Did the Philistines Speak Greek?

It’s often nice to spot familiar faces where you don’t expect them, like an unforeseen run-in with a friend while on holiday. Joy in unexpected encounters is possible in the intellectual realm too; during my wanderings through the linguistic past, I’ve delighted in meeting languages and their humans whom I already know from elsewhere. One example is the Hittites. A culturally Christian upbringing had acquainted me with this mighty nation of the semi-historical past, mentioned in various passages of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. Later in life, I plunged into the world of the Indo-European language family, there to find that the ‘Hittite’ language is something of a celebrity. 19th- and 20th-century excavations in central Anatolia unearthed not only the remains of an impressive civilisation, but also plenty of documents in a local language. Its decipherment from 1915 revealed it to be a very old and very informative species of Indo-European, and also contributed to the identification…