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The Hurro-Urartian languages are an
extinct Extinction is the termination of a kind of organism or of a group of kinds (taxon), usually a species. The moment of extinction is generally considered to be the death of the last individual of the species, although the capacity to breed and ...
language family A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ''ancestral language'' or ''parental language'', called the proto-language of that family. The term "family" reflects the tree model of language origination in h ...
of the
Ancient Near East The ancient Near East was the home of early civilizations within a region roughly corresponding to the modern Middle East: Mesopotamia (modern Iraq, southeast Turkey, southwest Iran and northeastern Syria), ancient Egypt, ancient Iran ( Elam, ...
, comprising only two known languages:
Hurrian The Hurrians (; cuneiform: ; transliteration: ''Ḫu-ur-ri''; also called Hari, Khurrites, Hourri, Churri, Hurri or Hurriter) were a people of the Bronze Age Near East. They spoke a Hurrian language and lived in Anatolia, Syria and Norther ...
and Urartian.


Origins

It is often assumed that the Hurro-Urartian languages (or a pre-split Proto-Hurro-Urartian language) were originally spoken in the Kura-Araxes culture.


External classification

While the genetic relation between Hurrian and Urartian is undisputed, the wider connections of Hurro-Urartian to other language families are controversial. After the decipherment of Hurrian and Urartian inscriptions and documents in the 19th and early 20th century, Hurrian and Urartian were soon recognized as not related to the Semitic nor to the
Indo-European The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Du ...
languages, and to date, the most conservative view holds that Hurro-Urartian is a primary language family not demonstrably related to any other language family. Early proposals for an external genetic relationship of Hurro-Urartian variously grouped them with the
Kartvelian languages The Kartvelian languages (; ka, ქართველური ენები, tr; also known as South Caucasian, Kartvelic, and Iberian languagesBoeder (2002), p. 3) are a language family indigenous to the South Caucasus and spoken primari ...
, Elamite, and other non-Semitic and non-Indo-European languages of the region.
Igor Diakonoff Igor Mikhailovich Diakonoff (occasionally spelled Diakonov, russian: link=no, И́горь Миха́йлович Дья́конов; 12 January 1915 – 2 May 1999) was a Russian historian, linguist, and translator and a renowned expert on th ...
and
Sergei Starostin Sergei Anatolyevich Starostin (russian: Серге́й Анато́льевич Ста́ростин; March 24, 1953 – September 30, 2005) was a Russian historical linguist and philologist, perhaps best known for his reconstructions of hypothet ...
suggested that Hurro-Urartian can be included as a branch of the Northeastern Caucasian language family, the latter dubbed
Alarodian languages The Alarodian languages are a proposed language family that encompasses the Northeast Caucasian (Nakh–Dagestanian) languages and the extinct Hurro-Urartian languages. History The term Alarodian is derived from Greek ''Ἀλαρόδιο� ...
by Diakonoff. Several studies argue that the connection is probable. Other scholars, however, doubt that the language families are related, or believe that, while a connection is possible, the evidence is far from conclusive. Uralicist and Indo-Europeanist Petri Kallio argues that the matter is hindered by the lack of consensus about how to reconstruct Proto-Northeast-Caucasian, but that Alarodian is the most promising proposal for relations with Northeast Caucasian, greater than rival proposals to link it with Northwest Caucasian or other families. However, nothing is known about Alarodians except that they "were armed like the
Colchians In Greco-Roman geography, Colchis (; ) was an exonym for the Georgian polity of Egrisi ( ka, ეგრისი) located on the coast of the Black Sea, centered in present-day western Georgia. Its population, the Colchians are generally thoug ...
and Saspeires," according to
Herodotus Herodotus ( ; grc, , }; BC) was an ancient Greek historian and geographer from the Greek city of Halicarnassus, part of the Persian Empire (now Bodrum, Turkey) and a later citizen of Thurii in modern Calabria (Italy). He is known fo ...
. Colchians and Saspeires are generally associated with Kartvelians or
Scythians The Scythians or Scyths, and sometimes also referred to as the Classical Scythians and the Pontic Scythians, were an ancient Eastern * : "In modern scholarship the name 'Sakas' is reserved for the ancient tribes of northern and eastern Cent ...
. Additionally, leading Urartologist Paul Zimansky rejected a connection between Urartians and Alarodians. Arnaud Fournet and
Allan R. Bomhard Allan R. Bomhard (born 1943) is an American linguist. Born in Brooklyn, New York, he was educated at Fairleigh Dickinson University, Hunter College, and the City University of New York, and served in the U.S. Army from 1964 to 1966. He curre ...
argue that Hurro-Urartian is a sister family to Indo-European. The poorly attested
Kassite language Kassite (also Cassite) was a language spoken by the Kassites in Mesopotamia from approximately the 18th to the 7th century BC. From the 16th to 12th centuries BC, kings of Kassite origin ruled in Babylon until they were overthrown by the Elam ...
may have belonged to the Hurro-Urartian language family.


