Talk:Indo-Hittite

message: The article regrettably lacks any arguments or evidence regarding the "Indo-Hittite Hypothesis", however contains a lot of science fiction (see e.g. my entry under Bronze Age below).HJJHolm (talk) 16:02, 24 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: This article isn't exactly about a language or group of languages, it's really about a hypothesis within historical lniguistics.  Naming it Indo-Hittite languages would imply that the content of the article should duplicate Indo-European languages, which of course it doesn't. But it might make sense to rename this Indo-Hittite hypothesis. --Angr/comhrá 23:29, 24 May 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  Of course, you do realize that even the Indo-European language group is a hypothesis, right ? They have different degrees of acceptance in the scientific world, but since none was directly attested, they are only hypotheses. bogdan ʤjuʃkə | Talk 13:56, 25 May 2005 (UTC)

text: So you think there's equally good evidence in both directions, so both should be called hypotheses rather than theories? I'd say there's an Indo-European theory, which includes two sub-hypotheses: (1) Anatolian broke off from the others only a little earlier (say a couple of centuries) than the other broke up (Anatolian-as-daughter hypothesis), (2) Anatolian broke off from the others a lot earlier (say a couple of millennia), allowing the rest to develop independently before breaking up (Indo-Hittite hypothesis). --Angr/ 05:33, 27 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Scientific evidence 

message: <rant>An anon just added a paragraph about the question whether Anatolian broke off from the rest of PIE before the Bronze Age or even the Chalcolithic. The question that interests me is, why are people so intent to tie linguistics in with archaeology? The Indo-Hittite hypothesis is a linguistic question that can only be answered with linguistic data. If the archaeological evidence supports the hypothesis, that's great, but it doesn't strengthen the hypothesis. If the archaeological evidence does not support the hypothesis, that's okay too, because it doesn't weaken the hypothesis either. The same holds true for a lot of other questions in Indo-European linguistics. </rant> --Angr/ 20:27, 22 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: There's been a bit of intermingling of historical linguistics with genetics and archaeology.  Part of it is the link between language and culture.  Interdisciplinary research into such matters can, on occasion, strengthen or weaken a hypothesis. AEuSoes1 06:19, 27 March 2006 (UTC)

text: There isn't only " a bit"...; BTW, the EBA (Early Bronze Age) starts in Anatolia at least with the beginning of the 3rd Millenium cal. BC., and NOT 3.300 in the Caucasus. See any modern archeological journal.HJJHolm (talk) 16:03, 24 November 2007 (UTC)

text: Transcaucasia had considerable impact on eastern Anatolian  during the Early Bronze Age when the Transcaucasian style of black and  red burnished pottery, architecture, and other artifacts appeared in eastern Anatolia and then in Syro-Palestine. The movement of this culture, variously called Kura-Araxes, Early Transcaucasian, and Khirbet Kerak, began late in the fourth millennium B.C., and its effects persisted into the second half of the third millennium. The incursion of the Kura-Araxes culture in the EB I coincided with the collapse of the Uruk-related trading system that had encouraged the emergence of towns and political complexity in eastern Anatolia.
in other words, EBI begins gradually, from about 3300, with the Kura-Araxes culture, brings about the end of the Uruk period in the 31st century, and is in full swing by the turn of the millennium. 
dab (𒁳) 10:23, 5 February 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bronze Age and Chalcolithic 

message: "Notably, Anatolian doesn't have the IE gender system opposing masucline : feminine; instead we have a rudimentary noun class system based on an older animate : inanimate opposition reminiscent of noun class systems in non-Bantu Niger-Congo languages."
Well, the Russian language also has a animate/inanimate distinction in its nouns as well. No need to recur to Niger-Congo languages.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.241.221.24 (talk) 11:36, 9 October 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Russian has a masculine-feminine-neuter distinction in the area that Hittite shows an animate-inanimate distinction, so it doesn't really compare.  Dutch is closer since its has merged the masculine-feminine of its old masculine-feminine-neuter system leaving two cases kind of like an animate-inanimate system.  It probably still isn't a good comparison though.Ekwos (talk) 01:32, 16 December 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Before someone adds the Dutch comparison to the article, let me point out that it's quite different from the Hittite system (as I understand it). Dutch has largely merged masculine and feminine, but that gives two genders common and neuter, without much meaning attached to the genders: e.g. stoel ("chair"), is common, but all diminutives including those referring to people are neuter. QVVERTYVS (hm?) 16:24, 13 December 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Animate / inanimate distinction 

message: I'm sure undergraduate students of historical linguistics understand what "(SLR-D)" means, but we laymen don't. 
Obviously one doesn't need to explain every technical term in detail on this particular page, but links to detailed information are necessary to make the article better than pseudo-academic wankery. 71.248.115.187 (talk) 02:47, 23 August 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Actually, SLR-D was described as "a method" in the same sentence and supplied with a reference. This is all laymen have to know without compromising WP:VERIFY.Rokus01 (talk) 13:07, 23 August 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  good god the jargon 

