Last year Dr Fatma Kaynar checked out some rituals current at Kizzuwadna from the Middle-Hittite stratum. This is the 1500s BC, after the raid on the Near East which did for Babylon and Ebla. This should be about when the region's literate class shifted from Hurrian to Luwian.
The Šalašu ritual was Hurrian, which was translated into scribal-Knesian for the Hattusa palace at least in part. Knesian as of 2019 AD was/is a very well-understood language, especially in cuneiform peppered as it is with scribal ideograms common to all the Bronze Age. Somewhat infamously the Hittite palace rarely wrote out their word for "woman"; they used the MUNUS sumerogram (I recall in the 1980s nobody knew what the actual Knesian was).
Based on the Hittite portions, Šalašu was a MUNUS-exorcist. The Hittites imported these to Hattusa like the Romans would import Etruscans. In this light, as the Tuscan menfolk weren't speaking much Rasnal as of 100 BC; so, the few Kizzuwadnans still speaking Hurri in 1500 BC might have been heathen witches in remote villages.
Dr MUNUS-Kaynar notes that the Hurri portions of the ritual are incomprehensible without the Hittite help. She muses that this might not have been common Hurri, but Kizzuwadna dialect to such a remove that it be another language in a "Horite" (and not Urartian) family. Mitannians in the east, speaking a standard Hurri in the 1500s, would not have understood this western ritual.
The later Kuwatalla ritual, is also MUNUS-driven and mainly an exorcism - but Luwian. This one bears a Hurri loanword, although an understandable one so not limited to Kizzuwadna. It also has some Semitic - the word halal, and not Akkadian "ellum".
Kaynar did not notice where Šalašu spoke any Luwian nor anything in the wider Semitic family, e.g. Eblaitic. I don't either.
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