The Case Marking of Sumerograms in Hittite

Abstract

The paper begins with a brief introduction to case and case marking and a description of the Hittite corpus and the corpus of the research. The main part is devoted to the case marking of Sumerograms, an as yet unresearched and undescribed topic in Hittitology. The paper examines different possibilities for the case marking of Sumerograms on the level of the sentence and the functional value of phonetic complements. It also attempts to discern whether competition between formally case-marked and case-unmarked Sumerograms in the grammatical roles of subject and direct object was driven by grammatical factors, economy of writing or by other reasons.