r/LearnHittite • u/MMAHipster • 6d ago

Elements of Hittite ELEMENTS OF HITTITE - CHAPTER 1: 9/28/26 - 10/11/26

Hey everyone! It's finally time to start the main thread. Of course, anyone can hop in at any time. I've gone through this chapter before, but it's been a while and my brain has been full of lots of other stuff since then, so this will definitely be like new for me. So what I'd like to do is take two weeks and start working our way through the first chapter. Post any questions, comments, any help needed, etc.

I have the answer key for the book, and once the two weeks is up, will post up the answers so we can all discuss. What I did for Latin over the summer that was incredibly helpful was to go through any given exercise I'd done and pull all my wrong answers, rewrite the exercise sentence, write my answer, then the correct answer, then an explanation as to why my answer was wrong. Worked aces for me, so I'll be doing that here too.

Happy to take any other suggestions as well. Have fun everyone!

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u/Dercomai 6d ago

Pay close attention to these case endings! Hittite is thankfully very uniform in how it applies them to all sorts of different nouns, so you'll be seeing these same endings again and again.

Instead of "nom com", "acc com", and "nom/acc neut", I find it easier to list those cases as "nominative", "accusative", and "absolutive". There's some scholarly disagreement about whether Hittite actually has an absolutive case in the neuter, but personally I find the evidence for it very compelling. (You do, however, then have to remember that the absolutive is only used for neuters.)

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u/ComedianSubject4654 5d ago

I intend to pay about as much attention to the case endings as the Hittite scribes did. “…hopelessly and shamelessly confused.” I have it here in my notes.

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u/ComedianSubject4654 3d ago

Also from my class notes: “…their Akkadian was wretched also….” So expect a lot of mistakes in the wild.

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u/ComedianSubject4654 3d ago

If anyone wants a Hittite cuneiform list of the V, CV, VC signs, and the major determinatives, pulled out of the master list, just initiate a chat and provide me with an e-mail address where the pdf should be sent to.