5 articles
Elamite language
Elamite, also called Susian, is an extinct language isolate spoken in ancient southwestern Iran, written in cuneiform from about 2300 B.C. and used officially by the Achaemenids.
Hurro-Urartian languages
Hurro-Urartian is an extinct Ancient Near East language family of two languages, Hurrian and Urartian, attested in cuneiform from the late third to first millennium BCE; agglutinative, ergative, and generally treated as an isolate.
Pre-Greek substrate
Pre-Greek substrate: the unattested language of Greece and the Aegean before Greek, known only through loanwords in Ancient Greek lacking Indo-European etymology; studied over 120 years under Pelasgian, Anatolian-Luwian, Aegean (Beekes), and Kartvelian theories.
Sumerian language
Sumerian (Emegir) is an extinct, ergative, agglutinative language isolate of southern Mesopotamia (Iraq), written in cuneiform from c. 3400-3300 BCE, spoken until about 1900 BCE, then used liturgically until the 1st century CE.
Tyrsenian languages
Tyrsenian (Tyrrhenian) is a proposed extinct language family of Etruscan, Rhaetic, and Lemnian, with Camunic disputed, proposed by Helmut Rix in 1998 for pre-Indo-European languages of Italy, the Alps, and Lemnos.