Ubykh language
Encyclopedia
Ubykh or Ubyx is an extinct language
of the Northwestern Caucasian group
, spoken by the Ubykh people
(who originally lived along the eastern coast of the Black Sea
before migrating en masse to Turkey in the 1860s). The language's last native speaker, Tevfik Esenç
, died in 1992.
The Ubykh language is ergative
and agglutinative, with polypersonal
verbal agreement and a very large number of distinct consonants, but only two distinct vowels. With around eighty consonants it may have been the language with the most consonants in the world.
The name Ubykh is derived from /wəbəx/, its name in the Abdzakh Adyghe
(Circassian) language. It is known in linguistic
literature by many names: variants of Ubykh, such as Ubikh, Ubıh (Turkish
) and Oubykh (French
); and Pekhi (from Ubykh /tʷaχə/) and its German
ised variant Päkhy.
phonemes. Ubykh distinguishes three types of postalveolar consonant
s, apical, laminal, and laminal closed. Regarding the vowels, even though there are only two phonemic vowels, there is a great deal of allophony.
: /ʃəkʲʼaajəfanamət/ we shall not be able to go back, /awqʼaqʼajtʼba/ if you had said it. Ubykh is often extremely concise in its word forms.
The boundaries between nouns and verbs in Ubykh is somewhat blurred. Any noun can be used as the root of a stative verb (/məzə/ child, /səməzəjtʼ/ I was a child), and many verb roots can become nouns simply by the use of noun affixes (/qʼa/ to say, /səqʼa/ my speech, what I say).
The instrumental
(-/awn(ə)/ by means of, by using) was also treated as a case in Dumézil (1975). Another pair of postpositions, -/laaq/ to(wards) and -/ʁaafa/ for, have been noted as synthetic datives (/aχʲəlaaq astʷadaw/ I will send it to the prince), but their status as cases is also best discounted.
Nouns do not distinguish grammatical gender
. The definite article
is /a/- the: /atət/ the man. There is no indefinite article directly equivalent to the English a or an, but /za/-(root)-/ɡʷara/ (literally one-(root)-certain) translates French un and Turkish bir: /zanaynʃʷɡʷara/ a certain young man.
Number
is only marked on the noun in the ergative case, with -/na/. The number marking of the absolutive argument is either by suppletive
verb roots (e.g. /akʷən blas/ he is in the car vs /akʷən blaʒʷa/ they are in the car) or by verb suffixes: /akʲʼan/ he goes, /akʲʼaan/ they go. Interestingly, the second person
plural
prefix /ɕʷ/- triggers this plural suffix regardless of whether that prefix represents the ergative, the absolutive or the oblique argument: I give you all to him (abs.) he gives me to you all (obl.) you all give it/them to me (erg.)
Note that in this last sentence, the plurality of it (/a/-) is obscured; the meaning can be either I give it to you all or I give them to you all.
Adjective
s, in most cases, are simply suffixed to the noun: /tʃəbʒəja/ pepper with /pɬə/ red becomes /tʃəbʒəjapɬə/ red pepper. Adjectives do not decline
.
Postpositions are rare; most locative semantic
functions, as well as some non-local ones, are provided with preverb
al elements: /asχʲawtxqʼa/ you wrote it for me. However, there are a few postpositions: /səʁʷa səɡʲaatɕʼ/ like me; /aχʲəlaaq/ near the prince.
-present
-future
distinction of verb tense
exists (the suffixes -/qʼa/ and -/awt/ represent past and future) and an imperfective
aspect
suffix is also found (-/jtʼ/, which can combine with tense suffixes). Dynamic and stative verbs are contrasted, as in Arabic
, and verbs have several nominal
forms. Morphological causative
s are not uncommon. The conjunctions and and but are usually given with verb suffixes, but there is also a free particle for each:
Pronominal benefactives are also part of the verbal complex, marked with the preverb /χʲa/-, but a benefactive cannot normally appear on a verb that has three agreement prefixes already.
Gender
only appears as part of the second person
paradigm, and then only at the speaker's discretion. The feminine second person index is /χa/-, which behaves like other pronominal prefixes: /wəsχʲantʷən/ he gives (it) to you (normal; gender-neutral) for me, but compare /χasχʲantʷən/ he gives (it) to you (feminine) for me.
by adverb
s or auxiliary verb
s are given in Ubykh by verb suffixes:
I need to drink it I can drink it I drink it all the time I am drinking it all up I drink it too much I drink it again
s may be marked grammatically, using verb suffixes or prefixes:
Other types of questions, involving the pronouns where and what, may also be marked only in the verbal complex: /maawkʲʼanəj/ where are you going?, /saawqʼaqʼajtʼəj/ what had you said?
al elements providing a large series of applicative
s, and it is in this that Ubykh is hideously complex. Two main types of preverbal elements exist in Ubykh: determinants and preverbs. The number of preverbs is limited, and mainly show location
and direction
. The number of determinants is also limited, but the class is more open; some determinant prefixes include /tʃa/- with regard to a horse and /ɬa/- with regard to the foot or base of an object.
For simple locations, there are a number of possibilities that can be encoded with preverbs, including (but not limited to):
There is also a separate directional preverb meaning towards the speaker: j-, which occupies a separate slot in the verbal complex. However, preverbs can have meanings that would take up entire phrases in English. The preverb /jtɕʷʼaa/- signifies on the earth or in the earth, for instance: /ʁadja ajtɕʷʼaanaaɬqʼa/ they buried his body (lit. they put his body in the earth). Even more narrowly, the preverb /faa/- signifies that an action is done out of, into or with regard to a fire: /amdʒan zatʃətʃaqʲa faastχʷən/ I take a brand out of the fire.
s have a strong tendency to be CV, although VC and CVC also exist. Consonant cluster
s are not as large as in Abzhywa Abkhaz
or in Georgian
, rarely being larger than two terms. Three-term clusters exist in two words - /ndʁa/ sun and /psta/ to swell up, but the latter is a loan from Adyghe, and the former more often pronounced /nədʁa/ when it appears alone.
Compounding
plays a large part in Ubykh and, indeed, in all Northwest Caucasian semantics
. There is no verb to love, for instance; one says I love you as /tʂʼanə wəzbjan/ I see you well.
Reduplication
occurs in some roots, often those with onomatopoeic values (/χˤaχˤa/ to curry(comb) from /χˤa/ to scrape; /kʼərkʼər/, to cluck like a chicken (a loan from Adyghe); /warqwarq/, to croak like a frog).
