Language
The Hurrians spoke an ergative-agglutinative language, conventionally called Hurrian, (unrelated to neighbouring Semitic or Indo-European languages), which may have been a Language Isolate. The Iron Age Urartian language is closely related to or a direct descendant of Hurrian. Several notable Russian linguists, such as S. A. Starostin and V. V. Ivanov, have claimed that the Hurrian and the Hattic were related to the Northeast Caucasian languages.
From the 21st Century BC through to the late 18th Century BC, Assyria controlled colonies in Anatolia, and the Hurrians, like the Hattians, adopted the Assyrian Akkadian cuneiform script for their own language about 2000 BCE. Texts in the Hurrian language have been found at Hattusa, Ugarit (Ras Shamra), as well as one of the longest of the Amarna letters, 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 Hattusa in 1983.
Read more about this topic: Hurrian Deities
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“Man acts as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man.”
—Martin Heidegger (1889–1976)
“It is impossible to dissociate language from science or science from language, because every natural science always involves three things: the sequence of phenomena on which the science is based; the abstract concepts which call these phenomena to mind; and the words in which the concepts are expressed. To call forth a concept, a word is needed; to portray a phenomenon, a concept is needed. All three mirror one and the same reality.”
—Antoine Lavoisier (1743–1794)
“It’s not that we want the political jobs themselves ... but they seem to be the only language the men understand. We don’t really want these $200 a year jobs. But the average man doesn’t understand working for a cause.”
—Jennie Carolyn Van Ness (b. c. 1890–?)