The Impact of Hittite and Tocharian: Rethinking Indo-European in the 20th Century and Beyond

Abstract

The ink was scarcely dry on the last volume of Brugmann’s Grundriß (1916, 2nd ed., Vol. 2, pt. 3), so to speak, when an unexpected discovery in a peripheral area of Assyriology portended the end of the scholarly consensus that Brugmann had done so much to create. Hrozný, whose Sprache der Hethiter appeared in 1917, was not primarily an Indo-Europeanist, but, like any trained philologist of the time, he could see that the cuneiform language he had deciphered, with such features as an animate nom. sg. in -š, an acc. sg. in -n, and neuter r/n-stems like wātar, gen. wetenaš ‘water’, was Indo- European.