‘broad’; Skt. ṛjús, ‘straight’; ṛbhús, ‘clever’; Greek yλυκύς, ‘sweet’; βαθύς, ‘deep’; Goth. tulgus, ‘firm’. In early I. E., u-stems have scarcely a respectable rival in this semantic field, except perhaps the primary adjectives in -ró (ἐρυθρό-ς = Skt. rudhirás = Lat. ruber, ‘red’; Skt. citrá-s = OHG heitar, ‘bright’). Of both these types of adjectives, which pervade to this day every nook and corner of I. E. speech, not a single one is to be found in this Hittite of 1500 B. C.; yet their type of inflection is supposed to have remained over. It is as though a Parisian salad had been carried through the house of Hatti, and had left behind nothing but its soupçon of onion aroma. The results of speech mixture are varied and not easy to predict, but it is difficult to conceive processes apparently so concerted and intentional as to wipe out all such words as ‘sweet’, ‘short’, ‘light’, ‘thick’, ‘thin’, ‘soft’, ‘broad’, ‘wide’, ‘dry’, ‘swift’, etc., etc., of the invading language, yet leave behind the inflection of these words as the orfaned result, so to speak.
Something very like this has happened to the i-stems. No Indo-European scholar can visualize i-stems without the abstract -ti stems, like Skt. gátis = βάσις = Goth. qumþ(i)s; or Skt. matís, Lat. men(ti)s, Goth. ga-mund(i)s; Skt. sthitís, Gr. στάσις, Lat. statio. They still control I. E. abstract expression everywhere, as in English station, convention, mention. There is not, as a matter of fact, among the u- and i-stems a single etymology which can claim standing; this as part expression of the wider fact that Hittite I. E. etymology rests on a basis whose shakiness cannot easily be overstated.
We come to the a-stems, nominative aš, accusative an. Echoes sound from many quarters of Western Asiatic speech. Kossaean suryaš; Chaldic (Vannic) -š(e) (with accusative ni)[1]; Mittani quasi-nominatives and accusatives in š and n[2]; even Lycian figures in a way[3]. This declension, the well-known second declension of Greek and Latin grammar, holds in Hittite for both masc. and fem.; thus: annaš ‘mother’; ŠAL-naš ‘woman’; GIM-aš ‘slave-girl’. Again there is not a single even remotely respectable I. E. etymology for this most pervasive class, involving
