On Thursday 2 March, João Paulo Galhano defended his PhD Thesis on “Hittite Emotions in Lexical and Semantic Grounds. A research into the history of emotions through the hittite records”, supervised by José Virgilio García Trabazo (Univ. of Santiago) and Nuno Simões Rodrigues (Univ. of Lisbon). The examining board, composed of doctors José Luis García Ramón (Universität zu Köln), Alberto Bernabé Pajares (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) and Mariona Vernet Pons (Universitat de Barcelona), awarded the thesis the grade of Outstanding cum laude.
In his research, João Paulo Galhano observes and evaluates Hittite lexical sensitivity to the semantic field of emotions. In this way, the ability to lexicalise what is modernly included under the lexical category of emotions is examined.
This is the first time that a thesis on the Hittite language has been defended at the University of Santiago. The importance of the study of Hittite lies in the fact that it is the Indo-European language with the oldest documentation of the whole linguistic group. Therefore, its study is irreplaceable for the reconstruction of the common prehistoric IE language, and therefore to know the evolution of our linguistic family.