Roots and affixes can be as small as one phoneme. The word /wantʷaan/ they give you to him, for instance, contains six phonemes, and each is a separate morpheme:
- 2nd singular absolutive - 3rd singular dative - 3rd ergative - to give - ergative plural - present tense
However, some words may be as long as seven syllable
s (although these are usually compounds): /ʂəqʷʼawəɕaɬaadətʃa/ staircase.
s. The word /ntʷa/ door, for instance, is an idiom meaning either magistrate, court or government. However, idiomatic constructions are even more common in Ubykh than in most other languages; the representation of abstract ideas with series of concrete elements is a characteristic of the Northwest Caucasian family. I love you translates literally as I see you well; you please me is literally you cut my heart. The term /wərəs/ Russian, a Turkish loan, has come to be a slang term meaning infidel, non-Muslim or enemy (see section History).
or Turkish
, with smaller numbers from Persian
, Abkhaz
and the South Caucasian languages
. Towards the end of Ubykh's life, a large influx of Adyghe words was noted; Vogt (1963) notes a few hundred examples. The phonemes /ɡ/ /k/ /kʼ/ were borrowed from Turkish and Adyghe. /ɬʼ/ also appears to be an Adyghe loan, although at a greater time depth. It is possible, too, that /ɣ/ is a loan from Adyghe, since most of the few words with this phoneme are obvious Adyghe loans: /paaɣa/ proud, /ɣa/ testis.
Many loanwords have Ubykh equivalents, but were dwindling in usage under the influence of Turkish, Circassian and Russian equivalents: to make a hole in, to perforate (Turkish) = /pɕaatχʷ/ tea (Turkish) = /bzəpɕə/ enemy (Turkish) = /bˤaqˤʼa/
Some words, usually much older ones, are borrowed from less influential stock: Colarusso (1994) sees /χˤʷa/ pig as a borrowing from a proto-Semitic
*huka, and /aɡʲarə/ slave from an Iranian root; however, Chirikba (1986) regards the latter as being of Abkhaz origin (< Abkhaz agər-wa lower cast of peasants; slave (literally Megrelian)).
With regard to the other languages of the family, Ubykh is closer to Abkhaz than to any other member, but shares many features with Adyghe due to geographic and cultural influence; many Ubykh speakers were bilingual in Ubykh and Adyghe.
of Ubykh has been noted (in Dumézil 1965:266-269). Grammatically, it is similar to standard Ubykh (i.e. Tevfik Esenç
's dialect), but has a very different sound system, which had collapsed into just 62-odd phonemes: have collapsed into /b/ /p/ /pʼ/. are indistinguishable from /ʃʷ/ /ʒʷ/. seems to have disappeared.
around Sochi
until 1864, when the Ubykhs were driven out of the region by the Russia
ns. They eventually came to settle in Turkey
, founding the villages of Hacı Osman
, Kırkpınar, Masukiye and Hacı Yakup. Turkish
and Circassian
eventually became the preferred languages for everyday communication, and many words from these languages entered Ubykh in that period.
The Ubykh language died out
on October 7, 1992, when its last fluent speaker (Tevfik Esenç
) died in his sleep. Before his passing, thousands of pages of material and many audio recordings had been collected and collated by a number of linguists, including Georges Charachidzé, Georges Dumézil
, Hans Vogt
and George Hewitt, with the help of some of its last speakers, particularly Tevfik Esenç and Huseyin Kozan. Ubykh was never written
by its speech community, but a few phrases were transcribed by Evliya Celebi
in his Seyahatname
, and a substantial portion of the oral literature, along with some cycles of the Nart saga
, was transcribed. Tevfik Esenç also eventually learned to write Ubykh in the transcription that Dumézil devised.
Julius von Mészáros, a Hungarian
linguist, visited Turkey in 1930 and took down some notes on Ubykh. His work Die Päkhy-Sprache
was extensive and accurate to the extent allowed by his transcription system (which could not represent all the phonemes of Ubykh), and marked the foundation of Ubykh linguistics.
The Frenchman
Georges Dumézil
also visited Turkey in 1930 to record some Ubykh, and would eventually become the most celebrated Ubykh linguist. He published a collection of Ubykh folktales in the late 1950s, and the language soon attracted the attention of linguists for its small number (two) of phonemic vowels. Hans Vogt
, a Norwegian
, produced a monumental dictionary
that, in spite of its many errors (later corrected by Dumézil), is still one of the masterpieces and essential tools of Ubykh linguistics.
Later in the 1960s and into the early 1970s, Dumézil published a series of papers on Ubykh etymology
in particular and Northwest Caucasian etymology in general. Dumézil's book Le Verbe Oubykh (1975), a comprehensive account of the verbal and nominal morphology of the language, is another cornerstone of Ubykh linguistics.
Since the 1980s, Ubykh linguistics
has slowed drastically. No other major treatises have been published; however, the Dutch linguist Rieks Smeets is currently trying to compile a new Ubykh dictionary based on Vogt's 1963 book, and a similar project is also underway in Australia. The Ubykh themselves have shown interest in relearning their language.
People who have published literature on Ubykh include
s, although it may have fewer than some of the Khoisan languages
. It has 20 uvular
and 29 pure fricative phonemes, more than any other known language. Ubykh may be related to Hattic
, a language spoken in Anatolia
before 2000 BC and written in a cuneiform script
.
|-class=IPA
|faaχʲa ||tʼqʷʼa-kʷabʒa ||kʲʼaʁə-n ||a-za-χʲa-ʃə-na-n ||a-mʁʲa-n ||ɡʲə-kʲa-qʼa-n
|-
|once ||two-man ||friend-ADV
||they-each.other-BEN-become-PL
-ADV ||the-road-OBL
||on-enter(PL)-past-PL
|}
|-class=IPA
|a-f-awtə-nə ||mʁʲawəf ||a-χʷada-awtə-n ||a-kʲa-na-n ||a-za-n ||fatɕʼ-aala ||ɕʷəbˤa-aala ||χʷada-qʼa
|-
|they-eat-FUT
-ADV ||provisions ||they-buy-FUT-ADV ||they-enter(PL)-PL-ADV ||the-one-ERG
||cheese-and bread-and ||buy-PAST
|}
|-class=IPA
|aajdə-χə-n-ɡʲə ||ɕʷəbˤa-aala ||psa-aala ||χʷada-n ||a-j-nə-w-qʼa
|-
|other-of-ERG-and ||bread-and ||fish-and ||buy-ADV ||it-hither-he-bring-past
|}
|-class=IPA
|a-mʁʲa-n ||ɡʲə-kʲa-na-ɡʲə
|-
|the-road-OBL ||on-enter(PL)-PL-GER
|}
|-class=IPA
|wa-fatɕʼ-də-χʷada-qʼajtʼ-ə ||ʁa-kʲʼaʁ-ʁaafa ||ɕʷəʁʷaɬa ||psa ||jada ||ɕʷ-f-aa-n
|-
|that-cheese-REL
-buy-PLUP-GER ||his-friend-towards ||you.all ||fish ||much ||you.all-eat-PL-PRES
|}
|-class=IPA
|saaba ||wana-n-ɡʲaafə ||psa ||ɕʷ-f-aa-nə-j ||qʼa-n ||ʁa-aa-dzʁa-qʼa
|-
|why ||that-OBL-as.much.as ||fish ||you.all-eat-PL-PRES-QU
||say-ADV ||him-to-ask-past
|}
|-class=IPA
|psa ||wə-fə-ba ||wə-tɕʼa ||jada ||ʃ-awt
|-
|fish ||you-eat-if ||your-knowledge ||much ||become-FUT
|}
|-class=IPA
|wana-ʁaafa ||ʃəʁʷaɬa ||psa ||jada ||ʃ-fə-n ||qʼa-qʼa
|-
|that-for ||we ||fish ||much ||we-eat-PRES ||say-PAST
|}
Extinct language
An extinct language is a language that no longer has any speakers., or that is no longer in current use. Extinct languages are sometimes contrasted with dead languages, which are still known and used in special contexts in written form, but not as ordinary spoken languages for everyday communication...
