Hurrian language
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Hurrian is a conventional name for the language of the Hurrians (Khurrites), a people who entered northern Mesopotamia around 2300 BC and had mostly vanished by 1000 BC.
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Language interrelations
Hurrian is an ergative-agglutinative language which belongs to neither the Semitic nor the Indo-European language families. Together with Urartian, it constitutes the Hurro-Urartian family. Some scholars see similarities between Hurrian and the Northeast Caucasian languages, and thus place it in the Alarodian family.
Many researchers who consider Hurrian language as proto-Kurdish regard the ergativity of the Kurdish language as one of the important syntactical connections between the two languages [1]. In addition to other grammatical similarities there are many Hurrian words found in Kurdish.
Hurrian writing
The Hurrians adopted the Akkadian cuneiform script for their own language about 2000 BC. This has enabled scholars to read the Hurrian language. The number of Hurrian texts yet discovered make up only a small number. They also tended use a lot of Sumerian logograms whose Hurrian pronunciation is unknown. The understanding of the Hurrian language is therefore far from complete and many words are missing from their vocabulary.
Hurrian literature
Texts in the Hurrian language itself 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. Among the Hurrian texts from Ugarit are the oldest known instances of wrtten music.
Hypothesis about Hurrian
Some scholars, like I. J. Gelb and E. A. Speiser, believe that the Hurrians were later arrivals who assimilated or were assimilated by a Subarian substratum, and view the term "Hurrian language" as an anachronistic term for the native language of Subartu.ja:フルリ語 sv:Hurritiska