Hurrian. (the language)

if I were to ask you to picture an ancient civilization Rome Greece Egypt maybe even Carthage or Persia might come to mind but there's a whole world of ancient languages that have seemingly been erased from history one of them being hurrian but who were the hurrians why do we know so little about them and what was their language like spoken at the intersection of Iran Iraq and Tura huran was used from the last century of the third millennium BC to the late 2 millennium BC by the state of matani due to the lack of written sources for a long time the civilization of matani and the hurrian language remained forgotten but upon discovering the matani letter in Amana Egypt in 1887 amazu AR lives at the site of hatus the former hitti capital interest in the language was reignited the matani letter was part of the Amana letters an episode of diplomatic correspondence between ancient Egypt and its neighbors this particular letter the only one written in huran details the marriage between the hurrian princess to do hia to the Egyptian a man hadt the third okay but what was the language like well in terms of morphology we know huran was a glutena with some fusional elements employing a large number of suffixes with modified stems the language had osv word order although since hurrian has ergative absolutive alignment instead of the nominative accusative alignment that we're used to in English this is often described as being more like goal agent action and isn't really a hard and fast rule anyway huran exhibits suffix alame or case stacking a formation which necessitates specific affixes in set positions in relation to the roots since this feature is shared with the calian languages of the Caucasus some have argued for a connection although at present this can't be proven the roote was often followed by a root extension essentially a derivational suffix as seen below with the causative facta and reflexive SL iterative with it being frequent to observe vow Harmony in these chains as for the morphology most roots of and hurrian consisted of a single unchanging syllable with their also existing reduplicated Roots added to this was a thematic vowel either an i e or even a in huran there existed the following cases the absolutive ergative genitive dative directive ablative comitative equative adverbial equ instrumental locative instrumental essive and adverbial which are summarized [Music] here with huran verbs intransitive and transitive verbs are treated quite differently while transitive verbs behave as you might expect intransitives were treated as participles and thus more like nouns therefore because person was marked through inic pronouns that is pronouns not directly connected to a given word the person marker could appear anywhere in the sentence there were three tenses the present preterit and future SL imperfect as well as an entirely different conjugation system for the negative forms and like like with the nouns heran utilized the slot system where different suffixes had to go in set positions in relation to the roots there were also non-indicative forms like the voluna imperative and Jive although they're not yet fully understood most adjectives apart from these ones will form through the addition of derivational suffix es like ha SE and KN with a similar system being used for forming abstract nouns numerals suitability ethnicities and job titles this was the phology although something to note is that there wasn't really a distinction between voiced and unvoiced consonants with short and long variations existing and these were the [Music] vowels so that you can get a real taste of the language here's a short sample from the matani letter like many civilizations in Mesopotamia at the time the hurrians used a modified system of C form which was more cabic and used far less logograms than other forms of the writing system and to a lesser extent the language used the ugaritic alphabetic scripts and abjad with some cabic elements in the 13th century BC crippled by both hitte attacks from the North and the Assyrians at their southern border the hurrian state of matani was eventually brought to its knees in 1200 BC by the Bronze Age collapse after after which the language gradually faded out the exact date though is hard to pinpoint due to scarcity of sources anyway that's it for this week as you found this video informative consider leaving a like subscribing and tune in for another episode next week [Music] [Music]

Channel: The Milu Project

Views: 2,457

Keywords: language, persia, ancient mesopotamia, mesopotamian civilisation, hurrian, hurrian language, mitanni, ancient language spoken, ancient language, hurrian language spoken, ancient iraq, ancient iran, ancient turkey, ancient syria

Id: zutYg8MMwrY

Length: 7min 8sec (428 seconds)

Published: Fri May 31 2024