of the Northwestern Caucasian group
Northwest Caucasian languages
The Northwest Caucasian languages, also called Abkhazo-Adyghean, or sometimes Pontic as opposed to Caspian for the Northeast Caucasian languages, are a group of languages spoken in the Caucasus region, chiefly in Russia , the disputed territory of Abkhazia, and Turkey, with smaller communities...
, spoken by the Ubykh people
Ubykh people
The Ubykh are a group who spoke the Northwest Caucasian Ubykh language, until other local languages displaced it and its last speaker died in 1992....
(who originally lived along the eastern coast of the Black Sea
Black Sea
The Black Sea is bounded by Europe, Anatolia and the Caucasus and is ultimately connected to the Atlantic Ocean via the Mediterranean and the Aegean seas and various straits. The Bosphorus strait connects it to the Sea of Marmara, and the strait of the Dardanelles connects that sea to the Aegean...
before migrating en masse to Turkey in the 1860s). The language's last native speaker, Tevfik Esenç
Tevfik Esenç
Tevfik Esenç was a Circassian exile in Turkey and the last known fully competent speaker of the Ubykh language.Esenç was raised by his Ubykh-speaking grandparents for a time in the village of Hacı Osman in Turkey, and he served a term as the muhtar of that village, before receiving a post in the...
, died in 1992.
The Ubykh language is ergative
Ergative
The term ergative is used in grammar in three different meanings:* Ergative case* Ergative-absolutive language* Ergative verb...
and agglutinative, with polypersonal
Polypersonal agreement
In linguistics, polypersonal agreement or polypersonalism is the agreement of a verb with more than one of its arguments...
verbal agreement and a very large number of distinct consonants, but only two distinct vowels. With around eighty consonants it may have been the language with the most consonants in the world.
The name Ubykh is derived from /wəbəx/, its name in the Abdzakh Adyghe
Adyghe language
Adyghe language , also known as West Circassian , is one of the two official languages of the Republic of Adygea in the Russian Federation, the other being Russian. It is spoken by various tribes of the Adyghe people: Abzekh, Adamey, Bzhedugh; Hatukuay, Kemirgoy, Makhosh; Natekuay, Shapsigh; Zhane,...
(Circassian) language. It is known in linguistic
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
literature by many names: variants of Ubykh, such as Ubikh, Ubıh (Turkish
Turkish language
Turkish is a language spoken as a native language by over 83 million people worldwide, making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages. Its speakers are located predominantly in Turkey and Northern Cyprus with smaller groups in Iraq, Greece, Bulgaria, the Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo,...
) and Oubykh (French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
); and Pekhi (from Ubykh /tʷaχə/) and its German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
ised variant Päkhy.
Major features
Ubykh is distinguished by the following features, some of which are shared with other Northwest Caucasian languages:- It is ergativeErgative-absolutive languageAn ergative–absolutive language is a language that treats the argument of an intransitive verb like the object of a transitive verb, but differently from the agent of a transitive verb.-Ergative vs...
, making no syntactic distinction between the subjectSubject (grammar)The subject is one of the two main constituents of a clause, according to a tradition that can be tracked back to Aristotle and that is associated with phrase structure grammars; the other constituent is the predicate. According to another tradition, i.e...
of an intransitiveIntransitive verbIn grammar, an intransitive verb is a verb that has no object. This differs from a transitive verb, which takes one or more objects. Both classes of verb are related to the concept of the transitivity of a verb....
sentence and the direct object of a transitiveTransitive verbIn syntax, a transitive verb is a verb that requires both a direct subject and one or more objects. The term is used to contrast intransitive verbs, which do not have objects.-Examples:Some examples of sentences with transitive verbs:...
sentence. Split ergativitySplit ergativitySplit ergativity is shown by languages that have a partly ergative behaviour, but employ another syntax or morphology — usually accusative — in some contexts...
plays only a small part, if at all. - It is highly agglutinative, using mainly monosyllabic or bisyllabic roots, but with single morphologicalMorphology (linguistics)In linguistics, morphology is the identification, analysis and description, in a language, of the structure of morphemes and other linguistic units, such as words, affixes, parts of speech, intonation/stress, or implied context...
words sometimes reaching nine or more syllables in length: /aχʲazbatɕʼaʁawdətʷaajlafaqʼajtʼmadaχ/ if only you had not been able to make him take (it) all out from under me again for them. AffixAffixAn affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word. Affixes may be derivational, like English -ness and pre-, or inflectional, like English plural -s and past tense -ed. They are bound morphemes by definition; prefixes and suffixes may be separable affixes...
es rarely fuse in any way. - It has a simple nominalNounIn linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition .Lexical categories are defined in terms of how their members combine with other kinds of...
system, contrasting just four noun cases, and not always marking grammatical numberGrammatical numberIn linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions ....
in the direct case. - Its system of verbal agreement is quite complex. English verbs must agree only with the subject; Ubykh verbs must agree with the subject, the direct object and the indirect object, and benefactive objects must also be marked in the verb.
- It is phonologicallyPhonologyPhonology is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language. That is, it is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use...
complex as well, with 84 distinct consonantConsonantIn articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are , pronounced with the lips; , pronounced with the front of the tongue; , pronounced with the back of the tongue; , pronounced in the throat; and ,...
s (four of which, however, appear only in loan words). According to some linguistic analyses, it only has two phonological vowels, but these vowels have a large range of allophoneAllophoneIn phonology, an allophone is one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds used to pronounce a single phoneme. For example, and are allophones for the phoneme in the English language...
s because the range of consonants which surround them is so large.
