text: Learn more about Hurrian language
  Spoken in: Mitanni
  Language extinction: Ca 1000 BC
  Language family: Hurro-Urartian
  ISO 639-2: to be added
  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.
  1 Language interrelations
  2 Hurrian writing
  3 Hurrian literature
  4 Hypothesis about Hurrian
  [edit] Language interrelations
  Hurrian is an ergative-agglutinative language that, together with Urartian, constitutes the Hurro-Urartian family. 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].
  [edit] Hurrian writing
  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 use a lot of Sumerian logograms whose Hurrian pronunciation is unknown. The understanding of the Hurrian language is therefore far from complete.
  [edit] Hurrian literature
  Texts in the Hurrian language itself have been found at Hattusa, Ugarit (Ras Shamra), and Sapinuwa (but unpublished).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.
  [edit] Hypothesis about Hurrian
  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.
  de:Hurritische Sprache hr:Hurijski jezik la:Lingua Hurrica ja:フルリ語 ru:Хурритский язык sv:Hurritiska
  Retrieved from "http://www.worldwizzy.com/library/Hurrian_language"
  Categories: Articles lacking sources from July 2006 | All articles lacking sources | Ancient languages | Hurro-Urartian languages | Extinct languages of Asia
  This page was last modified 23:56, 2 December 2006.
  It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Hurrian language". (If you would like to edit this document, click on the Wikipedia article link above.)