Alwin Kloekhorst (born in

Smilde Smilde is a town in the Netherlands' northern province of Drenthe and lies about southwest of the province capital of Assen. Smilde was a separate municipality until 1998, when it became a part of Middenveld. However, that name changed in 2000 a ...

, 1978) is a

Dutch Dutch commonly refers to: * Something of, from, or related to the Netherlands * Dutch people () * Dutch language () Dutch may also refer to: Places * Dutch, West Virginia, a community in the United States * Pennsylvania Dutch Country People E ...

linguist,

Indo-Europeanist Indo-European studies is a field of linguistics and an interdisciplinary field of study dealing with Indo-European languages, both current and extinct. The goal of those engaged in these studies is to amass information about the hypothetical pro ...

and

Hittitologist Hittitology is the study of the Hittites, an ancient Anatolian people that established an empire around Hattusa in the 2nd millennium BCE. It combines aspects of the archaeology, history, philology, and art history of the Hittite civilisation. Li ...

Biography

Kloekhorst received his Ph.D. in 2007 at

Leiden University Leiden University (abbreviated as ''LEI''; nl, Universiteit Leiden) is a Public university, public research university in Leiden, Netherlands. The university was founded as a Protestant university in 1575 by William the Silent, William, Prince o ...

for his thesis on Hittite. In over 1200 pages, his dissertation describes the history of Hittite in the light of its

Indo-European language The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Dutch ...

origin. Part One, ''Towards a Hittite Historical Grammar'', contains a description of

Hittite phonology Hittite phonology is the description of the reconstructed phonology or pronunciation of the Hittite language. Because Hittite as a spoken language is extinct, thus leaving no living daughter languages, and no contemporary descriptions of the pr ...

and a discussion of the sound laws and morphological changes that took place between the

Proto-Indo-European Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. No direct record of Proto-Indo-E ...

and Hittite. Part Two, ''An Etymological Dictionary of the Hittite Inherited Lexicon'', contains etymological treatments of all Hittite words of Indo-European origin. One of the dissertation's most important conclusions is the confirmation that the

Anatolian languages The Anatolian languages are an extinct branch of Indo-European languages that were spoken in Anatolia, part of present-day Turkey. The best known Anatolian language is Hittite, which is considered the earliest-attested Indo-European language. ...

split from Proto-Indo-European before all other Indo-European branches, which have undergone a period of common innovations (see

Indo-Hittite In Indo-European linguistics, the term Indo-Hittite (also Indo-Anatolian) refers to Edgar Howard Sturtevant's 1926 hypothesis that the Anatolian languages may have split off a Pre-Proto-Indo-European language considerably earlier than the separat ...

). The thesis was published in the Leiden-based

Indo-European Etymological Dictionary The ''Indo-European Etymological Dictionary'' (commonly abbreviated ''IEED'') is a research project of the Department of Comparative Indo-European Linguistics at Leiden University, initiated in 1991 by Peter Schrijver and others. It is financially ...

project.

Works

* ''Kanišite Hittite: The Earliest Attested Record of Indo-European'', 2019, Leiden – Boston, xii + 303 pp. * ''Accent in Hittite: A Study in Plene Spelling, Consonant Gradation, Clitics, and Metrics'' (= Studien zu den Boğazköy-Texten 56), Wiesbaden, 2014, xxxvi + 716 pp. * ''Etymological Dictionary of the Hittite Inherited Lexicon'' (= Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 5), 2008, Leiden – Boston, xiii + 1162 pp. * ''Hethitische Texte in Transkription. KBo 35'' (= Dresdner Beiträge zur Hethitologie 19), 2006, Wiesbaden, xiv + 353 pp. (together with D. Groddek)

References

Personal webpage

External links

The Hittite Inherited Lexicon
1978 births Living people Linguists from the Netherlands Hittitologists Leiden University alumni People from Midden-Drenthe Paleolinguists Linguists of Indo-Uralic languages Linguists of Indo-European languages Indo-Europeanists {{Netherlands-linguist-stub