nursery words: addaš or attaš, ‘father’, annaš ‘mother’, or they are written in Babylonian (Shemitic) A. BU ‘father’; AHI-IA ‘of my brother’; AHÂTU, ‘sister’. The Hittite before us has, with the exception of the noun wādar, said to mean ‘water’, which is also written widār; genitive wedenaš, u-e-te-na-aš, widêni, hardly a single noun of I. E. etymology. The inflection of the noun is by no means conclusively Indo-European. The verbal inflections are at points (not all of them brought out here) bewitchingly Indo-European; at other points they are not less bewilderingly mystifying. From the point of view of verb etymology there are not a dozen verbs that are securely Indo-European, and the total of etymology, with the exception of pronominal etymology—and here again really only the interrogative-indefinite pronoun—is the weakest link in the chain. The heaping of conglutinative particles (e. g., ma-ah-ha-an-ma-za-kan ‘when further mine’, p. 39), combined with the conglutinative use of personal pronouns at the end of nouns, is non-Indo-European, and deserves special investigation. Finally, the over-ripe condition of language at the earliest dating known to I. E. speech history (1500 B. C.) bids us hold still a while longer, on the off-chance that we are facing a perplexing illusion.14 JAOS 41
