Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 December 2009
The discovery of the Anatolian family of languages early in the present century' confronted Indo-Europeanists with a verbal system of considerably less complexity than that which had been assumed, largely on the basis of Greek and Indo-Iranian evidence, to have existed in the latest common period of the parent language. This raised questions which are still keenly debated today. Did the simplicity of the Anatolian system represent something more primitive than the classic image of Indo-European, out of which the latter could be explained as a subsequent development, or was it the simplified outcome of an originally more complex system, close to that which had been reconstructed before the Anatolian family was known? Where Anatolian had isolated features (such as the ending -i(š) of the 3 s. preterite of the –ḫi conjugation) corresponding to features which characterized the whole of a paradigm in Indo-European (such as –s– in the sigmatic aorist), had it preserved a relic of a once fully-formed s– aorist which had been largely lost as a result of merger with other categories, or was this a 3 s. ending which had subsequently become incorporated into the stem to form a new kind of paradigm?.