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Hurrian language
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Hurrian | ||
|---|---|---|
| Spoken in: | Mitanni | |
| Region: | Mesopotamia | |
| Language extinction: | Ca 1000 BC | |
| Language family: | Hurro-Urartian | |
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | none | |
| ISO 639-2: | — | |
| ISO 639-3: | — | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-based pronunciation key. | ||
Hurrian is a conventional name for the language of the Hurrians (Khurrites), a people who entered northern Mesopotamia around 2300 BC and had mostly vanished by 1000 BC. Hurrian was the language of the Mitanni kingdom in northern Mesopotamia, and was likely spoken at least initially in Hurrian settlements in Syria.
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Hurrian is an ergative-agglutinative language that, together with Urartian, constitutes the Hurro-Urartian family. Armenian, has many layers of loanwords, and shows traces of long language contact with Hurrian and Hurro-Urartian. [1] Some scholars see similarities between Hurrian and the Northeast Caucasian languages, and thus place it in the Alarodian family. Examples of the proposed phonological correspondences are PEC *l- > Hurrian t-, PEC *-dl- > Hurrian -r- (Diakonoff & Starostin).
There are significant grammatical influences of the Hurrian language such as ergativity, as well as vocabulary items, incorporated into the modern-day Kurdish languages of the same region[1].
The Hurrians adopted the Akkadian cuneiform script for their own language about 2000 BC. This has enabled scholars to read the Hurrian language. The number of Hurrian texts yet discovered is still small. They also tended to use a lot of Sumerian logograms whose Hurrian pronunciation is unknown. The understanding of the Hurrian language is therefore far from complete.
Texts in the Hurrian language itself have been found at Hattusa, Ugarit (Ras Shamra), and Sapinuwa (but unpublished). Also, one of the longest of the Amarna letters is Hurrian; written by King Tushratta of Mitanni to Pharaoh Amenhotep III. It was the only long Hurrian text known until a multi-tablet collection of literature in Hurrian with a Hittite translation was discovered at Hattusas in 1983. Among the Hurrian texts from Ugarit are the oldest known instances of written music.
Hurrian further influenced the Semitic language spoken at Qatna; and the Hittite language, particularly in the dialect of Sapinuwa.
Some scholars, like I. J. Gelb and E. A. Speiser, believe that the Hurrians were later arrivals who assimilated or were assimilated by a Subarian substratum, and view the term "Hurrian language" as an anachronistic term for the native language of Subartu.
- ^ Hovick Nersessian, "Highlands of Armenia," Los Angeles, 2000, Mr Nersessian is in the New York Academy of Sciences; Martiros Kavoukjian "Armenia, Subartu, Sumer," Montreal, 1982; Rafael Ishkhanyan, "Illustrated History of Armenia," Yerevean 1989