Contacts with other languages

Hurrian The Hurrians (; cuneiform: ; transliteration: ''Ḫu-ur-ri''; also called Hari, Khurrites, Hourri, Churri, Hurri or Hurriter) were a people of the Bronze Age Near East. They spoke a Hurrian language and lived in Anatolia, Syria and Norther ...
was the language of the
Hurrians The Hurrians (; cuneiform: ; transliteration: ''Ḫu-ur-ri''; also called Hari, Khurrites, Hourri, Churri, Hurri or Hurriter) were a people of the Bronze Age Near East. They spoke a Hurrian language and lived in Anatolia, Syria and Northern Me ...
(occasionally called "Hurrites"), and was spoken in the northern parts of
Mesopotamia Mesopotamia ''Mesopotamíā''; ar, بِلَاد ٱلرَّافِدَيْن or ; syc, ܐܪܡ ܢܗܪ̈ܝܢ, or , ) is a historical region of Western Asia situated within the Tigris–Euphrates river system, in the northern part of the ...
and
Syria Syria ( ar, سُورِيَا or سُورِيَة, translit=Sūriyā), officially the Syrian Arab Republic ( ar, الجمهورية العربية السورية, al-Jumhūrīyah al-ʻArabīyah as-Sūrīyah), is a Western Asian country loc ...
and the southeastern parts of
Anatolia Anatolia, tr, Anadolu Yarımadası), and the Anatolian plateau, also known as Asia Minor, is a large peninsula in Western Asia and the westernmost protrusion of the Asian continent. It constitutes the major part of modern-day Turkey. The re ...
between at least last quarter of the third millennium BC and its extinction towards the end of the second millennium BC. There have been various Hurrian-speaking states, of which the most prominent one was the kingdom of
Mitanni Mitanni (; Hittite cuneiform ; ''Mittani'' '), c. 1550–1260 BC, earlier called Ḫabigalbat in old Babylonian texts, c. 1600 BC; Hanigalbat or Hani-Rabbat (''Hanikalbat'', ''Khanigalbat'', cuneiform ') in Assyrian records, or '' Naharin'' ...
( 14501270 BC). It has also been proposed that two little known groups, the
Nairi Nairi ( classical hy, Նայիրի, ''Nayiri'', reformed: Նաիրի, ''Nairi''; , also ''Na-'i-ru'') was the Akkadian name for a region inhabited by a particular group (possibly a confederation or league) of tribal principalities in the Armen ...
and the
Mannae Mannaea (, sometimes written as Mannea; Akkadian: ''Mannai'', Biblical Hebrew: ''Minni'', (מנּי)) was an ancient kingdom located in northwestern Iran, south of Lake Urmia, around the 10th to 7th centuries BC. It neighbored Assyria and Urartu, ...
, might have been Hurrian speakers, but as little is known about them, it is hard to draw any conclusions about what languages they spoke. Furthermore, the
Kassite language Kassite (also Cassite) was a language spoken by the Kassites in Mesopotamia from approximately the 18th to the 7th century BC. From the 16th to 12th centuries BC, kings of Kassite origin ruled in Babylon until they were overthrown by the Elam ...
was possibly related to Hurro-Urartian. Francfort and Tremblay on the basis of the Akkadian textual and archaeological evidence, proposed to identify the kingdom of Marhashi and Ancient Margiana. The Marhashite personal names seems to point towards an Eastern variant of Hurrian or another language of the Hurro-Urartian language family. There was also a strong Hurrian influence on Hittite culture in ancient times, so many Hurrian texts are preserved from Hittite political centres. The Mitanni variety is chiefly known from the so-called " Mitanni letter" from Hurrian Tushratta to pharaoh
