Sad news

I just heard that my Hittite professor from the University of Chicago, Harry Hoffner died unexpectedly yesterday. Sad news indeed. You can read a bit more about him here.

I know that some students didn't like him, but I found him to be an excellent teacher. Eisenbrauns published a Festschrift for him several years ago. And his Hittite Grammar was also published by them. I'd like to think that one of the reasons Eisenbrauns got the grammar instead of Harrassowitz was because I was at Eisenbrauns...but we'll never know, will we?

Here are the links to the two books:

Hittite Studies in Honor of Harry A. Hoffner Jr. on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday

Edited by Gary M. Beckman, Richard Beal, and Gregory McMahon
Eisenbrauns, 2003
xxiv + 396 pages, English
Cloth
ISBN: 9781575060798
List Price: $65.00
Your Price: $58.50
www.eisenbrauns.com/item/BECSTUDIE

A Grammar of the Hittite Language, 1: Reference Grammar
Part I: Reference Grammar
Languages of the Ancient Near East - LANE 1/1
by Harry A. Hoffner Jr. and H. Craig Melchert
Eisenbrauns, 2008
xxii + 468 pages + CD-ROM, English
Cloth, 7 x 9 inches
ISBN: 9781575061
List Price: $69.50
Your Price: $62.55
www.eisenbrauns.com/item/HOFGRAMMA

And the teaching grammar

A Grammar of the Hittite Language, 2: Tutorial
Languages of the Ancient Near East - LANE 1/2
by Harry A. Hoffner Jr. and H. Craig Melchert
Eisenbrauns, 2008
vi + 75 pages, English
Cloth, 7 x 10
ISBN: 9781575061481
List Price: $32.50
Your Price: $29.25
www.eisenbrauns.com/item/HOFTUTORI

Subordination (grammatical!)

Among the early Indo-European languages, Ancient Greek and especially Latin present a highly developed system of finite subordination, with embedding and consecutio. Naturally, a distinction should be made among different authors and genres, since consectio is not always respected in popular or unofficial writings. Even Cicero, whose elaborate modus dicendi is largely responsible for the complex organization of the sentence in the literary languages of the Romance domain, does not always abide by consecutio in the letters to his intimates. However, a remarkable difference may be noticed between a text in Latin or Ancient Greek on the one hand and a text in Hittite or Indo-Iranian on the other, since the latter languages make extensive use of adjoining by means of correlative elements, without any obligatory temporal or modal predetermination of the subordinate verb. The Germanic, Baltic, and Slavic languages, as well as Classical Armenian, are positioned somewhere in the middle of the two extremes—Latin and Hittite—since they often attest embedded constructions, but do not have a productive system of consecutio. Latin and Ancient Greek consecutio is probably related to the spread of oratory and rhetoric in these languages. The art of persuading in judiciary and politic discourse needs an attentive manipulation of backgrounded and foregrounded information, as well as a careful distinction among more or less reliable sources and among more and less subjective viewpoints. Such exigency is less cogent in narrative texts.— The Bloomsbury [formerly Continuum] Companion to Historical Linguistics, page 245

<idle musing>
Having studied Classical Greek, Latin, and Hittite, I can vouch for the dramatic difference in the way they express subordination. Hittite is definitely simpler—in that area, anyway!

But it got me to thinking about discourse analysis and Aspect/Actionsart/Tense/Mood and the ramifications this has. No ideas yet, but just food for thought.

By the way, this is a wonderful book. It's making all kinds of stuff that I've noticed in the various languages I've studied over the years fall into place. Of course, there a paragraphs where I get to the end and don't have a clue what they are saying. Sometimes I wonder if it is even English!

[Updated 13:20] I added Mood to the Aspect/Actionsart/Tense because in Greek it is a sequence of mood, not just tense. I hadn't thought of that at the time of writing. So, it gets even more interesting (or less to some) in that you now have the whole TAM spectrum involved...
</idle musing>