Learning verbs

Hoffner and Melchert and van den Hout present Hittite morphology to their students in different sequences.  Van den Hout presents -mi and -ḫi verbs in the same first chapter, and later add verbs in different stems and featuring ablaut; Hoffner and Melchert's tutorial don't introduce the -ḫi verbs until nearly halfway through the course.  Van den Hout's approach is perhaps more complete--I get a full view of the verbal system.  Hoffner and Melchert choose an approach more in common with the development of the language--if the -ḫi conjugation is a later intrusion into the language, then a learner might be well-served treating it as later, and subsidiary, to the -mi conjugation.  Van den Hout also introduces perfects and mediopassives far earlier. 

Each tutorial presents the various verb classes in different orders, and I don't yet have the perspective on the language to know what order is best.  I do think back to how I learned Greek and Latin, which have much richer inflection systems--in those, authors have to teach verbs beginning with the present tense, and then move into more complex tenses and voices.  Because Hittite verb endings are fairly sparse, I've found it most important to learn them, and jump right into the rest.

To teach in bound transcription or in transliteration?

Hittite is written not with an alphabet but with a syllabary, each sign representing either a single vowel or a cluster: consonant-vowel, vowel-consonant, or consonant-vowel-consonant.  This would obviously create problems for writing a language with sequences of consonants: the third-person plural ending -anzi could be spelled precisely with the two syllables an-zi (see Hoffner & Melchert § 1.7), but at the beginning or end of a word it was more difficult.  Hoffner and Melchert offer the word spikusta, written variously as še-pi-ku-uš-ta, ši-pi-ku-uš-ta, and ša-pi-ku-uš-ta (§1.11).  Even words introduced in the first lesson of in van den Hout's grammar, like paḫšmi, "I protect," must be rendered in cuneiforms with the symbols pa-aḫ-aš-mi.

So the student must be taught with "bound transcription," the attempt to render words like pahs- as they must have been pronounced.  The student must learn which vowels are extraneous.  But almost all Hittitological literature is presented in syllable-by-syllable transliteration and it has been very valuable for me to learn from that sort of transliteration.  So Van den Hout gives practice readings only in transliteration and Hoffner and Melchert offer bound transcription only in the first few lessons.  The awareness both of bound transcription and of transliteration is necessary.  There must be doubt in how certain proper names might look alphabetically; and, very responsibly, the Chicago Hittite Dictionary offers lemmas in both bound transcription and transliteration.