Urartian Sibilants in Armenian

Abstract

It is long known that Urartian has left certain loan words in Classical Armenian. Recent linguistic evidence points to the likelihood that the Urartians came westward from Central Asia after the Hurrians, passing south of the Caspian Sea but north of the area influenced by the Assyrians, and settled in the Sub-Caucasus; later, driven out in the mid first millennium by the Armenians and perhaps the Persians, the Urartians moved north to the South Caucasus, where their language now remains, becoming Proto-Lezgian, from which the modern Lezgian languages have evolved. This is the same as the change of Latin to Proto-Romance. Evidence showing that Urartian (and Hurrian) are related to the languages of the North-East Caucasus might be overstated. But the supposition that we can re-construct Proto-Lezgian and from there posit genetic parallels with Urartian remains an appealing consideration. © 2010 Bull. Georg. Natl. Acad. Sci.