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To: blam

They were the forebears of the Russians.


3 posted on 06/25/2008 6:29:35 PM PDT by Tribune7 (How is inflicting pain and death on an innocent, helpless human being for profit, moral?)
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To: Tribune7; muawiyah

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurrians#Language

The Hurrians spoke an ergative-agglutinative language, conventionally called Hurrian, unrelated to neighboring Semitic or Indo-European languages, but clearly related to Urartian — a language spoken about a millennium later in northeastern Anatolia — and possibly, very distantly, to the present-day Northeast Caucasian languages. Some scholars relate the Hurrian language also to Georgian and its associated South Caucasian or Kartvelian languages.[3] Similarities to Hurrian words have also been suggested in neighboring languages such as Armenian.[4][5] It is believed by some scholars that the Hurrians arrived in the Caucasus around 2700 BC.[6]

The Hurrians adopted the Akkadian cuneiform script for their own language about 2000 BC. This has enabled scholars to read the Hurrian language. Because the number of Hurrian texts discovered is small, and because many Sumerian logograms are used, masking the phonetic shapes of the Hurrian words they represent, understanding of the Hurrian language is far from complete and many words are missing from their vocabulary.

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 Hattusas in 1983.

According to medieval Islamic sources, the language spoken by Hurrian tribes that primarily belonged to the Yazdanism sect of religious belief spoke a Proto-Pehlewani language.[7] The Hurrian influence on the modern Kurdish language is still evident in its ergativic grammatical structure and in its toponyms.[8]


17 posted on 06/25/2008 7:21:29 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/_________________________Profile updated Friday, May 30, 2008)
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To: Tribune7
They were the forebears of the Russians.

Nice play on words; but it's also partly true.

22 posted on 06/25/2008 8:11:20 PM PDT by Migraine (Diversity is great (until it happens to YOU)...)
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