Question

In the winter of 1915, Bedřich Hrozný published his preliminary reports on the decipherment of the Hittite cuneiform tablets unearthed at Boğazköy. While his contemporaries expected Hittite to belong to the Semitic family—owing to the geographical proximity of the ruins to Mesopotamia—Hrozný’s breakthrough hinged on a single sentence: 'nu NINDA-an ezzatteni watar-ma ekutteni'. Recognizing ezzatteni as cognate to the German essen (to eat) and watar to the English water, he proposed an Indo-European origin. The announcement was met with chilly skepticism from established philologists, who questioned how an Indo-European tongue could have dominated central Anatolia during the Bronze Age without leaving conspicuous traces in neighboring Assyrian records. Critics demanded further proof, arguing that Hrozný had merely found lexical loans, not structural affinity. Undeterred, Hrozný painstakingly compiled a comprehensive grammar, which he published two years later. By meticulously detailing the conjugations and declensions that aligned Hittite syntax with ancient Greek and Latin, rather than merely pointing to isolated vocabulary words, Hrozný gradually silenced his detractors. The academic community’s initial resistance faded not because the critics conceded their geographical arguments, but because they could no longer deny the systematic morphological correspondence.

Based on the passage, the academic community's eventual acceptance of Hrozný's decipherment of Hittite is best described as which of the following?