The Indo-European Elements in Hurrian

26 2. Phonology, Writing Systems, Texts
- in I 87 , I 115 , II 21 , II 24 , II 61 , II 68 ,
III 9 ,
- in I 81 , I 81 , II 58 , II 70 ,
II 86 , II 104 ,
III 103 ,
Is this corpus a reason to think and are anything but graphic variants? The
reasons not to believe are: (1) never appears initially; (2) some items seem to be variants
of the same words: Mit. II 68 = Mit. II 70 ; Mit. I
87 = Mit. I 81 . There is no basis for a contrast between */Ku/ and
**/Ko/. The signs and are variants.
Another claim of that theory is that and should contrast. and would
stand for *[k/gi] and *[k/ge]. 59 The instances of and in the Mitanni letter are:
a) Initial position:
- in I 96 , II 87 , II 103 ,
II 114 ,
- in II 7 < I Gi-li-i-an>, II 16 , II 20 ,
II 22 , I 53 , II 54 ,
II 63 , III 18 ,
b) Non-initial position:
- , always geminate, in I 97 , II 16 , II 52 ,
II 103 , III 3 ,
- , never geminate, in I 101 < d Ši-mi-i-gi-[...]>, I 105 < d Ši-mi-i-gi-ni-e-wə>, I
106 < d Ši-mi-i-gi-níš>,
What are the indications that and may contrast? What is the difference
between and , which appears several times in the letter? And
word-internally, we can see that is never geminate and is always geminate. There is
no basis for a contrast between */Ki/ and **/Ke/.
The theory about the Mitanni letter having a “special” cuneiform convention is a fiction.
The distributional features of the cuneiform signs conflict with this approach.
59 Cf. Wilhelm 2004a and Bush 1964:22.