The grammar of the Hittite language has a highly conservative verbal system and rich nominal declension.
[2] The other gender, the neuter/inanimate, is referred to objects, including parts of the body, and abstract concepts or collective nouns, e.g. "family, assembly, troops, humanity".
Hittite declension system also distinguishes between two numbers (singular and plural) and shows indirect traces of a dual number; due to syncretism, the ending of ablative and instrumental in the plural coincide.
[9] The sample word shown is antuḫšaš, "man", a-stem noun (common/animate gender, thus a name without the ergative case).
For instance, in mi-verb declension, the 3rd person singular ending in the present tense -zi according to Hoffner and Melchert comes from an earlier *-ti.
[11] Neuter nouns in the accusative singular take -n only if the thematic vowel is -a-, e.g., yukan (plough).
As already stated, due to syncretism, the ending of ablative and instrumental in the plural coincide.
In NH, all the three plural suffixes for nouns of common gender in the two strong cases (nominative and accusative) collapsed into -uš, with only some exceptions.
Hittite syntax shows one noteworthy feature that is typical of Anatolian languages: commonly, the beginning of a sentence or clause is composed of either a sentence-connecting particle or otherwise a fronted or topicalized form, and a "chain" of fixed-order clitics is then appended.
In writing, they were partially left unmarked: Scribes in Assyria and Babylonia who wrote Akkadian in cuneiform script (and later Hittites as well) sometimes indicated the interrogative intonation by a plene spelling of the vowel in the final syllable of the central word in the interrogative clause.
[18] When compared with other early-attested Indo-European languages, such as Ancient Greek and Sanskrit, the verb system in Hittite is morphologically relatively uncomplicated.
In the preterite, -un is used with vocalic stem, i.e., a verbal root that ends in a vowel, which is then deleted.
[24] A simple example of conjugation in the present tense is ḫarzi ('to have, to hold'); the verb belongs to the mi-conjugation verb class and is non-ablauting: The negation adverb is natta ("not"); nāwi translates "not yet", while lē translates "don't...!"
[26] The verb is conjugated in the present tense and belong to the mi-conjugation verbal class.
Hittite has a three-way system to indicate position: near to the speaker, near to the listener and far from both ("here-there-yonder").
The pronouns "this, that" in the nominative singular are kāš and apāš; their plural is kē (later kūš) and apē (later apūš).
[30] Both ordinal and cardinal numbers in Hittite were often written with ciphers instead of syllables, which makes both the reconstruction of their pronunciation and their translation in context difficult.