message: I don't think that the problem is quite appropriately explained here. For example, a tendency towards simplification of the noun case system within the history of Hittite (or other individual languages) is irrelevant; it's the Old Hittite stage that counts, if anything. (It is true, though, that in the plural, many case distinctions found in other branches seem to be attested nowhere in Anatolian and the overall case system in the plural looks much simpler, comparable to the dual.) Also, I fail to see how the vowel system in Anatolian in general is simpler than in PIE. It's rather the verbal (tense-aspect-mood) system of Hittite especially, which is unexpectedly simple compared to the traditionally reconstructed Brugmannian or Graeco-Aryan system, and more comparable to Germanic, lacking several categories usually reconstructed for PIE, which has given rise to this proposal. To be fair, however, the noun system is also simpler, considering the lack of the feminine and the dual, and the fewer case distinctions in the plural mentioned above. On the other hand, an additional case, the directive, has been reconstructed for Anatolian.
As far as I understand the issue, perhaps the decisive part of the problem is the overemphasis on Hittite, which is already reflected in the name of the proposal, "Indo-Hittite" instead of "Indo-Anatolian" or so. Yes, Hittite is strange in some ways, especially compared to other highly ancient (and presumably archaic) IE languages. But Hittite is only one out of several Anatolian languages; what should really matter is reconstructed Proto-Anatolian. As Hittite and its Anatolian sister languages were investigated more closely in recent decades, traces of categories which were previously considered absent in Anatolian turned up, or were directly found present in non-Hittite Anatolian languages. Therefore, reconstructed Proto-Anatolian turned out considerably less "strange" for an IE language than Hittite is. I can definitely affirm this for the phonology; the PA system as reconstructed by Melchert is surprisingly close to the PIE system (though still distinctive in some important points), especially the vocalism. Hittite and Luwian made it seem (at least superficially) as if *o had merged with *a, but Lycian hasn't. Therefore, even for Proto-Luwian, and a fortiori PA, a conventional five-vowel system has to be reconstructed.
The conclusion is that the "Indo-Hittite" proposal is simply misguided and Anatolian is essentially just another branch of IE on the same level as Indo-Iranian or Tocharian.
That doesn't mean, however, that everyone agrees that there is nothing special about Anatolian at all. Many scholars in the field do seem to think that Anatolian split from PIE first – with a crucial difference. The Indo-Hittite proposal implied a binary branching Proto-IE (sans Anatolian) vs. Proto-Anatolian; under the alternative view, there was never a "non-Anatolian" node (i. e., protolanguage). Instead, Anatolian separated from an already dialectally differentiated IE, a dialect continuum to be precise, not from PIE. Within the "non-Anatolian" continuum, some innovations could still spread, failing to reach Anatolian, which was already geographically detached and had lost contact with the remainder of IE, unable to exchange innovations with them. However, those innovations did not necessarily reach all non-Anatolian branches, either. Especially Greek and Indo-Iranian are often assumed to have shared innovations at a relatively late stage (but still before the Proto-Indo-Iranian stage). This idea is usually expressed as "Late PIE". (One innovation that is often attributed to "non-Anatolian" is the development of the perfect, whose counterpart in Anatolian, the hi-conjugation, does not seem to have a truly perfective meaning and may therefore represent an older stage. This is connected with the Urmedium proposal championed by Jasanoff, attempting to derive perfect and mediopassive from a single verbal category.)
I'm not sure how prevalent that view is, but it does seem to be relatively common in the field. There is also the idea, though perhaps somewhat less popular, that Tocharian was the second branch to split off and lose contact with the rest of IE. Italic and Celtic may have come next. One reason for this idea seems to be the mediopassive endings in *-r shared by all those branches (i. e., Anatolian, Tocharian, Italic and Celtic), which may therefore be an archaism that was replaced by the familiar endings in *-i in the other branches (however, Phrygian seems to have mediopassive endings in *-r as well, as in addaketor, vs. addaket, presumably cognate to Latin facitur and facit respectively with a preverb or perhaps augment). --Florian Blaschke (talk) 17:44, 1 March 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: I don't think that the "bronze" argument is particularly strong, either, I'd even consider it inconclusive and obsolete. There is a word *aios reconstructed for PIE that must mean a metal, but in the attested languages it can mean "ore" and various metals and alloys: "bronze" as well as "copper" (as in Latin aes) and "brass" and (in Indo-Iranian) even "iron". This is similar to the state of affairs in Proto-Uralic, where we have only *waśke as a term for an unspecified type of metal. In both cases it is suspected that it was "copper", the prime working metal in the latest stages of the Neolithic. There are old words for "gold" and "silver", quite possibly of PIE date, as well, which would definitely exclude those metals. If we have only one term for "(working) metal" (not gold or silver) in a prehistoric European language, the reasoning goes, this does point towards copper, but not necessarily to bronze. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 03:30, 14 April 2011 (UTC)
replies: text:   The term Indo-Hittite was coined before the decipherment of the other Anatolian languages. --Tom 144 (talk) 16:54, 25 February 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Presentation of the matter seems inadequate 

message: I have removed the section on Holm's investigations. His research does not appear to notable and a dissenting voice who has been paid little notice and whose criticism has not been taken up by others in the field does not generally deserve an entire section in an article. Tristanjlroberts (talk) 20:53, 6 October 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: The anonymous "Tristanjlroberts" descibes himself as a Theoretical Pphysicist and therefore is not in a position to criticise people who have by far more experience in linguistics, archaeology, Bayesian glottochronology, or genetics. This is an extremely difficult and still debated field. Even the paper of Jäntti (2016) cannot not really enlighten us. Unfortunately, the honourable outing of his mental shortcomings does not change this.HJJHolm (talk) 15:27, 11 November 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Holm