Near Eastern History
European family, one was forced to pare drastically the com-
mon denominators of that family, and to revise even the basic
definitions of what the hypothetical Proto-Indo-European had
been. An expedient course was to keep the name "Indo-Euro-
pean" for the languages conventionally included under that ru-
bric, and to suppose that Hittite (or, on our present under-
standing, Proto-Anatolian) had at a very early date separated
itself from the community out of which—many centuries
later—the truly Indo-European languages would come. As a
convenient name for the parent stem from which Hittite and
the Indo-European languages would have successively
emerged, E. H. Sturtevant proposed "Indo-Hittite." 7
An alternative to the Indo-Hittite hypothesis is to suppose
that the creators of Proto-Anatolian left the PIE speakers' fold
no earlier than did the creators of the mainline Indo-European
languages, but that for some reason Proto-Anatolian innovated
much more rapidly and thoroughly than did its siblings. Until
very recently this reconstruction has had more support than has
Sturtevant's among Indo-Europeanists. 8 There is little doubt
that Proto-Anatolian was a rampant innovator. Much more of
the Hittite vocabulary is borrowed than inherited, and the
simplicity of the Hittite verb is most reasonably attributed to
the loss of moods and tenses in Hittite (the other Indo-Euro-
pean languages being in this respect far more conservative).
Quite obviously, however, the likelihood that Proto-Ana-
- E. H. Sturtevant, "The Relationship of Hittite to Indo-Euro-
pean," TAPA 60 (1929): 25-37; see also Sturtevant's 1938 lecture, eventu-
ally published as "The Indo-Hittite Hypothesis" in Language 38 (1962):
105—10.
- In the last few years, perhaps, the trend has been reversed. Adra-
dos, "The Archaic Structure of Hittite," I, presents his study as a contribu-
tion to "the ever more widely accepted thesis of the archaic structure of
Hittite within the context of those IE languages known to us." For a de-
tailed study of the problem, see E. Neu and W. Meid, eds., Hethitisch und
Indogermanisch: Vergleichende Studien zur historischen Grammatik und zur di-
alektgeographischen Stellung der indogermanische Sprachgruppe Kleinasiens (Inns-
bruck: Innsbruck Institut fur Sprachwissenschaft der Universitat, 1979).
