Elamite language
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{{language |name=Elamite |familycolor=Isolate |states=Elamite Empire (extinct) |region=Middle East |extinct=by the end of the 4th century BCE |family=possible language isolate, but see Elamo-Dravidian languages |iso2=elx|iso3=elx}}
Elamite is an extinct language, which was spoken by the ancient Elamites. Elamite was an official language of the Persian Empire from the sixth to fourth centuries BCE. The last written records in Elamite appear about the time of the conquest of the Persian Empire by Alexander the Great.
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Elamite scripts
Over the centuries, three distinct Elamite scripts developed.
- Proto-Elamite is the oldest known Elamite script. It is first attested in 2900 BCE in Susa, the capital of Elam. The Proto-Elamite script is thought to have developed from an early Sumerian script. The Proto-Elamite script consists of about 1,000 signs and is thought to be partly logographic. Since it has not yet been deciphered, it is not known whether the language it represents is Elamite or another language.
- Old Elamite (Linear Elamite) is a syllabary derived from Proto-Elamite which was known to be used between about 2250 and 2220 BCE, although it may have been invented at an earlier date. Old Elamite has only been partially deciphered, mainly by Walther Hinz. Old Elamite consisted of about 80 symbols and was written in vertical columns running from top to bottom and left to right.
- The Elamite Cuneiform script was used from about 2500 BCE to 331 BCE, and was adapted from the Akkadian Cuneiform. The Elamite Cuneiform script consisted of about 130 symbols, far fewer than most other cuneiform scripts.
Linguistic typology
Elamite was an agglutinative language, and Elamite grammar features case agreement between nouns, called Suffixaufnahme. It also had the unusual feature of having a class of animate nouns with separate markers for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person.
Relations to other language families
Elamite is not mostly thought to be related to the neighboring Semitic languages, or Indo-European languages, and although some call Elamite the "sister" to the Sumerian language, the two languages appear to be unrelated.
David McAlpin's Elamo-Dravidian hypothesis postulates a genetic relation between Elamite and Dravidian languages, which then would have been carried from Elam to India by eastward migration.
More recently, Sergei Starostin has criticized the proposed grammatical correspondences between Elamite and Dravidian as unconvincing, and performs a mass lexical comparison of Elamite to the proposed Nostratic macrofamily (which includes Dravidian) as well as Afroasiatic and Sino-Caucasian, concluding that Elamite (unlike Sumerian) is distantly related to all three, but does not have a particularly close relationship with Dravidian. [1]
Also the most recently, there have been arguments showing the relationship between Elamite and Kurdish language, an Indo-European language classified among Iranian languages but with different origins [2].
Reference
Khačikjan, Margaret: The Elamite Language, Documenta Asiana IV, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche Istituto per gli Studi Micenei ed Egeo-Anatolici, 1998 ISBN 8887345015
Potts, Daniel T.: The archaeology of Elam: formation and transformation of an ancient Iranian state, Cambridge U., 1999 ISBN 0521564964 and ISBN 0521563585de:Elamische Sprache es:Idioma elamita eo:Elama lingvo fr:Élamite ja:エラム語 sv:Elamitiska