The Alarodian languages are a proposed language family that encompasses the Northeast Caucasian (Nakh–Dagestanian) languages

Northeast Caucasian languages

The Northeast Caucasian languages constitute a language family spoken in the Russian republics of Dagestan, Chechnya, Ingushetia, northern Azerbaijan, and in northeastern Georgia, as well as in diaspora populations in Russia, Turkey, and the Middle East...

 and the extinct Hurro-Urartian languages

Hurro-Urartian languages

The Hurro-Urartian languages are an extinct language family of the Ancient Near East, comprising only two known languages: Hurrian and Urartian, both of which were spoken in the Taurus mountains area.-Classification:...

.

History of the concept

The Alarodian family was first proposed by Fritz Hommel

Fritz Hommel

Fritz Hommel was a German Orientalist.Hommel was born in Ansbach, Germany. He studied in Leipzig and habilitated in 1877 in Munich, where he in 1885 became an extraordinary Professor for semitic languages....

 (1854–1936). The term comes from the name that Herodotus

Herodotus

Herodotus was an ancient Greek historian who was born in Halicarnassus, Caria and lived in the 5th century BC . He has been called the "Father of History", and was the first historian known to collect his materials systematically, test their accuracy to a certain extent and arrange them in a...

 used to refer to the kingdom of Urartu

Urartu

Urartu , corresponding to Ararat or Kingdom of Van was an Iron Age kingdom centered around Lake Van in the Armenian Highland....

. The connection between the Northeast and North-central families was based on claimed similarities in phonetics and grammar, such as sentence structure and an ergative case

Ergative case

The ergative case is the grammatical case that identifies the subject of a transitive verb in ergative-absolutive languages.-Characteristics:...

 system. However, neither of these characteristics is limited to languages of this area, and neither constitutes the extensive evidence required to demonstrate a genetic relationship. The Hurro-Urartian languages were included on the basis of grammatical and lexical similarities. However the genetic relationships between these languages is not clear.

Further research on this group of languages was later published by K. Ostir (1921, 1922), A. Svanidze

Alexander Svanidze

Alexander Semyonovich "Alyosha" Svanidze was a Georgian Old Bolshevik and historian. He was a personal friend of Joseph Stalin and a brother of Stalin’s first wife Kato. Nevertheless, Stalin had him arrested during a purge in 1937...

 (1937), Giorgi Melikishvili

Giorgi Melikishvili

Giorgi Melikishvili was a Georgian historian known for his fundamental works in the history of Georgia, Caucasia and the Middle East. He earned an international recognition for his research of Urartu....

 (1965), I.M. Diakonoff and S.A. Starostin (1986).

Literature

• K. Ostir. Beiträge zur Alarodischen Sprachwissenschaft (a monograph), I, 1921 (in German)
• K. Ostir. Alarodische Sprachwissenschaft (a monograph), 1922 (in German)
• A. Svanidze. "Materials for history of Alarodian tribes" (a monograph), Tbilisi, 1937 (in Russian)
• G.A. Melikishvili. Questions of the oldest population of Georgia, Caucasus and the Near East (a monograph), Tbilisi, 1965 (in Georgian, Russian summary)
• I. Diakonoff, S. Starostin. "Huro-Urartian as an Eastern Caucasian Language".- Münchener Studien zur Sprachwissenschaft, Beiheft, N.F., 12, 1986 (in English)
• Alarodian languages.- Encyclopedia "Sakartvelo", vol. I, Tbilisi, 1997, pp. 90 (in Georgian)

External links

• Comparative Notes on Hurro-Urartian, Northern Caucasian and Indo-European by V. V. Ivanov