Hittite Exercise Book.

• Position: Book review

Hittite Exercise Book. By SUSANNE ZEILFELDER. Translated by Esther-Miriam Wagner. Dresdner Beitrage zur Hethitologie, vol. 17, Wiesbaden: HARRASSO-WITZ VERLAG, 2005. Pp. xiii + 309. [euro]29 (paper).

This teaching tool, the product of Zeilfelder's courses at the University of Jena, is intended to provide supplementary classroom material for the instructor of the Hittite language. It begins with a very concise description of the available Hittite textual corpus and the cuneiform script before presenting chapters on noun formation and declension, verbal formation and conjugation, pronominal inflection, and the syntax of particles, conjunctions, and clauses. For each category, brief descriptions of the linguistic phenomena, accompanied by useful charts when appropriate, are followed by ample illustrative examples drawn from actual texts. A bibliography as well as glossaries of Hittite lexemes, Sumerograms and Akkadograms, determinatives, and proper names complete the volume.

I recently used this book in my own elementary instruction and found it on the whole to be a useful augmentation to the exercises in the tutorial volume of H. A. Hoffner and H. C. Melchert's new Grammar of the Hittite Language (Eisenbrauns, 2008). Due to the inadequacy of E.-M. Wagner's English translation, however, I cannot recommend it to a student attempting to learn Hittite on his or her own. Unidiomatic renderings...