Hurro-Urartian languages
Hurro-Urartian | |
---|---|
Geographic distribution | Anatolia, Levant, Mesopotamia, Zagros Mountains |
Linguistic classification | One of the world's primary language families |
Proto-language | Proto-Hurro-Urartian |
Subdivisions | |
Glottolog | hurr1239 |
The Hurro-Urartian languages are an extinct language family of the Ancient Near East, comprising only two known languages: Hurrian and Urartian.
Origins
It is often assumed that the Hurro-Urartian languages (or a pre-split Proto-Hurro-Urartian language) were originally spoken by people who engaged in the
External classification
While the genetic relation between Hurrian and Urartian is undisputed, the wider connections of Hurro-Urartian to other language families are controversial.[5] 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 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.[6][7][8]
Early proposals for an external genetic relationship of Hurro-Urartian variously grouped them with the Kartvelian languages, Elamite, and other non-Semitic and non-Indo-European languages of the region.
Arnaud Fournet and Allan R. Bomhard argue that Hurro-Urartian is a sister family to Indo-European.[20][21]
The poorly attested Kassite language may have belonged to the Hurro-Urartian language family.[22]
Contacts with other languages
There was also a strong Hurrian influence on the 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 surviving in the Amarna 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 and was probably spoken by the majority of the population in the mountainous areas around Lake Van and the upper Zab valley. It branched off from Hurrian at approximately the beginning of the second millennium BC.[26] 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.[27]
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
There are some lexical matches between Hurro-Urartian and the Sumerian, indicating an early contact.[37]
Characteristics
Besides their fairly consistent ergative
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.[38][39][40][41]
Cognates
Below are some Hurrian and Urartian lexical cognates, as listed by Kassian (2010).[42]
gloss | Hurrian | Urartian |
---|---|---|
all | šua=lla | šui=ni- |
to burn (tr.) | am- | am- |
come | un- | nun=a- |
to give | ar- | ar- |
hand | šu=ni | šu- |
to hear | haš- | haš- |
heart | tiša | tiš=ni |
I | iš-/šu- | iš-/šu- |
mountain | pab=ni | baba=ni |
name | tiye | ti=ni |
new | šuhe | šuhi |
not | =u | u=i, =u=ri |
one | šu=kki | šu=sini |
road | hari | hari |
to go | ušš- | uš- |
year | šawali | šali |
References
- ^ John A. C. Greppin and I. M. Diakonoff. Some Effects of the Hurro-Urartian People and Their Languages upon the Earliest Armenians.(1991) pp. 720-730. [1]
- ^ Charles Burney. Historical Dictionary of the Hittites. (2004) pp. 129. [2]
- ^ Marilyn Kelly- Buccellati. Andirons at Urkesh: New Evidence for the Hurrian Identity of the Early Trans-Caucasian Culture. (2004) [3]
- ^ Kassian, Alexei. Lexical Matches between Sumerian and Hurro-Urartian: Possible Historical Scenarios. (2014) [4]
- ^ Wilhelm, Gernot (2008). "Hurrian". In Woodard, Roger D. (ed.). The Ancient Languages of Asia Minor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 81–104.
- ^ Speiser, E. A. (1941). Introduction to Hurrian. The Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research. Vol. 20. New Haven: The American Schools of Oriental Research.
- ^ Laroche, Emmanuel (1980). Glossaire de la langue Hourrite. Revue hittite et asianique (in French). Vol. 34/35. Paris: Éditions Klincksieck.
- ^ a b Smeets, Rieks (1989). "On Hurro-Urartian as an Eastern Caucasian language". Bibliotheca Orientalis. XLVI: 260–280.
- ^ Diakonoff, I.M. (1984). The Pre-History of the Armenian People. Translated by Lori Jennings. New York: Delmar.
- ^ Starostin, Sergei A.; Diakonoff, Igor M. (1986). Hurro-Urartian as an Eastern Caucasian Language. Munich: R. Kitzinger.
- ^ Diakonoff, Igor M. (1995). "Long-Range Linguistic Relations: Cultural Transmission or Consanguinity?" (PDF). Mother Tongue. 24: 34–40.
- ^ Ivanov, Vyacheslav V. (1999). "Comparative Notes on Hurro-Urartian, Northern Caucasian and Indo-European" (PDF). UCLA Indo-European Studies. 1: 147–264. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2018-09-24. Retrieved 2016-08-18.
- ^ a b Greppin, John A.C. (2008). "The Urartian substratum in Armenian" (PDF). Bulletin of the Georgian National Academy of Sciences. 2 (2): 134–137.