Phonology
Ubykh has 84 phonemic consonants, a record high amongst languages without click consonants, but only 2 phonemic vowels. Four of these consonants are found only in loanwords and onomatopoeia. There are nine basic places of articulation for the consonants and extensive use of secondary articulation, such that Ubykh has 20 different uvularUvular consonant
Uvulars are consonants articulated with the back of the tongue against or near the uvula, that is, further back in the mouth than velar consonants. Uvulars may be plosives, fricatives, nasal stops, trills, or approximants, though the IPA does not provide a separate symbol for the approximant, and...
phonemes. Ubykh distinguishes three types of postalveolar consonant
Postalveolar consonant
Postalveolar consonants are consonants articulated with the tongue near or touching the back of the alveolar ridge, further back in the mouth than the alveolar consonants, which are at the ridge itself, but not as far back as the hard palate...
s, apical, laminal, and laminal closed. Regarding the vowels, even though there are only two phonemic vowels, there is a great deal of allophony.
Morphosyntax
Ubykh is agglutinative and polysyntheticPolysynthetic language
In linguistic typology, polysynthetic languages are highly synthetic languages, i.e., languages in which words are composed of many morphemes. Whereas isolating languages have a low morpheme-to-word ratio, polysynthetic languages have extremely high morpheme-to-word ratios.Not all languages can be...
: /ʃəkʲʼaajəfanamət/ we shall not be able to go back, /awqʼaqʼajtʼba/ if you had said it. Ubykh is often extremely concise in its word forms.
The boundaries between nouns and verbs in Ubykh is somewhat blurred. Any noun can be used as the root of a stative verb (/məzə/ child, /səməzəjtʼ/ I was a child), and many verb roots can become nouns simply by the use of noun affixes (/qʼa/ to say, /səqʼa/ my speech, what I say).
Nouns
The noun system in Ubykh is quite simple. Ubykh has three noun cases (the oblique-ergative case may be two homophonous cases with differing function, thus presenting four cases in total):- direct or absolutive caseAbsolutive caseThe absolutive case is the unmarked grammatical case of a core argument of a verb which is used as the citation form of a noun.-In ergative languages:...
, marked with the bare rootRoot (linguistics)The root word is the primary lexical unit of a word, and of a word family , which carries the most significant aspects of semantic content and cannot be reduced into smaller constituents....
; this indicates the subjectSubject (grammar)The subject is one of the two main constituents of a clause, according to a tradition that can be tracked back to Aristotle and that is associated with phrase structure grammars; the other constituent is the predicate. According to another tradition, i.e...
of an intransitive sentence and the direct object of a transitive sentence (/tət/ a man) - oblique-ergative caseErgative caseThe ergative case is the grammatical case that identifies the subject of a transitive verb in ergative-absolutive languages.-Characteristics:...
, marked in -/n/; this indicates either the subject of a transitiveTransitive verbIn syntax, a transitive verb is a verb that requires both a direct subject and one or more objects. The term is used to contrast intransitive verbs, which do not have objects.-Examples:Some examples of sentences with transitive verbs:...
sentence, targets of preverbPreverbAlthough not widely accepted in linguistics, the term preverb is used in Caucasian , Caddoan, Athabaskan, and Algonquian linguistics to describe certain elements prefixed to verbs.Theoretically, any prefix could be called a preverbal element...
s, or indirect objects which do not take any other suffixes (/məzən/ (to) a child) - locative case, marked in -/ʁa/, which is the equivalent of English in, on or at.
The instrumental
Instrumental
An instrumental is a musical composition or recording without lyrics or singing, although it might include some non-articulate vocal input; the music is primarily or exclusively produced by musical instruments....
(-/awn(ə)/ by means of, by using) was also treated as a case in Dumézil (1975). Another pair of postpositions, -/laaq/ to(wards) and -/ʁaafa/ for, have been noted as synthetic datives (/aχʲəlaaq astʷadaw/ I will send it to the prince), but their status as cases is also best discounted.
Nouns do not distinguish grammatical gender
Grammatical gender
Grammatical gender is defined linguistically as a system of classes of nouns which trigger specific types of inflections in associated words, such as adjectives, verbs and others. For a system of noun classes to be a gender system, every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be...
. The definite article
Definite Article
Definite Article is the title of British comedian Eddie Izzard's 1996 performance released on VHS. It was recorded on different nights at the Shaftesbury Theatre...
is /a/- the: /atət/ the man. There is no indefinite article directly equivalent to the English a or an, but /za/-(root)-/ɡʷara/ (literally one-(root)-certain) translates French un and Turkish bir: /zanaynʃʷɡʷara/ a certain young man.
Number
Number
A number is a mathematical object used to count and measure. In mathematics, the definition of number has been extended over the years to include such numbers as zero, negative numbers, rational numbers, irrational numbers, and complex numbers....
is only marked on the noun in the ergative case, with -/na/. The number marking of the absolutive argument is either by suppletive
Suppletion
In linguistics and etymology, suppletion is traditionally understood as the use of one word as the inflected form of another word when the two words are not cognate. For those learning a language, suppletive forms will be seen as "irregular" or even "highly irregular". The term "suppletion" implies...
verb roots (e.g. /akʷən blas/ he is in the car vs /akʷən blaʒʷa/ they are in the car) or by verb suffixes: /akʲʼan/ he goes, /akʲʼaan/ they go. Interestingly, the second person
Grammatical person
Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event; such as the speaker, the addressee, or others. Grammatical person typically defines a language's set of personal pronouns...
plural
Plural
In linguistics, plurality or [a] plural is a concept of quantity representing a value of more-than-one. Typically applied to nouns, a plural word or marker is used to distinguish a value other than the default quantity of a noun, which is typically one...
prefix /ɕʷ/- triggers this plural suffix regardless of whether that prefix represents the ergative, the absolutive or the oblique argument: I give you all to him (abs.) he gives me to you all (obl.) you all give it/them to me (erg.)
Note that in this last sentence, the plurality of it (/a/-) is obscured; the meaning can be either I give it to you all or I give them to you all.
Adjective
Adjective
In grammar, an adjective is a 'describing' word; the main syntactic role of which is to qualify a noun or noun phrase, giving more information about the object signified....
s, in most cases, are simply suffixed to the noun: /tʃəbʒəja/ pepper with /pɬə/ red becomes /tʃəbʒəjapɬə/ red pepper. Adjectives do not decline
Declension
In linguistics, declension is the inflection of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and articles to indicate number , case , and gender...
.
Postpositions are rare; most locative semantic
Semantics
Semantics is the study of meaning. It focuses on the relation between signifiers, such as words, phrases, signs and symbols, and what they stand for, their denotata....
functions, as well as some non-local ones, are provided with preverb
Preverb
Although not widely accepted in linguistics, the term preverb is used in Caucasian , Caddoan, Athabaskan, and Algonquian linguistics to describe certain elements prefixed to verbs.Theoretically, any prefix could be called a preverbal element...
al elements: /asχʲawtxqʼa/ you wrote it for me. However, there are a few postpositions: /səʁʷa səɡʲaatɕʼ/ like me; /aχʲəlaaq/ near the prince.
