A Comparative Linguistic Study of the Verbal Morphology of Indo-European Languages in Ancient Anatolia

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The seeming absence of preterite middle forms from a Luvian group of the minor Anatolian languages (Cuneiform Luvian, Hieroglyphic Luvian, and Lycian) is not due to chance. As far as the 3sg.and 3 pl.are concerned, it is probably attributed to the formal replacement of the active ending by the corresponding middle ending.The 3 pl.active preterite endings reconstructed for late Proto-Anatolian are ^<**>-er, ^<**>-r__o, and ^<**>-an (< ^<**>-ant). Among these endings ^<**>-er was generalized to bo the mi-and *i-conjugations in Hittite. In a Luvian group, on the other hand, the undercharacterized ^<**>-an was replaced by the 3 pl.middle ^<**>-anta, which, ousting the ^<**>-er and ^<**>-r__o, came to serve as a general preterite marker (Cuneiform Luvian -nta, Hieroglyphic Luvian-^nta, Lycian-^nte, -^nte^^-).In the case of the 3 sg., the middle preterite ending [^<**>-ta]or[^<**>-da]was added to the mi-verbs, which were endingless because Common Luvian lost final dentals. The Quality of the dental, lenited or unlenited, was determined by that of the corresponding present form. A similar kind of remodelling also occurred to the 3 sg.preterite of the *i-conjugation, where the original ^<**>-s was replaced by the unmarked middle ending [^<**>-ta]. This view most naturally explains why each mi-verb is consistent in the dental quality of its ending form and why the contrast between lenited and unlenited dentals is not observed in the *i-conjugation.