Proto-Anatolian Language - Phonology

Phonology

For the most part, Proto-Anatolian has been reconstructed on the basis of Hittite, the best-attested Anatolian language. However, the usage of Hittite cuneiform writing system limits the enterprise of understanding and reconstructing Anatolian phonology, partly due to the deficiency of the adopted Akkadian cuneiform syllabary to represent Hittite sounds, and partly due to the Hittite scribal practices.

This especially pertains to what appears to be confusion of voiceless and voiced dental stops, where signs -dV- and -tV- are employed interchangeably different attestations of the same word. Furthermore, in the syllables of the structure VC only the signs with voiceless stops as usually used. Distribution of spellings with single and geminated consonants in the oldest extant monuments indicates that the reflexes of PIE voiceless stops were spelled as double consonants and the reflexes of PIE voiced stops as single consonants. This regularity is the most consistent in the case of dental stops in older texts; later monuments often show irregular variation of this rule.