One hundred years of re-reconstruction: Hittite, Tocharian, and the ongoing revision of Proto-Indo-European

Abstrakt

The identification of Hittite as an Indo-European language by Bedřich Hrozný in 1915 has had profound and lasting repercussions for the field of Indo-European linguistics, in particular for the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European (PIE). As one who has devoted much of his research to the other Indo-European branch discovered at the turn of the 20th century, namely Tocharian, I would like to draw attention to some methodological issues raised by a century of efforts to revise the protolanguage in light of the Anatolian and Tocharian facts.