Hittite phonology

Hittite phonology is the description of the reconstructed phonology or pronunciation of the Hittite language. Because Hittite as a spoken language is extinct, thus leaving no living daughter languages, and no contemporary descriptions of the pronunciation are known, little can be said with certainty about the phonetics and the phonology of the language. Some conclusions can be made, however, by noting its relationship to the other Indo-European languages, by studying its orthography and by comparing loanwords from nearby languages. Hittite had two series of consonants, which may be described as fortis and lenis; one was written always geminate in the original script, and the other was always written simple. In cuneiform, all consonant sounds except for glides could be geminate. It has long been noticed that the geminate series of plosives is the one descending from Proto-Indo-European voiceless stops, and the simple plosives come from both voiced and voiced aspirate stops. This is often referred as Sturtevant's law. Because of typological implications of Sturtevant's law, the distinction between the two series is commonly regarded as one of voice. However, there is still disagreement over the subject among scholars, some of whom view both series as if they were differentiated by length, which a literal interpretation of the cuneiform orthography would suggest. Supporters of a length distinction usually point to the fact that Akkadian, the language from which the Hittites borrowed the cuneiform script, had voicing. Hittite scribes nevertheless used voiced and voiceless signs interchangeably. Kloekhorst has also argued that the absence of assimilatory voicing is also evidence for a length distinction and points out that the word "e-ku-ud-du - [ɛ́gwtu]" does not show any voice assimilation. If the distinction were one of voice, agreement between the stops should be expected since the velar and the alveolar plosives are known to be adjacent since the "u" in that word does not stand for a vowel but instead represents labialization.