Description

Original cloth bdg. Roy. 8vo. (24 x 17 cm). In English. 230 p. A Hittite chrestomathy. Sturtevant was an American linguist. Besides research on Native American languages and field work on the Modern American English dialects, he is the father of the Indo-Hittite hypothesis, first formulated in 1926, based on his seminal work establishing the Indo-European character of Hittite (and the related Anatolian languages), with Hittite exhibiting more archaic traits than the normally reconstructed forms for Proto-Indo-European. He authored the first scientifically acceptable Hittite grammar with a chrestomathy and a glossary, formulated the so-called Sturtevant's law (the doubling of consonants representing Proto-Indo-European voiceless stops) and laid the foundations to what later became the Goetze-Wittmann law (the spirantization of palatal stops before u as the focal origin of the centum-satem isogloss). First Edition.