Tell my readers that I say the following:
I'm currently busy picking up some Hieroglyphic Luwian. Interesting language, quite significantly different from the Hittite language. One thing that's really interesting, though odd about the language, is the way the Luwians wrote their letters. They would actually tell the letter to tell the reciptient what they said.
Here let me give you an example from the so called Assur letters:
|á-sa5-za [|]pi-ha-mi |hara/i-na-wa/i-za-sa-wa/i-' ("LOQUI"-')ha-ri+i-ti
asaza Pihami(n) Haranawizas hariti:
asaza = to say, with 2nd person imperative Ø-suffix.
Pihami(n) = Personal name in the Accusative, coda n was not written in Hieroglyphic Luwian and may have been lost.
Haranawizas = Personal name in the nominative (s-suffix)
hariti = to speak with the 3rd person indicative present ti-suffix.
So this translates like this:
Say to Pihami (that) Haranawizas speaks:
After that line the actual content of the letter begins. It's funny to see such a formulaic opening of a letter telling a tablet to say something. It's not precisely without precedent. Also in Hittite texts you often see the author telling a tablet to say what he says.
Nevertheless I thought I'd show it to you.
Comments
I found out that making objects "speak" is a literary device that's found among Etruscans, Faliscans and Greeks. Like when Etruscan artifacts say something like "I am the winejug of so-and-so. I was blessed by blah-blah-blah." It's weird but there's so much cross-linguistic evidence of this strange habit that it's hard to deny: Our ancestors were schizophrenic :)
I wasn't aware that the Hittites were doing this too though. So thanks. I learned something new and I'll add that to my history-blogging toolkit for later use :)
Every sentence after such an introduction would get the quotation particle -wa- after the sentence initial particle chain. So the writer was in fact very aware that a story was being told. I always find it a strange idea that 'direct speech' is interjected by an indirect particle like -wa-. Doesn't feel like direct speech any more. But it's hard argue against it. Hittite does it too. But a lot more marginally. Most of the written text wouldn't 'talk'. While almost every Hieroglyphic Luwian text gets such an introduction to make it speak. Which means that every sentence following it does have such a quotation particle.