Albrecht Goetze
Encyclopedia
Albrecht Goetze was a German
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

-American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 Hittitologist
Hittitologist
A Hittitologist is an archaeologist, historian, linguist, or art historian who specialises in the study of the Ancient Hittites and their Near Eastern Empire which was based in Hattusa in modern day Anatolia.A partial list of notable Hittite scholars includes:...

.

Goetze was Professor of Semitic languages at the University of Marburg when the Nazi regime came to power in 1933. It was through the initiative of Edgar H. Sturtevant
Edgar H. Sturtevant
-Biography:Sturtevant was born in Jacksonville, Illinois, the older brother of Alfred Sturtevant. He studied at the University of Chicago receiving there in 1901 a Ph.D. with a dissertation on Latin case forms. He became an assistant professor of classical philology at Columbia University in New...

 that Goetze was invited to Yale University
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...

 in 1934, a move that was to prove momentous for the advancement of Assyrology and Hittology at Yale. He retired there to emeritus status in 1965.

Goetze's combined training in Indo-European and Semitic linguistics placed him into a peculiarly advantageous position to tackle the emerging field of Hittite studies at the end of World War I. His contributions to that field are numerous and most reliably commented on in Finkelstein's 1972 bibliography.

With Sturtevant, he laid the foundations to what later became the Goetze-Wittmann law
Henri Wittmann
Henri Wittmann is a Canadian linguist from Quebec. He is best known for his work on Quebec French.-Biography:Henri Wittmann was born in Alsace in 1937...

 (spirantization of palatal stops before u as the focal origin for the diffusion of the Centum-Satem isogloss
Centum-Satem isogloss
The centum-satem division is an isogloss of the Indo-European language family, related to the different evolution of the three dorsal consonant rows of the mainstream reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European:...

). The diffusion hypothesis of the Satem features has the merit to motivate the existence of marginal Satem features in Greek, Albanian and Tocharian and of marginal Kentum features in Armenian.

See also

  • Hittite language
    Hittite language
    Hittite is the extinct language once spoken by the Hittites, a people who created an empire centred on Hattusa in north-central Anatolia...

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