Re: Mitanni and Matsya

On Sat, 5 Apr 2008 12:26:46 +0200, "fournet.arnaud"
<fournet.arnaud@...> wrote:

>>>Cuneiform enables wa : wa-hri, wa-ndi etc
>>>
>>>We have : uruwana- and a-ru-na
>>>uru and a are not a possible match for va-
>>>There is no reason they should not write wa
>>>if it was /va/ or /wa/ when they could write wa.
>>
>> Well, they couldn't write <wa> (PI) in initial poition,
>> because that was pronounced /fa/ (/fe/, /fi/, /fo/, /fu/) in
>> Hurrian.
>>
>> They might've written it ú-a.
>==============
>
>On account of what wa is impossible,
>
>Laroche, Glossaire Hourrite,
>wahri "true, faithfull" PIE werH1
>wali "worm"
>wandi "right side"

Those words, if they have /wa-/, are written with initial
ú-a-.

>Who invented that wa is /fa/ ?

The cuneiform sign PI (= GES^TU), Hittite syllabic value
/wa/, is used in the Hurrian texts to render initial /fV-/
and medial /vV/. For /af/ ~ /av/, /ef/ ~ /ev/ ~ /if/ ~ /iv/
and /of/ ~ /ov/ ~ /uf/ ~ /uv/ the aigns AB, IB and UB are
used. See Daniels/Bright "The World's Writing Systems", pp.
61-63.

Hurrian distinguished between /o/ (written U) and /u/
(written Ú, i.e. U2). For /wV/, the writing Ú-V[C] was
used, and for /Vw/ [C]V-Ú.

>>>==============
>>>I consider that a single voiced grapheme
>>>stands for glottalized in Hurri
>>>Indara (not intara) is [int?ara]
>>
>> The Mitanni Hurrian text writes it <in-tar> (<in-da-ra> in
>> the Hittite version). Neither Hurrian nor Hittite do in fact
>> distinguish between voiced and voiceless cuneiform graphemes
>> (<ta> equals <da>), but only between single and geminate
>> (<at-ta>/<at-da> does not equal <a-ta>/<a-da>).
>>
>> The Mitanni syllabary even does away with the orthographic
>> distinction completely, and standardizes on a single
>> cuneiform CV sign (whether originally voiced or voiceless).
>> Therefore, Mitanni Hurrian has only <ta>, never <da>.
>>
>> =======================
>
>Who invented that ?

There aren't many good online overviews on the current state
of our knowledge on the Hurrian language. The German
edition of Wikipedia (unlike the English one) offers a
decent introduction:

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurritische_Sprache

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
miguelc@...