The Coming of the Greeks
us examine the evidence for this "Hittite invasion" and for the
existence of a Hittite nation.
In the second millennium, three closely related languages—
Luwian, Palaic, and the so-called Hittite language—were spo-
ken in central and western Asia Minor. These languages, of
which "Hittite" is far and away the best documented (although
it was perhaps not the most widespread), appear to have
evolved from a single "Proto-Anatolian" language. Proto-An-
atolian was in turn either a daughter or a sister language of
Proto-Indo-European, but it has little of the family resem-
blance that one finds in most of the Indo-European languages.
Alongside some early enthusiasm for Hittite as an Indo-Euro-
pean language was a skepticism that Hittite was Indo-Euro-
pean at all. Not only did very little Hittite vocabulary derive
from Indo-European roots, but even in morphology and gram-
mar Hittite lacked some features that were common to all or
most of the Indo-European languages. In Hittite there was no
comparative degree of the adjective, and no feminine gender. 6
Even stranger, by Indo-European standards, is the Hittite
verb. It lacked the aorist and perfect tenses, and the optative
and subjunctive moods. Whereas the Indo-European verb sys-
tem seems to have begun in complexity and to have evolved
toward simplicity, the verb in Hittite was as simple as in mod-
ern French.
For Indo-Europeanists, all of this presented a dilemma. Un-
less some relationship between Hittite and the Indo-European
languages was admitted, one could hardly explain why Hittite
resembled these languages in a number of important ways. On
the other hand, if one chose to include Hittite in the Indo-
I, 2: 841-45) that Luwian and Hittite were so similar that they could not
possibly have entered Asia Minor from opposite ends, four hundred years
apart.
- J. Puhvel, "Dialectal Aspects of the Anatolian Branch of Indo-
European," in Ancient Indo-European Dialects, ed. H. Birnbaum and
J. Puhvel (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1966), 237. On the entire
question, see Baldi, An Introduction to the Indo-European Languages, 151—64.
