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Hittite has a simple verbal system with only two inflectional moods, indicative and imperative. Unreal and potential kinds of modal meaning are conveyed by means of the modal particle (-) man combined with the indicative form of the verb. Indo-Europeanists have long debated whether the small number of moods in Hittite should be regarded as an archaic feature of the Hittite verbal system or as a consequence of an early branching off of Hittite from the Indo-European parent stock. Recent research on the history of the Indo-European mood has established that Hittite actually lost the inherited subjunctive and athematic optative, while the Indo-European thematic optative is a relatively late construction which was not created until Hittite and the whole northern group of Indo-European languages had split off from the rest of the Indo-European family. The origin of the Hittite modal construction with (-)man plus indicative seems inexplicable using only internal Anatolian and Indo-European material.
Akkadian had a homophone irrealis particle -man (with an Old Assyrian variant form -min), which was used in the same way as the Hittite (-)man: for a modal (unreal and potential) modification of declarative sentences and in conditionals. If we compare the structure of the Hittite and the Akkadian sentences with (-)man, we can see that the main difference between them is in word order: in apodosis the Akkadian -man could be attached to any stressed word, while the Hittite (-)man is always clause initial or attached to the first stressed word. Since the almost complete formal and semantic similarity cannot be accidental and the mere lexical borrowing of (-) man which was discussed in some earlier treatises on this question cannot explain the origin of the grammatical pattern as a whole, I propose to view the Hittite (-) man plus indicative as a product of linguistic change in a Hittite-Akkadian contact setting.
Hittite is the oldest attested Indo-European language. It has a simple verbal system with only two inflectional moods, indicative and imperative. In contrast to Greek and Sanskrit which also have an inflectional optative and a subjunctive, it expresses the optative, unreal and potential kinds of modal meaning with the modal particle (-) man combined with the indicative form of the verb. This is illustrated by the following...