Hittite flash cards

I've been trying to be as conscientious as possible in memorizing Hittite vocabulary--no one's going to be quizzing me, and so I'm making all the flash cards from van den Hout's chapter vocabularies and numbering them to keep track.  I guess I'll have a thousand or two by the time the course is complete.

It's easier than the last language for which I made flash cards.  In Greek, one's verb flash cards have to have six words each (not to mention the English translation and other notes on the back), one for each "principal part" of each verb, in order to recognize all the forms.  Page 117 here shows the nice and confusing πάσχω and πειθώ.

I try to memorize only three vocabulary cards at once.  It usually takes only a minute or two of repeating the three to help make them stick.  It's useful if the three are very similar phonologically or orthographically.  In Hittite, good examples are parš- (escape/ flee), parḫ- (chase away) and paḫš- (protect/ be careful)--especially good because the meanings, at least for me, are all relatively similar or in the same domain of experience.  I don't find that actually making the cards helps me memorize the words on them; it's really when I sit down and force myself to run through a stack of cards that I learn.

And then there's the cuneiform--I am trying to learn the entire syllabary that van den Hout includes in his textbook.  Hittite cuneiform (borrowed from the Akkadian of the Babylonians) does not represent alphabetic sounds but a series of whole syllables.  Flashcards, with a cuneiform symbol on one side and the syllable (or alternatives) that it represents are the only way I can think of to learn the symbols without years of impressing them in clay myself.  van den Hout is quite correct to present cuneiform symbols of similar shapes together (John Huehnergard's Grammar of Akkadian of course does the same), and, as there's no pattern to how the symbols match the syllables they stand for, there's no way to systematize the learning process or to proceed deductively.  For instance: a horizontal wedge that ends at a vertical wedge, but does not cross the line of the vertical wedge, is pronounced "ka₄" or "qa"¹; if the horizontal wedge does cross the line of the vertical wedge, it is "pár" or "maš."² If we then add another horizontal wedge, piercing the head of the horizontal wedge in pár/ maš, we end up with "an" or "DINGIR" (which indicates the name of a god).  Oy vey, I should say, using monosyllables.


1. The subscript numeral in "ka₄" means the syllabary has at least three other "ka" signs.
2. There's no particular reason, as far as I know, that such disparate syllables as "pár" or "maš" should be represented by the very same sign.