Hittite and the Indo-European Verb

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OUP Oxford, Jul 3, 2003 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 288 pages
This book reconciles what is known of the Proto-Indo-European verbal system with the evidence of Hittite and the other early Anatolian languages. The decipherment of Hittite in 1917 and the recognition that it was an Indo-European language had dramatic consequences for conceptions of the Indo-European parent language. For most of the twentieth century, the 'disconnects' between Hittite and the other early languages such as Sanskrit and Greek have been the subject of research,scholars finally realizing that the question was not whether the conventional picture of the parent language should be modified to account for the facts of Hittite, but how. After investigating the subject for twenty-five years, Professor Jasanoff proposes a resolution of the problem that is the mostthorough and systematic yet published. In this outstanding book he puts forward a new and revolutionary model of the Proto-Indo-European verbal system which will have a profound impact on the study of the Indo-European family of languages. It also represents a significant advance in the understanding of the history of Indo-European.

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About the author (2003)

Jay Jasanoff received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from Harvard University in 1968 and has spent most of his academic career at Cornell and Harvard, where is he currently Diebold Professor of Indo-European Linguistics and Philology and Chair of the Department of Linguistics. His publications include Stative and Middle in Indo-European (1978) and numerous articles on Indo-European linguistics and problems in the history of the individual Indo-European languages.

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