Hurrian language
Hurrian is an extinct Hurro-Urartian language spoken by the Hurrians, 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 modern-day Syria.
Classification
Hurrian is closely related to Urartian, the language of the ancient kingdom of Urartu. Together they constitute the Hurro-Urartian language family. The external connections of the Hurro-Urartian languages are disputed. There exist various proposals for a genetic relationship to other language families. It has also been speculated that it is related to "Sino-Caucasian". However, none of these proposals are generally accepted.History
The earliest Hurrian text fragments consist of lists of names and places from the end of the third millennium BC. The first full texts date to the reign of King Tish-atal of Urkesh, at the start of the second millennium BC, and were found on a stone tablet accompanying the Hurrian foundation pegs known as the "Urkish lions". Archeologists have discovered the texts of numerous spells, incantations, prophecies and letters at sites including Hattusha, Mari, Tuttul, Babylon, Ugarit and others. Early study of the language, however, was entirely based on the Mitanni letter, found in 1887 at Amarna in Egypt, written by the Hurrian King Tushratta to the Pharaoh Amenhotep III. The Hurro-Urartian relation was recognized as early as 1890 by Sayce and Jensen. After the fall of the Akkadian Empire, Hurrians began to settle in northern Syria, and by 1725 BC they constituted a sizable portion of the population of Yamhad. The presence of a large Hurrian population brought Hurrian culture and religion to Aleppo, as evidenced by the existence of certain religious festivals that bear Hurrian names.File:Foundation tablet, dedication to God Nergal by Hurrian king Atalshen, king of Urkish and Nawar, Habur Bassin, circa 2000 BC Louvre Museum AO 5678.jpg|thumb|upright=1.5|Foundation tablet with a dedication to the god Nergal by the Hurrian king Atalshen, king of Urkish and Nawar, Habur Bassin, circa 2000 BC. The text on the tablet reads:
Of Nergal the lord of Hawalum, Atal-shen, the caring shepherd, the king of Urkesh and Nawar, the son of Sadar-mat the king, is the builder of the temple of Nergal, the one who overcomes opposition. Let Shamash and Ishtar destroy the seeds of whoever removes this tablet. Shaum-shen is the craftsman.
In the thirteenth century BC, invasions from the west by the Hittites and from the south by the Assyrians brought the end of the Mitanni empire, which was divided between the two conquering powers. In the following century, attacks by the Sea Peoples brought a swift end to the last vestiges of the Hurrian language. It is around this time that other languages, such as the Hittite language and the Ugaritic language, also became extinct, in what is known as the Bronze Age collapse. In the texts of these languages, as well as those of Akkadian or Urartian, many Hurrian names and places can be found.
Renewed interest in Hurrian was triggered by texts discovered in Boğazköy in the 1910s and Ugarit in the 1930s. In 1941, Speiser published the first comprehensive grammar of Hurrian. Since the 1980s, the Nuzi corpus from the archive of Šilwa-Teššup 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.
Dialects
The Hurrian of the Mitanni letter differs significantly from that used in the texts at Hattusha and other Hittite centers, as well as from earlier Hurrian texts from various locations. The non-Mitanni letter varieties, while not entirely homogeneous, are commonly subsumed under the designation Old Hurrian. Whereas in Mitanni the vowel pairs i/''e and u''/o are differentiated, in the Hattusha dialect they have merged into i and u, respectively. There are also differences in morphology, some of which are mentioned in the course of the exposition below. Nonetheless, it is clear that these represent dialects of one language. Another Hurrian dialect is likely represented in several texts from Ugarit, but they are so poorly preserved that little can be said about them, except that spelling patterns used elsewhere to represent Hurrian phonemes are virtually ignored in them. There was also a Hurrian-Akkadian creole, called Nuzi, spoken in the Mitanni provincial capital of Arrapha.Phonology
Consonants
As can be seen from the table, Hurrian did not possess a voiced-voiceless distinction. There is no voiced consonant with an unvoiced counterpart, nor vice versa. However, based on evidence from the cuneiform script, there seem to have been voiced allophones of consonants other than /ts/, which occurred in certain environments: between two voiced phonemes, and, surprisingly, also word-finally. Sometimes a voiced consonant is written in these situations, i.e. b, d, g, v or ž, and, very rarely, ǧ. All consonants except /w/ and /j/ can be long or short. The long consonants occur only between vowels. In the cuneiform, as in the Latin transcription, geminated consonants are indicated by doubling the corresponding symbol, so ...VC-CV... Short consonants are written ...V-CV..., for example mānnatta is written ma-a-an-na-at-ta.Since /f/ was not found in the Sumerian cuneiform script, the Hurrians used the symbols representing /p/, /b/ or /w/. An /f/ can be recognised in words where this transcription varies from text to text. In cases where a word occurs only once, with a p, it cannot be known if it was originally meant to represent a /p/ or an /f/. In final syllables containing a, /f/ becomes diphthongised to /u/, e.g. tānōšau ) "I did". /s/ is traditionally transcribed by /š/, because the cuneiform script adapted the sign indicating /š/ for this phoneme. /ts/ is regularly transcribed by z, and /x/ by ḫ or h. In Hurrian, /r/ and /l/ do not occur at the beginning of a word.
