Hittite and the Indo-European Verb

Book excerpt: This book reconciles what is known of the Proto-Indo-European verbal system with the evidence of Hittite and the other early Anatolian languages. The decipherment of Hittite in 1917 and the recognition that it was an Indo-European language had dramatic consequences for conceptions of the Indo-European parent language. For most of the twentieth century, the 'disconnects' between Hittite and the other early languages such as Sanskrit and Greek have been the subject of research,scholars finally realizing that the question was not whether the conventional picture of the parent language should be modified to account for the facts of Hittite, but how. After investigating the subject for twenty-five years, Professor Jasanoff proposes a resolution of the problem that is the mostthorough and systematic yet published. In this outstanding book he puts forward a new and revolutionary model of the Proto-Indo-European verbal system which will have a profound impact on the study of the Indo-European family of languages. It also represents a significant advance in the understanding of the history of Indo-European.