Hostname: page-component-89b8bd64d-nlwjb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-05-07T02:26:27.884Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Indo-Hittite hypothesis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2026

E. H. Sturtevant
E. H. Sturtevant*
Affiliation:
Yale University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In the summer of 1938, at the Linguistic Institute in Ann Arbor, Sturtevant gave a public lecture on his Indo-Hittite hypothesis, which was then very much in the foreground of discussion. The next year, C. C. Fries, as Director of the Institute, persuaded Sturtevant to allow the lecture to be printed in the announcement and course program for the Institute of 1939, as the first (and, as it turned out, the last) of what Fries hoped might be a regular feature of such programs.

The lecture, in its published form, had a limited circulation. At the time and for a little while thereafter, Fries received a number of requests for copies. But the publication remained largely unknown, and in particular seems never to have reached European scholars. For this reason, Fries has now suggested that the lecture be reprinted in Language, so that it may at last enjoy the wider circulation which it deserves as the most concise defense of his hypothesis that Sturtevant ever put together.

The article is reprinted here verbatim from the course program of the 1939 Linguistic Institute, except that the bibliographical references in the footnotes have been changed to the form customary in Language.—The Editor.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 38 , Issue 2: April-June , June 1962 , pp. 105 - 110
Copyright
Copyright © 1962 Linguistic Society of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

1 Mitteilungen der deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft 56.17–50.

2 Die Sprache der Hethiter: Ihr Bau und ihre Zugehörigkeit zum indogermanischen Sprachstamm, ein Entzifferungsversuch.

3 Mitteilungen der deutschen Orient-Gesellschaft 61.26 ff. (1921).

4 E. H. Sturtevant, Lg. 2.29–34 (1926), 9.1–11 (1935), 14.69 and fn. 2 (1938), 15.11–19 (1939); TAPA 60.25–37 (1930). For the other side of the question see especially Meillet, BSL 32.1–28 (1931); W. Petersen, AJP 53.193–212 (1932); H. Pedersen, Hittitisch und die anderen indoeuropäischen Sprachen (Copenhagen, 1938).

5 The nearest approach to such a suggestion was M. Bloomfield's (AJP 12.3–11 [1891]) demonstration that r/n stems came, partly in Primitive Indo-European and partly in certain historical languages, to be used as names for parts of the body.

6 See Benveniste, Origines de la formation des noms en indo-européen 1.103–10.

7 Ibid. 100–10.

8 Ibid. 110–20.

9 We have no conclusive evidence for the other languages.

10 In fact Mansion, Mélanges linguistiques offerts à M. Holger Pedersen 486, and Pedersen, op.cit. 12, hold that this is the only kind of evidence that can have any cogency.

11 Probably also *soi ‘et ei, eae’ and *toi ‘turn ei, eae’.

12 For the laryngeal hypothesis see especially Kurylowicz, Etudes indoeuropéennes 1.27–76, 253–5, Prace filologiczne 17.90–6; Couvreur, De Hettitische Ḫ: Een Bijdrage tot de Studie van het Indo-Europeesche Vocalisme; Pedersen, op.cit. 179–90. I hope soon to publish my own views upon this difficult but extremely important subject.

13 See especially Hrozný, Les inscriptions hittites hiéroglyphiques (Prague, 1933–).

14 See especially Meriggi, Festschrift für Hermann Hirt 2.257–90.

15 Pedersen, op.cit. 191 ff.