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Urartian, Vannic, and (in older literature) Chaldean (''Khaldian'', or ''Haldian'') are conventional names for the language spoken by the inhabitants of the ancient kingdom of Urartu that was located in the region of Lake Van, with its capital near the site of the modern town of Van, in the Armenian Highland, modern-day Eastern Anatolia region of Turkey.〔People of Ancient Assyria: Their Inscriptions and Correspondence - Page 89 by Jørgen Laessøe〕 It was probably spoken by the majority of the population around Lake Van and in the areas along the upper Zab valley.〔Wilhelm, Gernot. 2008. Urartian. In Woodard, Roger D. (ed.) The Ancient Languages of Asia Minor. P.105. "Neither its geographical origin can be conclusively determined, nor the area where Urartian was spoken by a majority of the population. It was probably dominant in the mountainous areas along the upper Zab Valley and around Lake Van."〕 First attested in the 9th century BCE, Urartian ceased to be written after the fall of the Urartian state in 585 BCE, and presumably it became extinct due to the fall of Urartu.〔Wilhelm, Gernot. 2008. Hurrian. In Woodard, Roger D. (ed.) The Ancient Languages of Asia Minor. P.106: "We do not know when the language became extinct, but it is likely that the collapse of what had survived of the empire until the end of the seventh or the beginning of the sixth century BCE caused the language to disappear."〕 It must have been replaced by an early form of Armenian,〔Clackson, James P. T. 2008. Classical Armenian. In: The languages of Asia Minor (ed. R. D. Woodard). P.125. "Speakers of Armenian appear to have replaced an earlier population of Urartian speakers (see Ch. 10) in the mountainous region of Eastern Anatolia. ... We have no record of the Armenian language before the fifth century AD."〕 perhaps during the period of Achaemenid Persian rule,〔J.Lendering, Urartu/Armenia article by Jona Lendering ()〕 although it is only in the fifth century CE that the first written examples of Armenian appear.〔Clackson, James P. T. 2008. Classical Armenian. In: The languages of Asia Minor (ed. R. D. Woodard). P.125. "The extralinguistic facts relevant to the prehistory of the Armenian people are also obscure. Speakers of Armenian appear to have replaced an earlier population of Urartian speakers (see Ch. 10) in the mountainous region of Eastern Anatolia. The name Armenia first occurs in the Old Persian inscriptions at Bīsotūn dated to c. 520 BCE (but note that the Armenians use the ethnonym hay (hayk‘ ) to refer to themselves). We have no record of the Armenian language before the fifth century CE. The Old Persian, Greek, and Roman sources do mention a number of prominent Armenians by name, but unfortunately the majority of these names are Iranian in origin, for example, Dādrši- (in Darius’ Bīsotūn inscription), Tigranes, and Tiridates. Other names are either Urartian (Haldita- in the Bīsotūn inscription) or obscure and unknown in literate times in Armenia (Araxa- in the Bīsotūn inscription)."〕 ==Classification== Urartian was an ergative, agglutinative language, which belongs to neither the Semitic nor the Indo-European families but to the Hurro-Urartian family (whose only other known member is Hurrian).〔The Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East - Page 292 by Eric M. Meyers, American Schools of Oriental Research〕 However, according to recent researchs about Urartu language, the connection of Urartu language to North-East Caucasian languages (such as Chechen-Ingush, Lezgi, Tabassaran, Avar) is quite certain.〔Vyacheslav V. Ivanov, Comparative Notes on Hurro-Urartian, Northern Caucasian and Indo-European, http://www.pies.ucla.edu/IESV/1/VVI_Horse.pdf〕〔Sergei A. Starostin: Igor M. Diakonoff, Hurro-Urartian as an Eastern Caucasian Language. Munich: R. Kitzinger, 1986.〕〔Greppin, JAC, The Urartian Substratum in Armenian, http://www.science.org.ge/2-2/Grepin.pdf〕 It survives in many inscriptions found in the area of the Urartu kingdom, written in the Assyrian cuneiform script. There have been claims〔Jeffrey J. Klein, Urartian Hieroglyphic Inscriptions from Altintepe, Anatolian Studies, Vol. 24, (1974), 77-94〕 of a separate autochthonous script of "Urartian hieroglyphs" but these remain unsubstantiated. Urartian is closely related to Hurrian, a somewhat better documented language attested for an earlier, non-overlapping period, approximately from 2000 BCE to 1200 BCE (written by native speakers until about 1350 BCE). The two languages must have developed quite independently from approximately 2000 BCE onwards.〔Wilhelm 1982: 5〕〔Wilhelm, Gernot. 2008. Hurrian. In Woodard, Roger D. (ed.) The Ancient Languages of Asia Minor. P.105〕 Although Urartian is not a direct continuation of any of the attested dialects of Hurrian,〔Academic American Encyclopedia - Page 198〕 many of its features are best explained as innovative developments with respect to Hurrian as we know it from the preceding millennium. The closeness holds especially true of the so-called Old Hurrian dialect, known above all from Hurro-Hittite bilingual texts. Igor Diakonoff and others have suggested ties between the Hurro-Urartian languages and the Northeastern Caucasian languages.〔The Pre-history of the Armenian People. I. M. Diakonoff〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Urartian language」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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