Parallels To Natural Languages
Russian historian Alexander Nemirovski identified an ergative suffix: in durbatuluk, the suffix –tuluk means "them all", relating to the verb's object rather than to its subject. Verb forms related to object are specific to ergative languages. Nemirovski claimed a "strong lexical similarity" to Hurrian (also an ergative language), which had recently been deciphered at the time of the writing of The Lord of the Rings, E. A. Speiser's Introduction to Hurrian appearing in 1941.
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