Urartian language
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Urartian | ||
|---|---|---|
| Spoken in: | Northeastern Anatolia | |
| Language extinction: | ? | |
| Language family: | Hurro-Urartian Urartian | |
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | none | |
| ISO 639-2: | mis | |
| ISO/FDIS 639-3: | xur | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-based pronunciation key. | ||
Urartian is the conventional name for the language spoken by the inhabitants of the ancient kingdom of Urartu in Northeast Anatolia (present-day Turkey), in the region of Lake Van.
Urartian was an agglutinative language, which belongs to neither the Semitic nor the Indo-European families but to the Hurro-Urartian family. It survives in many inscriptions found in the area of the Urartu kingdom, written in the Assyrian cuneiform script. The Urartians also possessed a native hieroglyphic script, but in later Urartu this script was restricted to use in accounting and religion.
Based on linguistic similarities with Northeast Caucasian languages, some scholars place it and the closely related Hurrian language in the Alarodian family. The possibility of a connection between Urartian and the modern Armenian language is unlikely, given that Armenian is a recognisably Indo-European language.
Reference
section on Urartian in Walker, C. B. F. 'Cuneiform' in, "Reading the Past" (1996). Published by British Museum Press, ISBN 0-7141-8077-7
Friedrich, J. (1969). "Urartäisch" in Handbuch der Orientalistik I, ii, 1-2, Leiden: 31-53.
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de:Urartäische Sprache ja:ウラルトゥ語 no:Urartisk språk ru:Урартский язык
