The Hittite Inherited Lexicon

Kloekhorst, A. (2007)

Doctoral Thesis

Hittite was the language of the Hittite Empire that ruled over vast parts of Turkey from 1650 - 1180 BC. It was written in the cuneiform script on clay tablets. Linguistically, it belongs to the Anatolian language group, which is one of the twelve branches of the large Indo-European language family. Within the Indo-European language family, Hittite is the oldest attested language. In over 1200 pages this dissertation describes the history of Hittite in the light of its Indo-European origin. It consists of two parts. Part One, 'Towards a Hittite Historical Grammar', contains a description of the Hittite phoneme inventory and a discussion of the sound laws and morphological changes that have taken place between the Proto-Indo-European and the Hittite language stage. Part Two, 'An Etymological Dictionary of the Hittite Inherited Lexicon', contains etymological treatments of all Hittite words of Indo-European origin. One of the most important conclusions of this dissertation is that the Anatolian language group was the first one to split off from Proto-Indo-European and that all other Indo-European branches have undergone a period of common innovations. Therewith Anatolian, and especially Hittite, occupies a very important position within comparative Indo-European linguistics as it sometimes has retained linguistic information that has been lost in all other Indo-European languages

• Ancient Near East
• Comparative Indo-European linguistics
• Etymological dictionary
• Historical linguistics
• Historical phonology
• Hittitology

• All authors: Kloekhorst, A.
• Supervisor: Weitenberg, J.J.S.
• Qualification: Doctor (dr.)
• Awarding Institution: Faculty of Humanities, Leiden University
• Date: 2007-05-31
• Court: LEI Universiteit Leiden