Hurrian Substrate in the Modern Ukrainian Language: Linguistic Outlines

If to concern the questions of modern Ukrainian spiritual space and, in particular, concepts of emotional, intellectual, and cultural spheres, the lists of key concepts will certainly include such words as “people”, “community”, “citizen”, “father”, “respect”, “duty”, “resilience”, “holy shrine”, “holy order”, “basis”, “praise”, “glory”, “to magnify”, “wisdom”, “village”, “home”, “gift”, “food”, “healing”, and many others. Each real Ukrainian nowadays would probably agree with this statement. However, only few intellectuals are able to elaborate on the origin of these terms. And as for the age of the above mentioned terms, only single connoisseurs would be able to correctly identify it. The same will be observed if to name less significant language units of the Ukrainian lexicon. Huge clusters of the Ukrainian-language concepts, including conceptual terms, even now, in the first quarter of the 21st century, constitute the category of orphans. However, the author has established that the origin of the above mentioned words must be searched for in the ancient Hurrian language. Thus, Ukrainian must be considered one of the direct descendants of this prehistoric language, forgotten by all and dead for three thousand years. Modern dictionaries of the Ukrainian language give such a name of this prehistoric ethnic group: Hurrians. However, we find this form of writing in Ukrainian awkward. After all, the world’s lead orientalists claim today that the lexeme “Hurrian” (this is the correct form of conveying the name of the specified people in Ukrainian) has derived from the Akkadian geographic appellation Ḫurri and its ethnic derivative Ḫurri. According to the cuneiform texts on clay tablets, discovered by archaeologists at different times, this name was well known to other peoples of the ancient Near East. The name “Hurrian” can be found in the then (prehistoric) documents of royal archives: compare the Hittite “ᵁᴿᵁḪur-ri” (used for the first time by the ruler Ḫattušiliš I) and Ugaritic “ḫry”. We should also mention Hurrian “ᴷᵁᴿḪur-ru-u-ḫé” and “ᴷᵁᴿḪur-wu-u-ḫé”; Egyptian “Ḫu-ru” (used for the first time by Pharaoh Thutmose III). The Egyptian rendering of this name was “Ḫʒ-rw”. It is also found in their written records. The Hurrian form of the name shows that the ethnonym is built on the root “ḫur-”. This can be said, incidentally, about the ethnonym “Croats”. The author will return to this topic in his next research.