Verbs
A pastPast tense
The past tense is a grammatical tense that places an action or situation in the past of the current moment , or prior to some specified time that may be in the speaker's past, present, or future...
-present
Present tense
The present tense is a grammatical tense that locates a situation or event in present time. This linguistic definition refers to a concept that indicates a feature of the meaning of a verb...
-future
Future tense
In grammar, a future tense is a verb form that marks the event described by the verb as not having happened yet, but expected to happen in the future , or to happen subsequent to some other event, whether that is past, present, or future .-Expressions of future tense:The concept of the future,...
distinction of verb tense
Grammatical tense
A tense is a grammatical category that locates a situation in time, to indicate when the situation takes place.Bernard Comrie, Aspect, 1976:6:...
exists (the suffixes -/qʼa/ and -/awt/ represent past and future) and an imperfective
Imperfective aspect
The imperfective is a grammatical aspect used to describe a situation viewed with internal structure, such as ongoing, habitual, repeated, and similar semantic roles, whether that situation occurs in the past, present, or future...
aspect
Grammatical aspect
In linguistics, the grammatical aspect of a verb is a grammatical category that defines the temporal flow in a given action, event, or state, from the point of view of the speaker...
suffix is also found (-/jtʼ/, which can combine with tense suffixes). Dynamic and stative verbs are contrasted, as in Arabic
Arabic language
Arabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...
, and verbs have several nominal
Gerund
In linguistics* As applied to English, it refers to the usage of a verb as a noun ....
forms. Morphological causative
Causative
In linguistics, a causative is a form that indicates that a subject causes someone or something else to do or be something, or causes a change in state of a non-volitional event....
s are not uncommon. The conjunctions and and but are usually given with verb suffixes, but there is also a free particle for each:
- -/ɡʲə/ and (free particle /ve/, borrowed from Turkish);
- -/ɡʲəla/ but, nevertheless, even so, however, although (free particle /aʁʷa/)
Pronominal benefactives are also part of the verbal complex, marked with the preverb /χʲa/-, but a benefactive cannot normally appear on a verb that has three agreement prefixes already.
Gender
Grammatical gender
Grammatical gender is defined linguistically as a system of classes of nouns which trigger specific types of inflections in associated words, such as adjectives, verbs and others. For a system of noun classes to be a gender system, every noun must belong to one of the classes and there should be...
only appears as part of the second person
Grammatical person
Grammatical person, in linguistics, is deictic reference to a participant in an event; such as the speaker, the addressee, or others. Grammatical person typically defines a language's set of personal pronouns...
paradigm, and then only at the speaker's discretion. The feminine second person index is /χa/-, which behaves like other pronominal prefixes: /wəsχʲantʷən/ he gives (it) to you (normal; gender-neutral) for me, but compare /χasχʲantʷən/ he gives (it) to you (feminine) for me.
Adverbials
A few meanings covered in EnglishEnglish language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
by adverb
Adverb
An adverb is a part of speech that modifies verbs or any part of speech other than a noun . Adverbs can modify verbs, adjectives , clauses, sentences, and other adverbs....
s or auxiliary verb
Auxiliary verb
In linguistics, an auxiliary verb is a verb that gives further semantic or syntactic information about a main or full verb. In English, the extra meaning provided by an auxiliary verb alters the basic meaning of the main verb to make it have one or more of the following functions: passive voice,...
s are given in Ubykh by verb suffixes:
I need to drink it I can drink it I drink it all the time I am drinking it all up I drink it too much I drink it again
Questions
QuestionQuestion
A question may be either a linguistic expression used to make a request for information, or else the request itself made by such an expression. This information may be provided with an answer....
s may be marked grammatically, using verb suffixes or prefixes:
- Yes-no questions with -/ɕ/: /wana awbjaqʼaɕ/? did you see that?
- Complex questions with -/j/: /saakʲʼa wəpʼtsʼaj/? what is your name?
Other types of questions, involving the pronouns where and what, may also be marked only in the verbal complex: /maawkʲʼanəj/ where are you going?, /saawqʼaqʼajtʼəj/ what had you said?
Preverbs and determinants
Many local, prepositional, and other functions are provided by preverbPreverb
Although not widely accepted in linguistics, the term preverb is used in Caucasian , Caddoan, Athabaskan, and Algonquian linguistics to describe certain elements prefixed to verbs.Theoretically, any prefix could be called a preverbal element...
al elements providing a large series of applicative
Applicative voice
The applicative voice is a grammatical voice which promotes an oblique argument of a verb to the object argument, and indicates the oblique role within the meaning of the verb. When the applicative voice is applied to a verb, its valency may be increased by one...
s, and it is in this that Ubykh is hideously complex. Two main types of preverbal elements exist in Ubykh: determinants and preverbs. The number of preverbs is limited, and mainly show location
Location (geography)
The terms location and place in geography are used to identify a point or an area on the Earth's surface or elsewhere. The term 'location' generally implies a higher degree of can certainty than "place" which often has an ambiguous boundary relying more on human/social attributes of place identity...
and direction
Direction (geometry, geography)
Direction is the information contained in the relative position of one point with respect to another point without the distance information. Directions may be either relative to some indicated reference , or absolute according to some previously agreed upon frame of reference Direction is the...
. The number of determinants is also limited, but the class is more open; some determinant prefixes include /tʃa/- with regard to a horse and /ɬa/- with regard to the foot or base of an object.
For simple locations, there are a number of possibilities that can be encoded with preverbs, including (but not limited to):
- above and touching
- above and not touching
- below and touching
- below and not touching
- at the side of
- through a space
- through solid matter
- on a flat horizontal surface
- on a non-horizontal or vertical surface
- in a homogeneous mass
- towards
- in an upward direction
- in a downward direction
- into a tubular space
- into an enclosed space
There is also a separate directional preverb meaning towards the speaker: j-, which occupies a separate slot in the verbal complex. However, preverbs can have meanings that would take up entire phrases in English. The preverb /jtɕʷʼaa/- signifies on the earth or in the earth, for instance: /ʁadja ajtɕʷʼaanaaɬqʼa/ they buried his body (lit. they put his body in the earth). Even more narrowly, the preverb /faa/- signifies that an action is done out of, into or with regard to a fire: /amdʒan zatʃətʃaqʲa faastχʷən/ I take a brand out of the fire.