Amenhotep III Amenhotep III ( egy, jmn-ḥtp(.w), ''Amānəḥūtpū'' , "Amun is Satisfied"; Hellenized as Amenophis III), also known as Amenhotep the Magnificent or Amenhotep the Great, was the ninth pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty. According to different ...
surviving in the
Amarna Amarna (; ar, العمارنة, al-ʿamārnah) is an extensive Egyptian archaeological site containing the remains of what was the capital city of the late Eighteenth Dynasty. The city was established in 1346 BC, built at the direction of the Ph ...
archives. The "Old Hurrian" variety is known from some early royal inscriptions and from religious and literary texts, especially from Hittite centres. Urartian is attested from the late 9th century BC to the late 7th century BC as the official written language of the state of
Urartu Urartu (; Assyrian: ',Eberhard Schrader, ''The Cuneiform inscriptions and the Old Testament'' (1885), p. 65. Babylonian: ''Urashtu'', he, אֲרָרָט ''Ararat'') is a geographical region and Iron Age kingdom also known as the Kingdom of V ...
and was probably spoken by the majority of the population in the mountainous areas around
Lake Van Lake Van ( tr, Van Gölü; hy, Վանա լիճ, translit=Vana lič̣; ku, Gola Wanê) is the largest lake in Turkey. It lies in the far east of Turkey, in the provinces of Van and Bitlis in the Armenian highlands. It is a saline soda lake ...
and the upper Zab valley. It branched off from Hurrian at approximately the beginning of the second millennium BC. Scholars, such as Paul Zimansky, contend that Urartian was only spoken by a small ruling class and was not the primary language of the majority of the population. Although Hurro-Urartian languages became extinct with the collapse of the Urartu empire, Diakonoff and Greppin suggested that traces of its vocabulary survived in a small number of loanwords in
Old Armenian Classical Armenian (, in Eastern Armenian pronunciation: Grabar, Western Armenian: Krapar; meaning "literary anguage; also Old Armenian or Liturgical Armenian) is the oldest attested form of the Armenian language. It was first written down at ...
. More recent scholarship by Arnaud Fournet,
Hrach Martirosyan Hrach K. Martirosyan ( hy, Հրաչ Մարտիրոսյան; born in Vanadzor in 1964) is an Armenian linguist. He is currently Lecturer in Eastern Armenian in the department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at University of California, Los ...
, Armen Petrosyan, and others has proposed more extensive contacts between the languages, including vocabulary, grammar, parts of speech, and proper nouns loaned into from Armenian, such as Urartian "eue" ("and"), attested in the earliest Urartian texts (compare to Armenian "yev" (և, եվ), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European
*h₁epi
'). Other loans from Armenian into Urartian includes personal names, toponyms, and names of deities. There are some lexical matches between Hurro-Urartian and Sumerian, indicating an early contact.


