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Luwian and Hittite are two daughter languages of Anatolian. Their close similarity is at first striking, since almost every sentence can be transferred from one language into the other word by word, morpheme by morpheme. In light of this, it is all the more surprising that there are numerous divergences in lexical and morphological expression, that is, either lexemes and grammatical morphemes that are not cognate or that differ due to ablaut. This seemingly contradictory evidence has been interpreted within a chronology of genetic relatedness and language contact.
In the present study, a particular role is assigned to non-finite verbal forms and their constructions, as these exhibit both similarities and differences between the two languages that can be placed with comparatively high confidence within a chronological framework. They can therefore serve to confirm or to challenge the assumptions proposed so far.