Alwin Kloekhorst

Alwin Kloekhorst (born 4 March 1978) is a Dutch linguist, Indo-Europeanist and Hittitologist. He was appointed a full professor in Anatolian Linguistics at Leiden University in November 2023.

Biography Kloekhorst received his Ph.D. in 2007 at Leiden University for his thesis on Hittite. In over 1200 pages, his dissertation describes the history of Hittite in the light of its Indo-European language origin. Part One, Towards a Hittite Historical Grammar, contains a description of Hittite phonology and a discussion of the sound laws and morphological changes that took place between the Proto-Indo-European and Hittite. Furthermore, Kloekhorst affirms an orthographic distinction between and consonants in Hittite, as opposed to the alternative proposal that Hittite distinguished between voiced and voiceless stops. Though Kloekhorst’s views on this matter are not universally accepted, the philologist Mark Weeden still described this perspective as “refreshing, with new insights and clear, incisive arguments.” Kanišite Hittite: The Earliest Attested Record of Indo-European, 2019, Leiden – Boston, xii + 303 pp. Accent in Hittite: A Study in Plene Spelling, Consonant Gradation, Clitics, and Metrics (= Studien zu den Boğazköy-Texten 56), Wiesbaden, 2014, xxxvi + 716 pp. Etymological Dictionary of the Hittite Inherited Lexicon (= Leiden Indo-European Etymological Dictionary Series 5), 2008, Leiden – Boston, xiii + 1162 pp. Hethitische Texte in Transkription. KBo 35 (= Dresdner Beiträge zur Hethitologie 19), 2006, Wiesbaden, xiv + 353 pp. (together with D. Groddek)