Hittite

The Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture, (EIEC) under 'Anatolian Languages' indicates the differences found in Anatolian (Hittite, etc.) as compared to the system from which all other Indo-European languages decend:
 

• Heteroclitics: many neuter nouns with -r  in the nominative and accusative but in -n  for other cases (heteroclisis, heteroclitic nouns), "a very old pattern in Indo-European but nowhere else preserved so commonly".
• No separate dual number.
• Verb moods: indicative and imperative only; no subjunctive or optative.
• Verb tenses: present and past only; "and in the past no distinction of imperfect and aorist and no perfects indicating states that result from some prior action".
• No feminine gender.

From other sources, I have gathered that (1) Hittite also lacked the passive voice, with only active and mediopassive, whereas all other IE languages descend from a three voice system (active, middle and passive), and (2) the noun gender system was not one of masculine-neuter but animate-inanimate, and that inanimate nouns could not take the nominative case.

English speakers, especially those who did not come to a foreign language until later in life, find the masculine-feminine distinction very strange. We can understand neuter nouns, in that these nouns, on the whole, are inanimate nouns, and do not normally occur in the subject position of sentences (they cannot by themselves do anything, but can only have something done to them). For myself, the only thing I've ever seen that explains why IE developed the masc-fem distinction is that it originated as a means of forming new words. Beyond this, what grammatical function does the distinction between masculine and feminine nouns serve?

EIEC seems to discount the the idea that Hittite never had the feminine gender, i.e., the notion that Hittite represents an earlier, more archaic two gender system, a system the remaining IE group would have further elaborated into the standard three gender system.  In fairness, I should state they note an 'a vocalization' in another of the Antolian languages. They note that Hittite had a "special ("ergative") case form in *-ants that neuter nouns take when they are the subject of transitive verbs."

From the descriptions I've read (and in some degree, have not sufficiently understood), Hittite seems to have had an ergative system not too unlike that found in modern Georgian. Georgian (so I understand) is fundamentally a nominative (i.e., non-ergative) language, but, again so far as I understand it, has an auxiliary ergative system that works to emphasize the patient of a verb, rather than its agent, and seems to be parallel to the emphatic effect an English passive construction can give, where one puts the patient of the verb into the subject position.

Everything I've ever seen on the subject says Hittite exhibits a great deal of innovation, and may have undergone a restructuring at least as extensive as the restructuring OId English undergoes when compared to Modern English.

The question, then: What is old and what is new in Hittite? Since just about no one denies that Hittite separated from the main body of IE first, whatever it is that the Anatolian languages have conserved testifies to the earlier state of PIE.

Mark Odegard.