- ^ Fournet, Arnaud (2013). "About the vocalic system of Armenian words of substratic origins". Archiv Orientální. 1.
- ^ Johanna Nichols (January 2003). "The Nakh Dagestanian consonant correspondences". In Dee Ann Holisky; Kevin Tuite (eds.). Current Trends in Caucasian, East European, and Inner Asian Linguistics: Papers in Honor of Howard I. Aronson. John Benjamins Publishing. p. 208. ISBN 9027247587.
- ISBN 9780199940127.
- ^ Gamkrelidze, Thomas V.; Gudava, T.E. (1998). "Caucasian Languages". Encyclopaedia Britannica.
- ^ Kallio, Petri. "XXI. Beyond Indo-European". In Klein, Jared; Joseph, Brian; Fritz, Matthew (eds.). Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics. De Gruyter Mouton. pp. 2285–2286.
- ^ Kallio, Petri. "XXI. Beyond Indo-European". In Klein, Jared; Joseph, Brian; Fritz, Matthew (eds.). Handbook of Comparative and Historical Indo-European Linguistics. De Gruyter Mouton. pp. 2285–2286.
- ^ Fournet, Arnaud; Bomhard, Allan R. (2010). "The Indo-European Elements in Hurrian". academia.edu. La Garenne Colombes, Charleston.
- ^ Fournet, Arnaud (2019). "PIE Roots in Hurrian".
- ^ a b Schneider, Thomas (2003). "Kassitisch und Hurro-Urartäisch. Ein Diskussionsbeitrag zu möglichen lexikalischen Isoglossen". Altorientalische Forschungen (in German) (30): 372–381.
- ^ Wilhelm, Gernot. 2008. Hurrian. In Woodard, Roger D. (ed.) The Ancient Languages of Asia Minor. p. 81
- ^ J. N. Postgate, "Mannäer", in RlA VII, pp. 340-42, 1987-90
- ^ Francfort H.-P., Tremblay X. Marhaši et la civilisation de l'Oxus // Iranica Antiqua, vol. XLV (2010), pp. 51–224. doi: 10.2143/IA.45.0.2047119.
- ^ Wilhelm, Gernot. 2008. Urartian. In Woodard, Roger D. (ed.) The Ancient Languages of Asia Minor. p. 105
- ^ "Urartian Material Culture As State Assemblage: An Anomaly in the Archaeology of Empire," Paul Zimansky, Page 103 of 103-115
- S2CID 163807245.
- ^ John A. C. Greppin; I. M. Diakonoff, Some Effects of the Hurro-Urartian People and Their Languages upon the Earliest Armenians, Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 111, No. 4 (Oct., 1991), pp. 720-730
- ^ Armen Petrosyan. "The Armenian Elements in the Language and Onomastics of Urartu." Association for Near Eastern and Caucasian Studies. 2010. p. 133. [5]
- ^ Archiv Orientální. 2013. About the vocalic system of Armenian words of substratic origin. (81.2:207–22) by Arnaud Fournet
- ^ Hrach K. Martirosyan. Etymological Dictionary of the Armenian Inherited Lexicon. Brill. 2009.
- ^ Hrach Martirosyan. "Origins and historical development of the Armenian language." 2014. pp. 7-8. [6]
- ^ Hrach Martirosyan (2013). "The place of Armenian in the Indo-European language family: the relationship with Greek and Indo-Iranian*" Leiden University. p. 85-86. [7]
- ^ Armen Petrosyan. "Towards the Origins of the Armenian People. The Problem of Identification of the Proto-Armenians: A Critical Review." Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies. 2007. pp. 33-34. [8]
- ^ Yervand Grekyan. "Urartian State Mythology". Yerevan Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography Press. 2018. pp. 44-45. [9]
- ^ Kassian, Alexei (2014). "Lexical Matches between Sumerian and Hurro-Urartian: Possible Historical Scenarios". Cuneiform Digital Library Journal. 2014 (4).
- ^ Wilhelm, Gernot. 2008. Hurrian. In Woodard, Roger D. (ed.) The Ancient Languages of Asia Minor. pp. 81-104
- ^ Wilhelm, Gernot. 2008. Urartian. In Woodard, Roger D. (ed.) The Ancient Languages of Asia Minor. pp. 105-123
- ^ Wegner, I. 2000. Einführung in die hurritische Sprache.
- ^ Дьяконов И. М. Языки древней Передней Азии. Издательство Наука, Москва. 1967. Часть I. Глава IV. Хурритский и урартский языки. pp. 113-165
- ^ 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.
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..