I have just read, with great interest, the manuscript by Arnaud Fournet and Allan Bomhard entitled The Indo-European Elements in Hurrian.  It is available as a PDF download from the Russian Nostratic website.  For some reason (never satisfactorily explained), the work deals only with Hurrian, mostly ignoring the closely related Urartian.  Also not discussed is the alternative theory put forth by Diakonoff and Starostin that sees Hurro-Urartian as a Northeast Caucasian language.  These omissions are disturbing.  I would like to offer a few comments about this work.

 

My overall impression is that the work is a piece of inferior scholarship, and that is being generous.  It is clear from the work that two authors were involved, and it is not too difficult to figure out who did what.  The chapter dealing with phonology, writing systems, and texts could only have been written by Fournet.  This is evident from the writing style and English usage as well as from the ideas expressed.  The ideas about Hurrian phonology are so far removed from what has come to be the accepted views (see Speiser 1941, Wegner 2007, and Wilhelm 2004a cited in the references at the end of the work for details) that they can only be described as “crackpot”.  Highly problematic interpretations are put forth as though they were standard points of view, without a single shred of credible evidence to back them up.  It may be likened in scholarship to the kind of term paper one receives from undergraduate students who have just come off a weekend of heavy partying, drinking, and drugging.

 

The three chapters dealing with morphology do, in fact, appear to be a joint effort.  They are much more in agreement with established views (see again, the works cited above for details about Hurrian), especially on the Indo-European side.  The attempt to compare Hurrian morphology with that of Proto-Indo-European does contain some interesting ideas.  However, what is disturbing is the fact that counter-evidence is totally ignored, as is the evidence marshaled by Diakonoff and Starostin to support their alternative theory. 

 

The Hurrian vocabulary is based mostly on the work of Laroche, with some additions taken from other sources.  As written, it can pass muster.

 

The chapter on the comparison of the lexicons of Hurrian and Indo-European could only have been prepared by Bomhard, since it is similar to other work he has authored.  This chapter has to be judged substandard compared to other work that Bomhard has produced.  It shows that he has an excellent understanding of the Indo-European data but not a good handle on the Hurrian.  At best, the data examined in this chapter points to possible contact between Hurrian and one or more Indo-European languages.  Moreover, when when digs deeply into the rest of the work, one can see that Bomhard does not use Fournet's theories regarding Hurrian phonology in presenting the Hurrian lexical data.  Does this point to disagreement between the two authors?  Was a subtle rejection of Fournet's theories built into the work itself?

 

Hurrian is unambiguously NOT an Indo-European daughter language.  Nor can we say, on the basis of this work, that Hurrian and Indo-European are genetically related in any way, shape, or form.

 

For more information, see the devastating review of this work by Alexei Kassian in Journal of Language Relationship, issue 4 (2010), pp. 199-206.  The rebuttal (prepared mostly, it seems, by Fournet), which appeared in the next issue of the same journal, is more of a “rant” than a genuine rebuttal.