Hurro-Urartian languages
It is often assumed that the Hurro-Urartian languages, or a pre-split Proto-Hurro-Urartian language, were originally spoken by people of the Kura-Araxes culture which existed in Eastern Anatolia, the Caucasus, northwestern Iran and northern Levant from the late 5th millennium BC to late 3rd millennium BC.
[1][2][3][4] While the genetic relation between Hurrian and Urartian is undisputed, the wider connections of Hurro-Urartian to other language families are controversial.
[22] Francfort and Tremblay[25] on the basis of the Akkadian textual and archaeological evidence, proposed to identify the kingdom of Marhashi and Ancient Margiana.
Urartian is attested from the late 9th century BC to the late 7th century BC as the official written language of the state of Urartu and was probably spoken by the majority of the population in the mountainous areas around Lake Van and the upper Zab valley.
[26] Scholars, such as Paul Zimansky, contend that Urartian was only spoken by a small ruling class and was not the primary language of the majority of the population.
[28][29][13] More recent scholarship by Arnaud Fournet, Hrach Martirosyan, Armen Petrosyan, and others has proposed more extensive contacts between the languages, including vocabulary, grammar, parts of speech, and proper nouns loaned into Armenian, such as Urartian "eue" ("and"), attested in the earliest Urartian texts (compare to Armenian "yev" (և, եվ), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *h₁epi).
[37] Besides their fairly consistent ergative alignment and their generally agglutinative morphology, despite a number of not entirely predictable morpheme mergers, Hurrian and Urartian are both characterized by the use of suffixes in their derivational and inflectional morphology, including ten to fifteen grammatical cases, and postpositions in syntax.
In both languages, nouns can receive a peculiar "anaphoric suffix" comparable, albeit apparently not identical, to a definite article.
In verbs, the type of valency, intransitive vs transitive, is signalled by a special suffix, the so-called "class marker".
In the phonology, written Hurrian only seems to distinguish a single series of phonemic obstruents without any contrastive phonation distinctions, the variation in voicing, though visible in the script, was allophonic.
Hurrian indicates the plural of nouns through a special suffix -až-, which only survives in fossilized form merged into some case endings in Urartian.
In general, the profusion of freely moving pronominal and conjunctional clitics that characterize Hurrian, especially that of the Mitanni letter, has few parallels in Urartian.
