Luraghi S. Hittite

München, Newcastle: Lincom Europa, 1997. - 75 p.Hittite belongs to the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European language family, which has become extinct in the first half of the first millenium b.C. Among the Anatolian languages Hittite is the best attested; for our knowledge of it we can relay on several thousands of clay tables, dating back to about 1750 b.C. - 1150 b.C. One of the biggest matters of interest concerning Hittite lies in its differences from the ancient Indo-European languages. The author does not aim at an evaluation of the relative antiquity of the Hittite features in comparison to those of the other Indo-European languages, rather, the author is going to highlight the pecularities which can be connected with major typological issues. Topics related in this sketch include:(1) the socio-linguistic situation of Anatolia in the second millenium b.C.; (2) phoneme inventory; graphic problems connected with the use of cuneiform and the evolution of scribal habits; (3) relative chronology of Hittite texts and periodization of the Hittite language; (4) morphology: word formation, parts of speech and their inflectional categories; gender system; (5) syntax: noun and verb phrase; types of adnominal modifiers; auxiliaries; use of cases; verbal voice; TAM system; (6) word order within the simple sentence; sentence initial and sentence final position; clitics; position of the finite verb; (7) parataxis and hypotaxis; connectives and asyndesis; types of subordinate clauses; infinitives; (8) anaphoric relations within the text.The text for analysis is from Old Hittite, particularly interesting for what concerns word order and the use of connectives.