Alwin Kloekhorst (born 4 March 1978) is a Dutch linguist, Indo-Europeanist 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. Ther ...

. He was appointed a full professor in Anatolian Linguistics at

Leiden University Leiden University (abbreviated as ''LEI''; ) is a Public university, public research university in Leiden, Netherlands. Established in 1575 by William the Silent, William, Prince of Orange as a Protestantism, Protestant institution, it holds the d ...

in November 2023.

Biography

Kloekhorst received his Ph.D. in 2007 at

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 northern Indian subcontinent, most of Europe, and the Iranian plateau with additional native branches found in regions such as Sri Lanka, the Maldives, parts of Central Asia ( ...

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 ...

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. No direct record of Proto-Indo-European exists; its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-Euro ...

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. The best known Anatolian language is Hittite, which is considered the earliest-attested Indo-European language. Undiscovered until the late ...

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 split off a Pre-Proto-Indo-European language considerably earlier than the separation o ...

). 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 studies, Indo-European Linguistics at Leiden University, initiated in 1991 by Peter Schrijver and ot ...

'' project.

Works

*''The Precursors of Proto-Indo-European: The Indo-Anatolian and Indo-Uralic Hypotheses'', edited with Tijmen Pronk, 2019, Leiden: Brill, viii+235 pp. * ''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.Reviews of ''Accent in Hittite'': *Elisabeth Rieken (2015), ''Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies'', , *Alice Mouton (2016), ''Syria'', *Ilya Yakubovich (2016), ''Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes'', *H. Craig Melchert (2018), ''Journal of the American Oriental Society'', , * ''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

External links

Personal webpage

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