Alwin Kloekhorst | |
---|---|
Born | 1978 (age 44–45) |
Academic background | |
Education | Leiden University (PhD) |
Academic work | |
Discipline | Linguistics |
Institutions | Leiden University |
Alwin Kloekhorst (born in Smilde,1978) is a Dutch linguist,Indo-Europeanist and Hittitologist. He was appointed a full professor in Anatolian Linguistics at Leiden University in November 2023.
Kloekhorst received his Ph.D. in 2007 at Leiden University for his thesis on Hittite. In over 1200 pages,his dissertation describes the history of Hittite in the light of its Indo-European language origin. Part One,Towards a Hittite Historical Grammar,contains a description of Hittite phonology and a discussion of the sound laws and morphological changes that took place between the Proto-Indo-European and Hittite. Part Two,An Etymological Dictionary of the Hittite Inherited Lexicon,contains etymological treatments of all Hittite words of Indo-European origin. One of the dissertation's most important conclusions is the confirmation that the Anatolian languages split from Proto-Indo-European before all other Indo-European branches,which have undergone a period of common innovations (see Indo-Hittite). The thesis was published in the Leiden-based Indo-European Etymological Dictionary project.
The Hittites were an Anatolian Indo-European people who formed one of the first major civilizations of Bronze Age West Asia. Possibly originating from beyond the Black Sea,they settled in modern day Turkey in the early 2nd millennium BC. The Hittites formed a series of polities in north-central Anatolia,including the kingdom of Kussara,the Kanesh or Nesha kingdom,and an empire centered on Hattusa. Known in modern times as the Hittite Empire,it reached its height during the mid-14th century BC under Šuppiluliuma I,when it encompassed most of Anatolia and parts of the northern Levant and Upper Mesopotamia.
The Anatolian languages are an extinct branch of Indo-European languages that were spoken in Anatolia,part of present-day Turkey. The best known Anatolian language is Hittite,which is considered the earliest-attested Indo-European language.
The laryngeal theory is a theory in the historical linguistics of the Indo-European languages positing that:
Luwian,sometimes known as Luvian or Luish,is an ancient language,or group of languages,within the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European language family. The ethnonym Luwian comes from Luwiya –the name of the region in which the Luwians lived. Luwiya is attested,for example,in the Hittite laws.
Hittite,also known as Nesite,is an extinct Indo-European language that was spoken by the Hittites,a people of Bronze Age Anatolia who created an empire centred on Hattusa,as well as parts of the northern Levant and Upper Mesopotamia. The language,now long extinct,is attested in cuneiform,in records dating from the 17th to the 13th centuries BC,with isolated Hittite loanwords and numerous personal names appearing in an Old Assyrian context from as early as the 20th century BC,making it the earliest attested use of the Indo-European languages.
Palaic is an extinct Indo-European language,attested in cuneiform tablets in Bronze Age Hattusa,the capital of the Hittites. Palaic,which was apparently spoken mainly in northern Anatolia,is generally considered to be one of four primary sub-divisions of the Anatolian languages,alongside Hittite,Luwic and Lydian.
In Indo-European linguistics,the term Indo-Hittite refers to Edgar Howard Sturtevant's 1926 hypothesis that the Anatolian languages may have split off a Pre-Proto-Indo-European language considerably earlier than the separation of the remaining Indo-European languages. The term may be somewhat confusing,as the prefix Indo- does not refer to the Indo-Aryan branch in particular,but is iconic for Indo-European,and the -Hittite part refers to the Anatolian language family as a whole.
An etymological dictionary discusses the etymology of the words listed. Often,large dictionaries,such as the Oxford English Dictionary and Webster's,will contain some etymological information,without aspiring to focus on etymology.
Indo-Uralic is a controversial language family consisting of Indo-European and Uralic.
The Anatolian hypothesis,also known as the Anatolian theory or the sedentary farmer theory,first developed by British archaeologist Colin Renfrew in 1987,proposes that the dispersal of Proto-Indo-Europeans originated in Neolithic Anatolia. It is the main competitor to the Kurgan hypothesis,or steppe theory,which enjoys more academic favor.
The Pre-Greek substrate consists of the unknown pre-Indo-European language(s) spoken in prehistoric Greece before the advent of the Proto-Greek language in the Greek peninsula during the Bronze Age. It is possible that Greek acquired approximately 1,000 words from such a language or group of languages,because some of its vocabulary cannot be satisfactorily explained as deriving from Proto-Greek and a Proto-Indo-European reconstruction is almost certainly impossible for such terms.
Proto-Indo-European nominals include nouns,adjectives,and pronouns. Their grammatical forms and meanings have been reconstructed by modern linguists,based on similarities found across all Indo-European languages. This article discusses nouns and adjectives;Proto-Indo-European pronouns are treated elsewhere.
The h₂e-conjugation theory adds a third conjugation to the two generally accepted conjugations of the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE),the thematic and athematic conjugations.
The Indo-European Etymological Dictionary is a research project of the Department of Comparative Indo-European Linguistics at Leiden University,initiated in 1991 by Peter Schrijver and others. It is financially supported by the Faculty of Humanities and Centre for Linguistics of Leiden University,Brill Publishers,and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research.
The following is a table of many of the most fundamental Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) words and roots,with their cognates in all of the major families of descendants.
Tarḫunz was the weather god and chief god of the Luwians,a people of Bronze Age and early Iron Age Anatolia. He is closely associated with the Hittite god Tarḫunna and the Hurrian god Teshub.
Arma was an Anatolian Moon god,worshipped by the Hittites and Luwians in the Bronze Age and early Iron Age.
Tarḫunna or Tarḫuna/i was the Hittite weather god. He was also referred to as the "Weather god of Heaven" or the "Lord of the Land of Hatti".
Hittite phonology is the description of the reconstructed phonology or pronunciation of the Hittite language. Because Hittite as a spoken language is extinct,thus leaving no living daughter languages,and no contemporary descriptions of the pronunciation are known,little can be said with certainty about the phonetics and the phonology of the language. Some conclusions can be made,however,by noting its relationship to the other Indo-European languages,by studying its orthography and by comparing loanwords from nearby languages.
Tijmen Pronk is a Dutch comparative linguist,his research focuses on etymology,historical phonology,morphology and prosody,and dialectology.