The basic morphology of Hittite is now relatively well known — for the classical period at least; that of the minor Anatolian languages still calls for continuous reassessment whenever new data become available. The need is particularly great in the case of the languages of the Luwian group: Cuneiform Luwian, Hieroglyphic Luwian and Lycian. In what follows I shall try to collect some data which concern the nominal inflection of Hieroglyphic Luwian. This can only be a small return for all that I owe to Oliver Gurney, to his teaching and to his unrestrainable kindness and generosity; it is good to know that I share this debt with all those who have worked in this country on the Indo-European languages of Anatolia — and with innumerable others.

The great bilingual of Karatepe is one of the best understood inscriptions in Hieroglyphic Luwian, though not all problems have yet been solved. On the one hand some readings remain uncertain, since no full set of photographs is available, and on the other hand the grammatical and semantic interpretation is not always clear in spite of the help provided by the Phoenician version. In this paper we propose to tackle some of the problems still open, taking as a starting point the text and interpretation published by Piero Meriggi in his Manuale (II/1, 69 ff.), which at present offers the most complete and up-to-date version of the inscription.

In transliterating we adopt the values listed in Anatolian Studies XXV (1975), 153–5, which we also used in our transliteration and discussion of the last part of KARATEPE (JRAS 1975/2, 124 ff.). We here use the same section and word numbering as in the latter contribution.

1. In the article which precedes Mr. Hawkins has proposed the readings NEG2 and NEG3 for the signs of Hieroglyphic Luwian and has argued that these logograms had the phonetic values na and ni respectively. These readings are supported by internal evidence and do not require any further justification, but it is necessary to see how plausible their consequences are from the linguistic point of view.

1.1. The discovery of two negative particles, a prohibitive ni and a factual na, is welcome. Hieroglyphic now joins Cun. Luwian (prohibitive nis, factual nawa), Lycian (prohibitive ni, nipe, factual ne, nepe) and Hittite (prohibitive lē, factual natta). It is not as yet absolutely certain that Palaic does not make any distinction between prohibitive and factual negatives: the particles ni and nit are relatively frequent, but it is not altogether clear whether they occur or not in prohibitions. On the other hand it is normally assumed that Lydian has generalized one negative (nid “not”, nik “and not”) for both types of sentence.

This paper is concerned with the phonetic values of four important Hieroglyphic signs: ↑ (HH, Nos. 376, 377) and (HH, Nos. 209, 210). To ↑ and the values i and a were ascribed long before the discovery of the Karatepe bilingual in 1948. On the other hand the differentiation of the second sign of each pair, viz. and , by the double stroke has never been fully explained. Conventionally the signs were transcribed as ī and ā, and this transcription has now become canonical, though there is no reason to believe that the distinction between, e.g., ↑ and is one of length.