Vowels
Vowels, just like consonants, can be either long or short. In the cuneiform script, this is indicated by placing an additional vowel symbol between the CV and VC syllables, giving CV-V-VC. Short vowels are indicated by a simple CV-VC pairing. In the Latin transcription, long vowels are indicated with a macron, ā, ē, ī, ō, and ū. For /o/, which is absent in the Sumerian script, the sign for U is used, whereas /u/ is represented by Ú.Grammar
Word derivation
While Hurrian could not combine multiple stems to form new stems, a large number of suffixes could be attached to existing stems to form new words. For example, attardi from attai, futki from fut, aštohhe from ašti. Hurrian also provided many verbal suffixes, which often changed the valency of the verb they modify.Morphology
Nominal morphology
The nominal morphology of Hurrian employs numerous suffixes and/or enclitics, which always follow a certain order. The resulting "morpheme chain" is as follows:Note: indicates morphemes added through Suffixaufnahme, described below.These elements are not all obligatory, and in fact a noun can occur as a single root followed by nothing except zero-suffixes for case and number. Despite the general agglutinative structure of the language, the plural marker merges with the case morphemes in ways which do not seem to be entirely predictable, so singular and plural forms of the case endings are usually listed separately. The anaphoric marker is formally identical to the article and anchors the Suffixaufnahme suffixes and. While the absolutive pronoun clitics attached to a noun are not necessarily connected to it syntactically, typically designating the object or intransitive subject of a nearby verb, the third plural pronoun clitic -lla can be used to signal the plural of the host noun in the absolutive.
Thematic vowels
Almost all Hurrian nouns end in a vowel, known as a thematic vowel or stem vowel. This vowel will always appear on the word, and will not switch between types. Most nouns end with /i/; a few end with /a/ and /e/. As well, in texts from Nuzi, stems of /u/ are found, mainly on non-Hurrian names and a few Hurrian ones.This stem-final vowel disappears when certain endings are attached to it, such as case endings that begin with a vowel, certain derivational suffixes, or the article suffix. Examples: kāz-ōš from kāzi, awarra from awari.
A minority of Hurrian noun roots have athematic stem vowels, such as šen in the forms šena and -šenni, mad, and muž. Some names of gods, heroes, persons, and places are also athematic, e.g. Teššob, Gilgaamiž, Hurriž. These nouns seem to occur more frequently in the earliest Hurrian texts.
Note: This type of thematic stem vowel is completely different in function to Indo-European stem vowels. For a discussion of those, see here and here.
Case and number
Hurrian has 13 cases in its system of declension. One of these, the equative case, has a different form in both of the main dialects. In Hattusha and Mari, the usual ending is -oš, termed equative I, whereas in the Mitanni letter we find the form -nna, called equative II. Another case, the so-called 'e-case', is very rare, and carries a genitive or allative meaning.Like many languages in the region, Hurrian is an ergative language, which means that the same case is used for the subject of an intransitive verb as for the object of a transitive one; this case is called the absolutive. For the subject of a transitive verb, however, the ergative case is used. Hurrian has two numbers, singular and plural. The following table outlines the case endings.
| Case | Singular | Plural |
| Absolutive | -Ø | -Ø, -lla |
| Ergative | -š | -šuš |
| Genitive | -fe, -we | -še |
| Dative | -fa, -wa | -ša |
| Essive | -a | -ša, -a |
| Allative | -ta | -šta |
| Ablative | -tan | -štan |
| Instrumental | -ae | unattested |
| Ablative-Instrumental | -n, -ne | -šani, -šane |
| Comitative | -ra | -šura |
| Associative | -nn | unattested šunn |
| Equative I | -ōš | unattested |
| Equative II | -nna | -šunna |
| 'e-Case' | -ē | unattested |
In certain phonological environments, these endings can vary. The f of the genitive and dative endings merges with a preceding p or t giving pp and tt respectively, e.g. Teššuppe, Hepat-te. The associative can be combined with the instrumental, as in šēna-nn-ae, meaning 'brotherly'.
The so-called essive case can convey the meaning "as" and a condition, but also to express direction, the aim of a demand, the transition from one condition to another, the direct object in antipassive constructions, and, in the variety of Nuzi, also the dative.