Native vocabulary
Ubykh syllableSyllable
A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds. For example, the word water is composed of two syllables: wa and ter. A syllable is typically made up of a syllable nucleus with optional initial and final margins .Syllables are often considered the phonological "building...
s have a strong tendency to be CV, although VC and CVC also exist. Consonant cluster
Consonant cluster
In linguistics, a consonant cluster is a group of consonants which have no intervening vowel. In English, for example, the groups and are consonant clusters in the word splits....
s are not as large as in Abzhywa Abkhaz
Abkhaz language
Abkhaz is a Northwest Caucasian language spoken mainly by the Abkhaz people. It is the official language of Abkhazia where around 100,000 people speak it. Furthermore, it is spoken by thousands of members of the Abkhazian diaspora in Turkey, Georgia's autonomous republic of Adjara, Syria, Jordan...
or in Georgian
Georgian language
Georgian is the native language of the Georgians and the official language of Georgia, a country in the Caucasus.Georgian is the primary language of about 4 million people in Georgia itself, and of another 500,000 abroad...
, rarely being larger than two terms. Three-term clusters exist in two words - /ndʁa/ sun and /psta/ to swell up, but the latter is a loan from Adyghe, and the former more often pronounced /nədʁa/ when it appears alone.
Compounding
Compound (linguistics)
In linguistics, a compound is a lexeme that consists of more than one stem. Compounding or composition is the word formation that creates compound lexemes...
plays a large part in Ubykh and, indeed, in all Northwest Caucasian semantics
Semantics
Semantics is the study of meaning. It focuses on the relation between signifiers, such as words, phrases, signs and symbols, and what they stand for, their denotata....
. There is no verb to love, for instance; one says I love you as /tʂʼanə wəzbjan/ I see you well.
Reduplication
Reduplication
Reduplication in linguistics is a morphological process in which the root or stem of a word is repeated exactly or with a slight change....
occurs in some roots, often those with onomatopoeic values (/χˤaχˤa/ to curry(comb) from /χˤa/ to scrape; /kʼərkʼər/, to cluck like a chicken (a loan from Adyghe); /warqwarq/, to croak like a frog).
Roots and affixes can be as small as one phoneme. The word /wantʷaan/ they give you to him, for instance, contains six phonemes, and each is a separate morpheme:
- 2nd singular absolutive - 3rd singular dative - 3rd ergative - to give - ergative plural - present tense
However, some words may be as long as seven syllable
Syllable
A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds. For example, the word water is composed of two syllables: wa and ter. A syllable is typically made up of a syllable nucleus with optional initial and final margins .Syllables are often considered the phonological "building...
s (although these are usually compounds): /ʂəqʷʼawəɕaɬaadətʃa/ staircase.
Slang and idioms
As with all other languages, Ubykh is replete with idiomIdiom
Idiom is an expression, word, or phrase that has a figurative meaning that is comprehended in regard to a common use of that expression that is separate from the literal meaning or definition of the words of which it is made...
s. The word /ntʷa/ door, for instance, is an idiom meaning either magistrate, court or government. However, idiomatic constructions are even more common in Ubykh than in most other languages; the representation of abstract ideas with series of concrete elements is a characteristic of the Northwest Caucasian family. I love you translates literally as I see you well; you please me is literally you cut my heart. The term /wərəs/ Russian, a Turkish loan, has come to be a slang term meaning infidel, non-Muslim or enemy (see section History).
Foreign loans
The majority of loanwords in Ubykh are derived from either AdygheAdyghe language
Adyghe language , also known as West Circassian , is one of the two official languages of the Republic of Adygea in the Russian Federation, the other being Russian. It is spoken by various tribes of the Adyghe people: Abzekh, Adamey, Bzhedugh; Hatukuay, Kemirgoy, Makhosh; Natekuay, Shapsigh; Zhane,...
or Turkish
Turkish language
Turkish is a language spoken as a native language by over 83 million people worldwide, making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages. Its speakers are located predominantly in Turkey and Northern Cyprus with smaller groups in Iraq, Greece, Bulgaria, the Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo,...
, with smaller numbers from Persian
Persian language
Persian is an Iranian language within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European languages. It is primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and countries which historically came under Persian influence...
, Abkhaz
Abkhaz language
Abkhaz is a Northwest Caucasian language spoken mainly by the Abkhaz people. It is the official language of Abkhazia where around 100,000 people speak it. Furthermore, it is spoken by thousands of members of the Abkhazian diaspora in Turkey, Georgia's autonomous republic of Adjara, Syria, Jordan...
and the South Caucasian languages
South Caucasian languages
The Kartvelian languages are spoken primarily in Georgia, with a large group of ethnic Georgian speakers in Russia, the United States, the European Union, and northeastern parts of Turkey. There are approximately 5.2 million speakers of this language family worldwide.It is not known to be related...
. Towards the end of Ubykh's life, a large influx of Adyghe words was noted; Vogt (1963) notes a few hundred examples. The phonemes /ɡ/ /k/ /kʼ/ were borrowed from Turkish and Adyghe. /ɬʼ/ also appears to be an Adyghe loan, although at a greater time depth. It is possible, too, that /ɣ/ is a loan from Adyghe, since most of the few words with this phoneme are obvious Adyghe loans: /paaɣa/ proud, /ɣa/ testis.
Many loanwords have Ubykh equivalents, but were dwindling in usage under the influence of Turkish, Circassian and Russian equivalents: to make a hole in, to perforate (Turkish) = /pɕaatχʷ/ tea (Turkish) = /bzəpɕə/ enemy (Turkish) = /bˤaqˤʼa/
Some words, usually much older ones, are borrowed from less influential stock: Colarusso (1994) sees /χˤʷa/ pig as a borrowing from a proto-Semitic
Semitic languages
The Semitic languages are a group of related languages whose living representatives are spoken by more than 270 million people across much of the Middle East, North Africa and the Horn of Africa...
*huka, and /aɡʲarə/ slave from an Iranian root; however, Chirikba (1986) regards the latter as being of Abkhaz origin (< Abkhaz agər-wa lower cast of peasants; slave (literally Megrelian)).
Evolution
In the scheme of Northwest Caucasian evolution, despite its parallels with Abkhaz, Ubykh forms a separate third branch of the family. It has fossilised palatal class markers where all other Northwest Caucasian languages preserve traces of an original labial class: the Ubykh word for heart, /ɡʲə/, corresponds to the reflex /ɡʷə/ in Abkhaz, Abaza, Kabardian and Adyghe. Ubykh also possesses groups of pharyngealised consonants otherwise found in the Northwest Caucasian family only in some dialects of Abkhaz and Abaza. All other NWC languages possess true pharyngeal consonants, but Ubykh is the only language to use pharyngealisation as a feature of secondary articulation.With regard to the other languages of the family, Ubykh is closer to Abkhaz than to any other member, but shares many features with Adyghe due to geographic and cultural influence; many Ubykh speakers were bilingual in Ubykh and Adyghe.
