Editing Hittite language (section)

===Laryngeals===
Hittite preserves some very archaic features lost in other Indo-European languages. For example, Hittite has retained two of the three [[laryngeal theory|laryngeals]] ({{PIE |*''h₂''}} and {{PIE|*''h₃''}} word-initially). Those sounds, whose existence had been hypothesized in 1879 by [[Ferdinand de Saussure]], on the basis of vowel quality in other Indo-European languages, were not preserved as separate sounds in any attested Indo-European language until the discovery of Hittite. In Hittite, the phoneme is written as ''ḫ''. In that respect, Hittite is unlike any other attested Indo-European language and so the discovery of laryngeals in Hittite was a remarkable confirmation of Saussure's hypothesis.

Both the preservation of the laryngeals and the lack of evidence that Hittite shared certain [[grammar|grammatical]] features in the other early Indo-European languages have led some philologists to believe that the Anatolian languages split from the rest of Proto-Indo-European much earlier than the other divisions of the [[proto-language]]. See [[#Classification]] above for more details.