Hittite and the Indo-European Verb

Abstract

This book sets out to reconcile our picture of the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) verbal system with the evidence of Hittite and the other early Anatolian languages. The discovery that Hittite was an Indo-European (IE) language had dramatic consequences for our conception of the IE parent language. For most of the 20th century, attention focused mainly on the peculiarities of Hittite phonology, especially the consonant h and its implications for the evolving laryngeal theory. Yet the morphological ‘disconnects’ between Hittite and the other early languages are more profound than the phonological differences. The Hittite verbal system lacks most of the familiar tense-aspect categories of Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin. On the other hand, it presents the novelty of the hi-conjugation, a purely formal conjugation class to which nearly half of all Hittite active verbs belong. Repeated attempts to explain the hi-conjugation on the basis of the classical model of the PIE verbal system have failed. This book takes the alternative view that the hi-conjugation — in the form here called the ‘h2e-conjugation’ — was an inherited category of the parent language. Separate chapters are devoted to showing how the individual classes of Hittite hi-verbs can be identified with well-known present and aorist types in the ‘classical’ IE languages and derived from preforms which, though grammatically active, inflected with the ‘perfect’ (=h2e-conjugation) endings. In the course of the survey, many seemingly independent peculiarities of the PIE verbal system are systematically explained for the first time.