Albrecht Goetze

Who was Albrecht Goetze?

Albrecht Goetze was a German-American Hittitologist.

Goetze was Professor of Semitic languages at the University of Marburg when the Nazi regime came to power in 1933. It was through the initiative of Edgar H. Sturtevant that Goetze was invited to Yale University in 1934, a move that was to prove momentous for the advancement of Assyrology and Hittology at Yale. He retired there to emeritus status in 1965.

Goetze's combined training in Indo-European and Semitic linguistics placed him into a peculiarly advantageous position to tackle the emerging field of Hittite studies at the end of World War I. His contributions to that field are numerous and most reliably commented on in Finkelstein's 1972 bibliography.

With Sturtevant, he laid the foundations to what later became the Goetze-Wittmann law. The diffusion hypothesis of the Satem features has the merit to motivate the existence of marginal Satem features in Greek, Albanian and Tocharian and of marginal Kentum features in Armenian.