Customer Reviews

Beginning Hittite

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

If you're very lucky you may find the following books by Edgar Sturtevant in a good library: A Hittite Chrestomathy (with George Bechtel) and A Comparative Grammar of the Hittite Language (with E. Adelaide Hahn). The Chrestomathy is an amazing book, intended for beginners, with an excellent treatment of cuneiform. You may also look for his Hittite Glossary. These are all pretty hard to come by these days, but they're better than anything else out there, including the subject of this 2 star rating.

Although the preface states that this book "can be used by the student for self instruction without the aid of any teacher", I found that not to be the case. My hat's off to anyone who could pick up more than a smattering of Hittite from this book alone.

I had hoped for a series of lessons, with vocabulary and exercises. After an introduction to the writing system, the authors launch into a catalogue of declensions ("nominal system", "the pronominal system", "the verbal system", etc.) It looks like a throwback to the phonology - morphology - syntax grammars of the last century.

The only thing that makes this work something more than a dry reference grammar for those who already know some Sumerian and Akkadian is a 40-page or so section of readings in the rear of the book. There are 4 reading selections given in cuneiform, with the transliteration and a literal translation into English underneath. Each selection is then followed by a "real" English translation.

For a true learner's grammar of Hittite, I guess we'll just have to wait. In the last couple of years, we've seen excellent learning aids for ancient languages (Huehnergard's Akkadian, Hayes' Sumerian, Allen's Middle Egyptian, to name a few.)

I'd recommend you wait a little longer for something meant for true beginners. Hopefully, it won't take too long.

This book was definitely for beginning Hittite. As a linguist, I was disappointed with how it began its introduction to the Hittite language. The authors gave a decent intro. to grammar, but not to the mechanics of the cuneiform. All of the conjugations and declensions were transliterations, leaving the student with no way to deal with actual Hittite texts. Further, many of the linguistic tidbits that the authors offered amounted to "that's just the way it is." Rarely do such excuses give the only available explanation; in spite of potential evidence that would avoid such sidestepping, the authors did not comment on more concrete theories.

To limn: this book is okay as a beginning, as the barest beginning, but you'll have to spend hundreds of dollars on additional texts and do your own linguistic analyses if you're serious about learning the language.

For those interested in such a book, but discouraged by the evaluation of this one, a new grammar of Hittite, complete with systematic grammatical description, graded exercises in transliteration, vocabulary, etc., is on the horizon. The authors are H. A. Hoffner (emeritus professor of Hittitology at Univ. of Chicago and co-founder and co-editor of the Hittite Dictionary of that university) and Craig Melchert (professor of linguistics at Univ. of N. Carolina Chapel Hill). If your need is not urgent, it should be out in another year.

Being a lover of languages, in particular Indo-European languages, I was fascinated to find a book that professed to teach Hittite, one of the oldest recorded Indo-European languages. I was disappointed however on several fronts. Firstly the terms used in the book are intended for a serious academic, so if you do not know your indefinite from your definite articles, this book is definitely not for you, with most information going way over any layperson's head. I also found the imitated pronunciation to be very poor and vague. To top it all off, I found the format of the book to be quite unprofessional and plain, the font being in a type-written format which smacked of low-budget production. I have not read or seen any other books on Hittite so it is hard for me to compare but if all other Hittite books are like this, then it would be advisable to make them more reader-friendly and secondly, I do not believe it is too much to ask for a modern format which does not make you squirm every time you look at it.

To date this is the best book about Hittite language written in English. Though there is still lot to be desired before this ancient language will be properly deciphered and supported with adequate and consistent dictionaries, the authors of this book have done a perfect job providing us with an excellent presentation of what the linguists currently know about this language. I should yank off two stars for a poor treatment of the grammar, but than again in comparison to other similar works the grammar presentation is as complete as one can reasonably expect from the linguists born into any of the modern western languages with vastly simplified grammar, where a concept of declination and other more exotic grammatic forms are at best some distant memory from also simplistic grammatic forms of Greek or Latin.

The above critic seems to be even more relevant due to the fact that hittitologists universally accepted the grammar exclusively rather than also the phonetics, semantics, and comparative linguistic as the basis of the deciphernment. Nevertheless, it is precisely grammar that most readers are the list interested in and there is no harm in doing so, if they are perfectly content with existing dictionaries and should they only desire to learn how to read the Hittite cuneiform tablets. For the beginning introduction the grammar as presented in this book is quite satisfactory and its shortcomings become obvious only if one starts to seek proof of or questions the truthfulness of certain translations.

Mushki

If you are interested in teaching yourself Hittite, by all means do not expect to do it with this tool! It is full of basic errors and is ignorant of any work done in the field for the past forty years. Do yourself a favor and wait for The Hittite Language by Harry A. Hoffner, Jr. and Craig Melchert, due to be published in summer 2007.

since I was very curious about the hitite language I sought a book on it and found this one. There are, as in most language books (especially for ancient languages) lacks in overall didactics, but after all the book covers quite a lot.

Since I am not a professional on this topic my review should not be taken too seriously, but from my point of view 4 stars.