Dialects
While not many dialects of Ubykh existed, one divergent dialectDialect
The term dialect is used in two distinct ways, even by linguists. One usage refers to a variety of a language that is a characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers. The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect may also be defined by other factors,...
of Ubykh has been noted (in Dumézil 1965:266-269). Grammatically, it is similar to standard Ubykh (i.e. Tevfik Esenç
Tevfik Esenç
Tevfik Esenç was a Circassian exile in Turkey and the last known fully competent speaker of the Ubykh language.Esenç was raised by his Ubykh-speaking grandparents for a time in the village of Hacı Osman in Turkey, and he served a term as the muhtar of that village, before receiving a post in the...
's dialect), but has a very different sound system, which had collapsed into just 62-odd phonemes: have collapsed into /b/ /p/ /pʼ/. are indistinguishable from /ʃʷ/ /ʒʷ/. seems to have disappeared.
- Pharyngealisation is no longer distinctive, having been replaced in many cases by geminate consonants.
- Palatalisation of the uvular consonants is no longer phonemic.
History
Ubykh was spoken in the eastern coast of the Black SeaBlack Sea
The Black Sea is bounded by Europe, Anatolia and the Caucasus and is ultimately connected to the Atlantic Ocean via the Mediterranean and the Aegean seas and various straits. The Bosphorus strait connects it to the Sea of Marmara, and the strait of the Dardanelles connects that sea to the Aegean...
around Sochi
Sochi
Sochi is a city in Krasnodar Krai, Russia, situated just north of Russia's border with the de facto independent republic of Abkhazia, on the Black Sea coast. Greater Sochi sprawls for along the shores of the Black Sea near the Caucasus Mountains...
until 1864, when the Ubykhs were driven out of the region by the Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
ns. They eventually came to settle in Turkey
Turkey
Turkey , known officially as the Republic of Turkey , is a Eurasian country located in Western Asia and in East Thrace in Southeastern Europe...
, founding the villages of Hacı Osman
Haci Osman
Hacı Osman köyü is a small village in Manyas district of Balıkesir Province, Turkey.It had a population of 134, according to a 2000 census.This village was a farming community, not unlike many others in the world...
, Kırkpınar, Masukiye and Hacı Yakup. Turkish
Turkish language
Turkish is a language spoken as a native language by over 83 million people worldwide, making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages. Its speakers are located predominantly in Turkey and Northern Cyprus with smaller groups in Iraq, Greece, Bulgaria, the Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo,...
and Circassian
Circassian language
Circassian language may refer to:* any of the Northwest Caucasian languages* in a more narrow sense,** the Adyghe language ** the Kabardian language...
eventually became the preferred languages for everyday communication, and many words from these languages entered Ubykh in that period.
The Ubykh language died out
Extinct language
An extinct language is a language that no longer has any speakers., or that is no longer in current use. Extinct languages are sometimes contrasted with dead languages, which are still known and used in special contexts in written form, but not as ordinary spoken languages for everyday communication...
on October 7, 1992, when its last fluent speaker (Tevfik Esenç
Tevfik Esenç
Tevfik Esenç was a Circassian exile in Turkey and the last known fully competent speaker of the Ubykh language.Esenç was raised by his Ubykh-speaking grandparents for a time in the village of Hacı Osman in Turkey, and he served a term as the muhtar of that village, before receiving a post in the...
) died in his sleep. Before his passing, thousands of pages of material and many audio recordings had been collected and collated by a number of linguists, including Georges Charachidzé, Georges Dumézil
Georges Dumézil
Georges Dumézil was a French comparative philologist best known for his analysis of sovereignty and power in Proto-Indo-European religion and society...
, Hans Vogt
Hans Vogt
Hans Vogt was a Norwegian linguist specialized in the Caucasian languages, especially Georgian. He also did significant early work on the Kalispel language....
and George Hewitt, with the help of some of its last speakers, particularly Tevfik Esenç and Huseyin Kozan. Ubykh was never written
Written language
A written language is the representation of a language by means of a writing system. Written language is an invention in that it must be taught to children, who will instinctively learn or create spoken or gestural languages....
by its speech community, but a few phrases were transcribed by Evliya Celebi
Evliya Çelebi
Evliya Çelebi was an Ottoman traveler who journeyed through the territory of the Ottoman Empire and neighboring lands over a period of forty years.- Life :...
in his Seyahatname
Seyahatname
Seyâhatnâme is a Persian term, also used in Ottoman Turkish, which means "book of travels", denoting a literary form and tradition whose examples can be found throughout centuries in the Middle Ages around the Islamic world, starting with the Arab travellers of the Umayyad period.An outstanding...
, and a substantial portion of the oral literature, along with some cycles of the Nart saga
Nart saga
The Nart sagas are a series of tales originating from the North Caucasus. They form the basic mythology of the tribes in the area, including Abazin, Abkhaz, Circassian, Ossetian, Karachay-Balkar and Chechen-Ingush folklore....
, was transcribed. Tevfik Esenç also eventually learned to write Ubykh in the transcription that Dumézil devised.
Julius von Mészáros, a Hungarian
Hungary
Hungary , officially the Republic of Hungary , is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is situated in the Carpathian Basin and is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine and Romania to the east, Serbia and Croatia to the south, Slovenia to the southwest and Austria to the west. The...
linguist, visited Turkey in 1930 and took down some notes on Ubykh. His work Die Päkhy-Sprache
Die Päkhy-Sprache
Die Päkhy-Sprache is the title of a treatise on the Ubykh language, written by Gyula Mészáros and published in 1934 by the University of Chicago Press.It was the first major descriptive work written of Ubykh...
was extensive and accurate to the extent allowed by his transcription system (which could not represent all the phonemes of Ubykh), and marked the foundation of Ubykh linguistics.
The Frenchman
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
Georges Dumézil
Georges Dumézil
Georges Dumézil was a French comparative philologist best known for his analysis of sovereignty and power in Proto-Indo-European religion and society...
also visited Turkey in 1930 to record some Ubykh, and would eventually become the most celebrated Ubykh linguist. He published a collection of Ubykh folktales in the late 1950s, and the language soon attracted the attention of linguists for its small number (two) of phonemic vowels. Hans Vogt
Hans Vogt
Hans Vogt was a Norwegian linguist specialized in the Caucasian languages, especially Georgian. He also did significant early work on the Kalispel language....
, a Norwegian
Norway
Norway , officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic unitary constitutional monarchy whose territory comprises the western portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula, Jan Mayen, and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and Bouvet Island. Norway has a total area of and a population of about 4.9 million...
, produced a monumental dictionary
Dictionary
A dictionary is a collection of words in one or more specific languages, often listed alphabetically, with usage information, definitions, etymologies, phonetics, pronunciations, and other information; or a book of words in one language with their equivalents in another, also known as a lexicon...
that, in spite of its many errors (later corrected by Dumézil), is still one of the masterpieces and essential tools of Ubykh linguistics.
