Foreword

The outline of grammar presented here is inspired from the Hethitisches Elementarbuch by Johannes Friedrich. However, it is not an exact translation of this book. I have nevertheless used his examples, his tables of the different paradigms and his numbering of the classes of verbs (referenced in the lexicon).

I have deviated from the usual rules of transcription of Hittite by replacing the sign š by the letter 's', according to the correspondence Hittite cuneiform š = phonetic /s/. This replacement only takes place for the the transcription of whole Hittite words, not when transcribing cuneiform signs ; one will find for instance 'wa-aš-ta = wasta'. Moreover, in order to simplify the typing and since there is no ambiguity, the letter ḫ has been replaced by the simple h.

I have also replaced the symbols u̯ and i̯ used in the grammar of Friedrich by the common letters w and y (excepted for the cuneiform sign noted i̯a by Friedrich that I have transcribed ia, according to the most frequent transcription today). Furthermore, I have modified the transcriptions of Friedrich when the vowels of two consecutive signs do not match. I have used instead the phonetic values recognized nowadays that match. For example, pí-eš-ta is replaced by pé-eš-ta.

For the numbering of paragraphs, I have used the same one as the grammar of Friedrich, which allows me to cross-reference data more easily inside the grammar, and among the grammar, the lexicon and the texts. Moreover, the owners of the grammar of Friedrich will be able to find directly the paragraphs.

Finally, this site is based on the second edition of the grammar of Friedrich that goes back to 1960. Hence, the grammar presented here does not take into account discoveries that have been made since.

To display correctly with Windows the special characters used in Assyriology, a rich enough font is mandatory. This site supports the fonts Arial Unicode MS (installed with Microsoft Office) and Code2000 (downloadable at http://home.att.net/~jameskass/ ; the font antialiasing should be activated for a correct rendering).

To check your explorer, you should see correctly the following characters : ā (a macron), ē (e macron), ī (i macron), ū (u macron), g̃ (g tilde), Ĝ (G circumflex), ḫ (h with subscribed breve), š (s caron), ṣ (s with subscribed dot), ṭ (t with subscribed dot).

Some diacritics are not correctly positioned with Arial Unicode MS, such as G̃ (G tilde), ō̆ (o with macron and breve) or i̯. They are correctly handled with Code2000, but I have prefered not to use them. This is why the Sumerian nasal velar is written G with circumflex instead of the more frequent G with tilde.