Indo-Hittite

[Larry Trask]

Steve Long writes:

> PS - Someone - I forget who - also wanted to know how the UPenn tree analysis
> could claim to "confirm the Indo-Hittite hypothesize"  when the actual
> language used was Luwian.

This is perhaps a misunderstanding arising from idiosyncratic terminology.

Sturtevant's 'Indo-Hittite hypothesis' is awkwardly named, and it might better
be called the 'IE-Anatolian hypothesis', or some such.

This hypothesis says nothing about Hittite in particular, in spite of its name.
Instead, it holds that Proto-Anatolian -- the ancestor of the entire Anatolian
group, including Hittite and Luwian -- was not a daughter of PIE, but rather a
sister of it.  That is, it holds that PIE and Proto-Anatolian were both
daughters of a single more remote ancestor, which might be called
'Proto-IE-Anatolian', or maybe 'Proto-Indo-Anatolian', but, in Sturtevant's
terminology, it comes out bizarrely as 'Proto-Indo-Hittite'.  Sturtevant's
'Indo-Hittite' is eccentric: it's comparable to referring to Balto-Slavic as
'Balto-Russian', or to Indo-Iranian as 'Indo-Kurdish'.

I will confess, though, that I have never been able to see any testable
empirical basis for distinguishing between the Indo-Hittite hypothesis and the
less grandiose view that Proto-Anatolian was simply the first of the known
branches of the IE family to separate from the rest.  As far as I can see --
and please correct me if I'm wrong -- Sturtevant's hypothesis, which requires a
hypothetical single language equivalent to 'Proto-all-of-IE-except-Anatolian',
can only be distinguished from a scenario in which the ancestral PIE splintered
simultaneously into a number of distinct daughter branches.

In fact, precisely this odd last view is the one commonly presented in those IE
family trees that we see everywhere.  But not many linguists are happy with
such a massive sudden-disintegration scenario.  It's merely that evidence has
been lacking for imposing a more highly branched and more normal-looking tree
structure upon the family.

But this is precisely the issue addressed by the UPenn work.  What Ringe's
group was trying to do was to find a principled basis for drawing up just such
a branching tree structure.  And one of their results is that PIE did indeed
undergo an original binary split into Proto-Anatolian and Proto-the-rest-of-IE.

Of course, you don't have to buy their methods or their conclusions, but it is
clear that the results they report confirm Sturtevant's hypothesis.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk