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Urartian or Vannic [1] is an extinct Hurro-Urartian language which was spoken by the inhabitants of the ancient kingdom of Urartu (Biaini or Biainili in Urartian), which was centered on the region around Lake Van and had its capital, Tushpa, near the site of the modern town of Van in the Armenian highlands, now in the Eastern Anatolia region of Turkey. [2]
The Marhashite personal names seems to point towards an Eastern variant of Hurrian, or another language of the Hurro-Urartian language family rather than to Indo-European or Semitic. There was a strong Hurrian influence on the Hittite culture in ancient times, so many Hurrian texts are preserved from Hittite political centres.
The Urartian language is an ergative-absolutive, agglutinative language, which belongs to neither the Semitic nor the Indo-European language families, but to the Hurro-Urartian language family, which is not known to be related to any other language or language family, despite repeated attempts to find genetic links.
Urartian was the language of Urartu, a powerful state that existed between 1000 BC or earlier and 585 BC in the area centered on Lake Van in current Turkey. The two languages are classified together as the Hurro-Urartian family. Diakonoff proposed the name Alarodian for the union of Hurro-Urartian and Northeast Caucasian.
Genetic relations of the Kassite language are unclear, although it is generally agreed that it was not Semitic; a relation with Elamite is doubtful. Relationship with or membership in the Hurro-Urartian family has been suggested, [4] based on a number of words. It is not clear whether Kassite was a distinct language in the Hurro-Urartian phylum ...
Noting that Hurro-Urartian-speaking peoples inhabited the Armenian homeland in the second millennium BC, Diakonoff identifies in Armenian a Hurro-Urartian substratum of social, cultural, and animal and plant terms such as ałaxin "slave girl" ( ← Hurr. al(l)a(e)ḫḫenne), cov "sea" ( ← Urart. ṣûǝ "(inland) sea"), ułt "camel" ( ← Hurr.
The external connections of the Hurro-Urartian languages are disputed. There exist various proposals for a genetic relationship to other language families (e.g., the Northeast Caucasian languages), but none of these are generally accepted. [60] The Hurrians adopted the Akkadian language and Cuneiform script for their
The term "Alarodian languages" was revived by I. M. Diakonoff for the proposed language family that unites the Hurro-Urartian and Northeast Caucasian languages. [8] Work by I. M. Diakonoff and Starostin (1986) asserted the connection between "Nakh-Dagestanian" (NE Caucasian) and Hurro-Urartian on the basis of comparison of their reconstruction ...