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. Hurrian language - Britannica Online Encyclopedia

Classification

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).

Armenian has many layers of loanwords, and may show traces of language contact with Hurro-Urartian. Hovick Nersessian, "Highlands of Armenia," Los Angeles, 2000^{[page # needed]}

Some scholars, such as I. J. Gelb and E. A. Speiser, tried to equate Hurrians and "Subarians".^{[citation needed]}

History

Early study of the language was entirely based on the Mitanni letter found in 1887. The Hurro-Urartian relation was recognized as early as 1890 by Sayce (ZA 5, 1890, 260-274) and Jensen (ZA 6, 1891, 34-72).

Renewed interest in Hurrian was triggered by texts discovered in Bogazköy in the 1910s and Ugarit in the 1930s. Speiser (1941) published the first comprehensive grammar of Hurrian. Since the 1980s, the Nuzi corpus from the archive of Silwa-tessup has been edited by G. Wilhelm.

Since the late 1980s, significant progress was made due to the discovery of a Hurrian-Hittite bilingual, edited by E. Neu (StBoT 32).

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Texts in the Hurrian language itself have been found at Hattusa, Ugarit (Ras Shamra), and Sapinuwa (but unpublished).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

Important finds were made at Ortaköy (Sapinuwa) in the 1990s, including several bilinguals. Most of them remain unedited as of 2007.

No Hurrian texts are attested from the first millennium BC (unless one wants to consider Urartian a late Hurrian dialect), but scattered loanwords persist in Assyrian, such as the goddess Savuska mentioned by Sargon II.Wegner (2000:25)

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.
• Wegner, I., Hurritisch, eine Einführung, Harassowitz (2000), ISBN 3-447-04262-1.

See also

• Indo-Aryan superstrate in Mitanni

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from Wikipedia