Description

Although it is usually stated that nothing is known about accent in Hittite, in the last decades various bits and pieces of information about its accent system have come about. This book provides, for the first time, a systematic treatment of all these sources of information: the interplay between accent and vowels (plene vs. non-plene spelling); the interplay between accent and consonants (lenition and fortition); and the interplay between accent and clauses (clitics and metrics). The result is a full description of the synchronic Hittite accent system, its internal diachronic development, as well as its Indo-European origins. The book is concluded by a word list in which the phonological interpretation of all treated words is given, including the place of their accent. One of the conclusions of this book is that the accent system of Hittite is similar to, and sometimes even more archaic than the accent systems of its cognates Ancient Greek and Vedic Sanskrit, and thus provides a totally new and unique source of information for the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European accent. This book is therefore not only of interest to Hittitologists, but certainly also to Indo-Europeanists. Moreover, the methodology that is used in this book for extracting accentological information out of texts written in the cuneiform script may also provide a working tool for scholars interested in the accent systems of other cuneiform languages.