Since the decipherment of Hittite as an Indo-European language (1917) the Anatolian branch has presented many obscure points for IE studies. Despite its antiquity, it lacks several of the features that are considered representative for the language family and are common to other well-known ancient IE languages as for example Sanskrit and Greek, belonging to the so-called Core IE, i.e. the non-Anatolian branches of IE.
The interpretation of the peculiarities of this branch with its lack of some classical IE features combined with the presence of new elements is still an open question: is it evidence for a more primitive or more advanced stage of evolution of the Anatolian branch compared to the other representative IE languages? Until now, three hypotheses have been proposed: (1) Anatolian could have lost a number of ‘classical Proto-Indo-European (PIE)’ features after it split off from PIE as the first branch; (2) the ‘classical PIE’ features missing in Anatolian are common innovations of Core IE, and Anatolian is, therefore, a ‘sister language’ rather than a ‘daughter language’ of PIE; (3) Anatolian is simply one descendant of PIE, which consequently has to be radically revised on the basis of Anatolian features.
This module offers an overview of: (i) the Anatolian languages as seen in relation to Core IE; (ii) the distinguished morphological and phonetic features relevant to determine the position of Anatolian and of its consequences for the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European stage, i.e. before the daughter languages split off from the IE family. The analysis of these aspects is also significant for the reconstruction of the PIE homeland since one of the hypotheses put forward until now sees Anatolia as possible homeland.