Characteristics

Besides their fairly consistent ergative
alignment Alignment may refer to: Archaeology * Alignment (archaeology), a co-linear arrangement of features or structures with external landmarks * Stone alignment, a linear arrangement of upright, parallel megalithic standing stones Biology * Struc ...
and their generally
agglutinative In linguistics, agglutination is a morphological process in which words are formed by stringing together morphemes, each of which corresponds to a single syntactic feature. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglutinative l ...
morphology (despite a number of not entirely predictable
morpheme A morpheme is the smallest meaningful Constituent (linguistics), constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistics, linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology (linguistics), morphology. In English, morphemes are ...
mergers), Hurrian and Urartian are also both characterized by the use of suffixes in their
derivation Derivation may refer to: Language * Morphological derivation, a word-formation process * Parse tree or concrete syntax tree, representing a string's syntax in formal grammars Law * Derivative work, in copyright law * Derivation proceeding, a proc ...
al and
inflection In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and ...
al morphology (including ten to fifteen
grammatical case A grammatical case is a category of nouns and noun modifiers ( determiners, adjectives, participles, and numerals), which corresponds to one or more potential grammatical functions for a nominal group in a wording. In various languages, nomin ...
s) and
postposition Prepositions and postpositions, together called adpositions (or broadly, in traditional grammar, simply prepositions), are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in'', ''under'', ''towards'', ''before'') or mark various ...
s in syntax; both are considered to have the default order subject–object–verb, although there is significant variation, especially in Urartian. In both languages, nouns can receive a peculiar " anaphoric suffix" comparable (albeit apparently not identical) to a
definite article An article is any member of a class of dedicated words that are used with noun phrases to mark the identifiability of the referents of the noun phrases. The category of articles constitutes a part of speech. In English, both "the" and "a(n)" a ...
, and nominal modifiers are marked by
Suffixaufnahme Suffixaufnahme (, "suffix resumption"), also known as case stacking, is a linguistic phenomenon used in forming a genitive construction, whereby prototypically a genitive noun agrees with its head noun. The term Suffixaufnahme itself is literally ...
(i.e. they receive a "copy" of the case suffixes of the head); in verbs, the type of valency (intransitive vs transitive) is signalled by a special suffix, the so-called "class marker". The complex morpheme "chains" of nouns and verbs follow roughly the same morpheme sequences in both languages. In nouns, the sequence in both languages is stem – article – possessive suffix – plural suffix – case suffix – agreement (Suffixaufnahme) suffix. In verbs, the portion of the structure shared by both languages is stem – valency marker – person suffixes. Most morphemes have fairly similar phonological forms in the two languages. Despite this structural similarity, there are also significant differences. In the phonology, written Hurrian only seems to distinguish a single series of phonemic obstruents without any contrastive phonation distinctions (the variation in voicing, though visible in the script, was allophonic); in contrast, written Urartian distinguishes as many as three series: voiced, voiceless and "emphatic" (perhaps glottalized). Urartian is also characterized by the apparent reduction of some word-final vowels to schwa (e.g. Urartian ''ulə'' vs Hurrian ''oli'' "another", Urartian ''eurišə'' vs Hurrian ''evrišše'' "lordship", Hurrian 3rd person plural enclitic pronoun ''-lla'' vs Urartian ''-lə''). As the last two examples shows, the Hurrian geminates are also absent in Urartian. In the morphology, there are differences as well. Hurrian indicates the plural of nouns through a special suffix ''-až-'', which only survives in fossilized form merged into some case endings in Urartian. Hurrian clearly marks tense or aspect through special suffixes (the unmarked form is the present tense) whereas Urartian has not been shown to do so in the attested texts (the unmarked form functions as a past tense). Hurrian has special negative verbal suffixes that negate a verb and are placed before the ergative person agreement suffixes; Urartian has no such thing and instead uses negative particles that are placed before the verb. In Hurrian, only the person of the ''ergative subject'' is marked obligatorily through a suffix in a verb form, whereas the '' absolutive'' subject or object is optionally marked with a pronominal enclitic that need not be attached to the verb and can also be attached to any other word in the clause. In Urartian, the ergative suffixes and the absolutive clitics have merged into a single set of obligatory suffixes that express the person of both the ergative and the absolutive participant and are an integral part of the verb. In general, the profusion of freely moving pronominal and conjunctional clitics that characterize Hurrian, especially that of the Mitanni letter, has few parallels in Urartian. Urartian is closer to the so-called Old Hurrian variety (mostly attested in Hittite documents) than to the Hurrian of the Mitanni letter. For example, both use ''-o-/-u-'' (rather than ''-i-'') as the marker of transitive valency and both display the plural suffix ''-it-'', expressing the number of the ergative subject and occupying a position before the valency marker.Дьяконов И. М. Языки древней Передней Азии. Издательство Наука, Москва. 1967. Часть I. Глава IV. Хурритский и урартский языки. pp. 113-165


Cognates

Below are some Hurrian and Urartian lexical cognates, as listed by Kassian (2010).Kassian, Alexei. 2010. Hurro-Urartian from the lexicostatistical viewpoint. In Manfried Dietrich and Oswald Loretz (eds.), ''Ugarit-Forschungen: Internationales Jahrbuch für die Altertumskunde Syrien-Palästinas'', 383-452. Münster: Ugarit. :


References


Further reading

* Fournet, Arnaud. 2013. "Eléments De Morphologie Et De Syntaxe De La Langue Hourrite. Destinés à l’étude Des Textes Mittaniens Et Anatolo-Hittites". In: ''Bulletin De l’Académie Belge Pour l’Étude Des Langues Anciennes Et Orientales'' 2 (avril), pp. 3–52. https://doi.org/10.14428/babelao.vol2.2013.19843. * Khachikyan, Margarit (2019). "Towards the Reconstruction of the Hurro-Urartian Protolanguage." In: ''Over the Mountains and Far Away: Studies in Near Eastern History and Archaeology Presented to Mirjo Salvini on the Occasion of His 80th Birthday'', edited by Avetisyan Pavel S., Dan Roberto, and Grekyan Yervand H. Summertown: Archaeopress. 304-06..


External links


Comparative Notes on Hurro-Urartian, Northern Caucasian and Indo-European
{{Eurasian languages Pre-Indo-Europeans Language families Cuneiform