Hurrian language

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. It is generally believed that the speakers of this language originally came from the Armenian mountains and spread over southeast Anatolia and northern Mesopotamia at the beginning of the 2nd millennium BC. ^[1]

The Hurrians are believed to be one of many ancestors of modern-day Kurds^[2] and the Hurrian language's influence on the modern Kurdish language is still evident in its ergativic grammatical structure and in its toponyms.^[3]

Language interrelations

The territory of the Armenian language appears to have been roughly coincidental with that of the earlier non-IE Hurrian and closely related Urartian (with Dark shading). The poorly known and presumably related non-IE Etio language was to its north. Many of these languages occupied partially or wholly the earlier territory of the Kuro-Araxes culture (light shading). The nearest IE neighbors of the Armenians were the Hittites (and related Luvians and Palaic-speaking populations) who were not closely related to Armenian. Assyrian and Gutian are non IE languages. Burials with wheeled vehicles have been uncovered at Trialeti and Lchashen. ^[4]

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. ^[5] 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).

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 to use a lot of Sumerian logograms whose Hurrian pronunciation is unknown. The understanding of the Hurrian language is therefore far from complete.

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Texts in the Hurrian language itself have been found at Hattusa, Ugarit (Ras Shamra), and Sapinuwa (but unpublished).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 the dialect of Sapinuwa.

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.

References

Further reading

• Speiser, E. A. (1941). Introduction to Hurrian. New Haven: Pub. by the American schools of Oriental research under the Jane Dows Nies publication fund.

See also

• Indo-Aryan superstrate in Mitanni

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