The book under review deals with the secondary effects of the Hittite word accent (p. 6) as sources of information on the Hittite accent system. Following a short introduction (pp. 1–10), the studies of these sources are arranged in three parts: (1) plene spellings that indicate vowel length, which arises or is kept under the accent (pp. 11–540); (2) lenition and fortition of consonants, which are conditioned by certain positions relating to the accent, e.g. lenition between unaccented vowels (pp. 541–96); (3) the syntactic behaviour of clitics and the metrical features of certain word classes (pp. 597–639). The fourth part, entitled “Conclusions and results”, consists mainly of a brittle, but extensive, list of “all Hittite words that have been treated in this book, and, if determinable, the place of the accent” (pp. 641–98). The author's results, if accepted by the community, are not only highly relevant to the understanding of the Hittite accent system itself, but also to the reconstruction of the accent patterns of the Anatolian and Indo-European proto-languages, Anatolian being the fifth branch of Proto-Indo-European from which information on the inherited accent can be extracted.

The author starts out from the assumption (based on the reflexes in Vedic, Greek, Balto-Slavic and Germanic) that the proto-language had a free accent (either stress or pitch). Since Lydian, another Anatolian daughter language, probably had a free stress accent, Kloekhorst puts forward as a working hypothesis “that also in Hittite each word in principle had only one accented syllable” (p. 5) and undertakes to find evidence for the position of the word accent (free or fixed) and its type (stress or pitch). The author claims, however, that evidence for a specific sentence accent is extremely rare so it hardly plays a role in the discussion. But his remarks on the imperative forms on pp. 94 f. and 208 f., where he convincingly explains the plene spelling in those forms as being due to an emphatic intonation pattern within the sentence, show that there might be other instances of such intonation patterns with emphasis on nouns or noun phrases. A way to explain exceptions to the results below seems to be discarded too rashly.

The study is based on an unusually large corpus of 280,000 words collected by the author himself and supplemented by attestations listed in Hittite dictionaries. The texts were categorized according to their palaeographic dating (Old, Middle and (Late) New Script). One result of the study, which the author asserts but which is not proven by evidence is “that younger copies of older compositions almost always reflect the spelling (and therefore the phonetics) of the language stage of the period in which the tablet was written on” (p. 9, but see p. 199 for an example of the opposite attitude of the scribe).

The empirical studies are carried out with great philological knowledge and enormous diligence. This is especially true for the 500 pages of Part I on plene spelling, i.e. the spelling of vowels with an extra vowel sign (e.g., še-e-er as opposed to the non-plene spelling še-er). After Kimball's unpublished dissertation (1983) on Hittite plene writing this is the first comprehensive attempt at collecting and interpreting the evidence. The results are many and interesting. Owing to limitations of space, only a single example can be given. The author's method is to provide statistics on the spelling of each vowel (/a, e, i, o, u/) in each position (word-initially, open and closed syllable, etc.). Three groups emerge for e after consonant in open syllables: plene spellings in over 90 per cent of the attestations; mixed spellings (30–50 per cent plene); and virtually no plene spellings. For Old Hittite, this is interpreted as a three-way contrast reflecting long, half-long and short e, and as going back to long accented *e, *eh ₁ and i-diphthongs, short accented e, and their unaccented counterparts, respectively. According to the author, the lack of most of the earlier plene spellings in Neo-Hittite is the outcome of shortening (while other scholars would presumably interpret it as purely graphic, i.e. a change in spelling conventions). Three exceptions of varying plausibility are stated: loss of accent in adverbs; secondary accent shift in verbal paradigms; and lengthening of *e before PIE mediae. The last group consists of only three examples, including *d^heǵ^hōm ‘earth’, which would normally (because of *ǵ^h) be regarded as a counter-example, but the reconstruction of which is changed to *d^heǵōm for this very reason. Therefore, it will be necessary for future research to discuss each result in detail before either accepting or dismissing it.

A serious drawback of this book is that previous scholarship is often cited only eclectically. Readers unfamiliar with the field will get the impression that many of the etymologies cited are the author's own suggestions. Even if he had made the effort to check them in his own Etymological Dictionary of the Hittite Inherited Lexicon (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2008) this will not be remedied, because that book suffers from the same (already much criticized) deficiency. Why, for instance, would Sidel'tsev's well-known article on the spelling of the nominative plural in -(e)-eš not be cited when treating the ending on pp. 79–89? (Andrej Sideltsev, “A new morphonological rule for Middle Hittite?”, in A. Kassian and A. Sideltsev (eds), Studia Linguarum 3. Moscow: Languages of Slavonic Culture, 2002, pp. 21–80, https:// www.academia.edu/10376111/). It is wholly inexplicable to the present reviewer why the author, through a ubiquitous negligence of other scholars’ achievements, spoils his otherwise so well-deserved praise for a book that is full of new information, that abounds in original ideas and that will function for decades as a point of reference for all future work on the topic.