1 Accentuation and Poetic Metre in Hittite 1. Güterbock (1952: 8): The Song of Ullikummi is “written in verse or at least in a form that comes close to verse,” although “it is not easy to describe these verses in detail or to establish anything like a metrical pattern. Should one count syllables or word stresses?” 2. McNeill (1963): - points at substitution patterns in recurring formulae - the metre was not syllable counting but stress-based - each line contains four stresses, divided into two equal cola - believes this system was taken over from Mesopotamia 3. Durnford (1972) uses these findings “to provide information on syntactic stress”, determining “words and their contexts where stress does or does not appear”. He concludes: 1. All verb forms are stressed. 2. All nouns are stressed (also adverbs formed from nominal stems), except dependent genitives accompanied by their governing nouns. 3. Adjectives are unstressed except when used predicatively. 4. nu + enclitics is unstressed. 5. ppa, par, šar, katta, etc. are unstressed, mn “like” probably also. 6. mn “when” is stressed. 7. Rules 1 to 6 may not always apply when idiomatic espressions are used or when special emphasis is intended. Moreover, he assumes that the same pattern is visible in the ‘Song of Neša’. 4. Melchert (1998) investigates the occurrence of each of Durnford’s categories before sentence initial particles in normal prose. e.g. [ LÚ ME]ŠEDI karšuaš=ma=šmaš [katt]i=smi iatta ‘The bodyguard of cutting walks with them’ (KBo 11.39 i 10). 5. Melchert (2007): part of the Ritual of Iria may also contain this metre. ANATOLISCHE LITERATUREN Alwin Kloekhorst „Autoren“ – Textstrukturen – „Zuhörer“ Leiden University Universität Bonn, 18- 20 February 2010 a.kloekhorst@hum.leidenuniv.nl