of the Istanbul Department of the German Archaeological Institute.

The tablet contains an introduction stating that a ritual expert conjures in (the language of) Kalašma. In what follows, we encounter a text that is not yet fully comprehended, written in a language sharing obvious similarities with the other Anatolian languages known so far but also exhibiting isolated features.

Professor Rieken will present the complete text and offer some hypotheses concerning its lexical and grammatical interpretation, which resulted from a collaboration between Dr Ilya Yakubovich and herself.