Barcino. Monographica Orientalia 22 – Series Anatolica et Indogermanica 4 (2023) (ISBN: 978-84-9168-937-9) 317 Changing colour as pollution in Hittite and Luwian incantations: From metaphor to semantic shift Ilya Yakubovich University of Marburg This paper examines the meaning and etymology of the Luwian abstract noun ḫalliš- and its language-internal cognates, all attested in cuneiform transmission in Hittite-Luwian ritual texts. 1 Laroche (1959: 39) tentatively compares ḫalliš- with Luw. ḫalal(i)- ‘pure’, a transparent West Semitic loanword. 2 Starke (1990: 112– 113) analyzes this noun as an inherited iš-stem, thus implicitly affirming its Indo- European origin, but withholds his judgment regarding its lexical meaning or ety- mology. According to Melchert (1993: 48), it possibly means ‘sickness, pain’ and 1. The translations of the Luwian passages cited in this paper were arrived at jointly with Alice Mouton (Paris) and will be published in Yakubovich and Mouton (2023). My preliminary research on the lexemes in question was conducted as a by-product of our work on this volume, and I am obliged to Alice Mouton for her intensive feedback. My intermediate results were presented at the 7 th Workshop on the Luwic Dialects held in Santiago de Compostela in February 2022. I am deeply grateful to the audience of this gathering for numerous insightful remarks, which helped me to sharpen my argumentation. The write-up of the present paper was conducted under the auspices of the project “LuwGramm: A Grammar of the Luwian Language”, co-directed by Elisabeth Rieken and myself and funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (RI 1730/11–1 and YA 472/3–1). The good advice of Valerij Ivanov (Moscow/Marburg), who is involved in the same project, and H. Craig Melchert (Carrboro, NC) prompted me to add new details to my account at this stage. Stephen Durnford (Brighton) did much to improve this paper’s style. Needless to say, I am alone responsible for any remaining shortcomings. 2. Since the empirical basis of the present paper is limited to the Luwian lexemes in cuneiform transmission, here and below they are cited in Hittitological transcription, also known as “bound transcription”. In citing the Hittite-Luwian passages, I use the sign-by-sign transliteration for Luwian and the Hittitological transcription for Hittite.