Later in the 1960s and into the early 1970s, Dumézil published a series of papers on Ubykh etymology
Etymology
Etymology is the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time.For languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts in these languages and texts about the languages to gather knowledge about how words were used during...
in particular and Northwest Caucasian etymology in general. Dumézil's book Le Verbe Oubykh (1975), a comprehensive account of the verbal and nominal morphology of the language, is another cornerstone of Ubykh linguistics.
Since the 1980s, Ubykh linguistics
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
has slowed drastically. No other major treatises have been published; however, the Dutch linguist Rieks Smeets is currently trying to compile a new Ubykh dictionary based on Vogt's 1963 book, and a similar project is also underway in Australia. The Ubykh themselves have shown interest in relearning their language.
People who have published literature on Ubykh include
- Brian George Hewitt
- Catherine Paris
- Christine Leroy
- Georg Bossong
- Georges Dumézil
- Hans Vogt
- John Colarusso
- Julius von Mészáros
- Rieks Smeets
- Viacheslav Chirikba
- Tevfik Esenç
- Wim Lucassen
Notable characteristics
Ubykh has been cited in the Guinness Book of Records (1996 ed.) as the language with the most consonant phonemePhoneme
In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
s, although it may have fewer than some of the Khoisan languages
Khoisan languages
The Khoisan languages are the click languages of Africa which do not belong to other language families. They include languages indigenous to southern and eastern Africa, though some, such as the Khoi languages, appear to have moved to their current locations not long before the Bantu expansion...
. It has 20 uvular
Uvular consonant
Uvulars are consonants articulated with the back of the tongue against or near the uvula, that is, further back in the mouth than velar consonants. Uvulars may be plosives, fricatives, nasal stops, trills, or approximants, though the IPA does not provide a separate symbol for the approximant, and...
and 29 pure fricative phonemes, more than any other known language. Ubykh may be related to Hattic
Hattic language
Hattic was a language spoken by the Hattians in Asia Minor between the 3rd and the 2nd millennia BC. Scholars call this language 'Hattic' to distinguish it from the Hittite language--the Indo-European language of the Hittite Empire....
, a language spoken in Anatolia
Anatolia
Anatolia is a geographic and historical term denoting the westernmost protrusion of Asia, comprising the majority of the Republic of Turkey...
before 2000 BC and written in a cuneiform script
Cuneiform script
Cuneiform script )) is one of the earliest known forms of written expression. Emerging in Sumer around the 30th century BC, with predecessors reaching into the late 4th millennium , cuneiform writing began as a system of pictographs...
.
Samples of Ubykh
All examples from Dumézil 1968.- Faːχe tʼqʼokobʒa kʼeʁən azaχeʃənan amʁen ɡikeqʼan.
- Once, two men set out together on the road.
- {|class=wikitable
|-class=IPA
|faaχʲa ||tʼqʷʼa-kʷabʒa ||kʲʼaʁə-n ||a-za-χʲa-ʃə-na-n ||a-mʁʲa-n ||ɡʲə-kʲa-qʼa-n
|-
|once ||two-man ||friend-ADV
Adverbial
In grammar an adverbial is a word or a group of words that modifies or tells us something about the sentence or the verb. The word adverbial is also used as an adjective, meaning 'having the same function as an adverb'...
||they-each.other-BEN-become-PL
Plural
In linguistics, plurality or [a] plural is a concept of quantity representing a value of more-than-one. Typically applied to nouns, a plural word or marker is used to distinguish a value other than the default quantity of a noun, which is typically one...
-ADV ||the-road-OBL
Oblique case
An oblique case in linguistics is a noun case of synthetic languages that is used generally when a noun is the object of a verb or a preposition...
||on-enter(PL)-past-PL
|}
- Afoːtənə mʁøːəf aχodoːtən akenan, azan fatɕʼaːla ɕubˤaːla χodaqʼa,
- They went to buy some provisions for the journey; the one bought cheese and bread,
- {|class=wikitable
|-class=IPA
|a-f-awtə-nə ||mʁʲawəf ||a-χʷada-awtə-n ||a-kʲa-na-n ||a-za-n ||fatɕʼ-aala ||ɕʷəbˤa-aala ||χʷada-qʼa
|-
|they-eat-FUT
Future tense
In grammar, a future tense is a verb form that marks the event described by the verb as not having happened yet, but expected to happen in the future , or to happen subsequent to some other event, whether that is past, present, or future .-Expressions of future tense:The concept of the future,...
-ADV ||provisions ||they-buy-FUT-ADV ||they-enter(PL)-PL-ADV ||the-one-ERG
Ergative case
The ergative case is the grammatical case that identifies the subject of a transitive verb in ergative-absolutive languages.-Characteristics:...
||cheese-and bread-and ||buy-PAST
|}
- Eːdəχənɡi ɕobˤaːla psaːla χodan eːnuːqʼa.
- and the other bought bread and fish.
- {|class=wikitable
|-class=IPA
|aajdə-χə-n-ɡʲə ||ɕʷəbˤa-aala ||psa-aala ||χʷada-n ||a-j-nə-w-qʼa
|-
|other-of-ERG-and ||bread-and ||fish-and ||buy-ADV ||it-hither-he-bring-past
|}
- Amʁen ɡikenaɡi
- While they were on the road,
- {|class=wikitable
|-class=IPA
|a-mʁʲa-n ||ɡʲə-kʲa-na-ɡʲə
|-
|the-road-OBL ||on-enter(PL)-PL-GER
Gerund
In linguistics* As applied to English, it refers to the usage of a verb as a noun ....
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- Wafatɕʼdəχodaqʼeːtʼə ʁakʼeʁʁaːfa, "ɕuʁoɬa psa jeda ɕʷfaːn;"
- the one who had bought the cheese asked the other, "You people eat a lot of fish;"
- {|class=wikitable
|-class=IPA
|wa-fatɕʼ-də-χʷada-qʼajtʼ-ə ||ʁa-kʲʼaʁ-ʁaafa ||ɕʷəʁʷaɬa ||psa ||jada ||ɕʷ-f-aa-n
|-
|that-cheese-REL
Relative clause
A relative clause is a subordinate clause that modifies a noun phrase, most commonly a noun. For example, the phrase "the man who wasn't there" contains the noun man, which is modified by the relative clause who wasn't there...
-buy-PLUP-GER ||his-friend-towards ||you.all ||fish ||much ||you.all-eat-PL-PRES
Present tense
The present tense is a grammatical tense that locates a situation or event in present time. This linguistic definition refers to a concept that indicates a feature of the meaning of a verb...
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- "Saːba wananɡʲaːfə psa ɕʷfaːniː?" qʼan ʁaːdzʁaqʼa.
- "why do you eat fish as much as that?"
- {|class=wikitable
|-class=IPA
|saaba ||wana-n-ɡʲaafə ||psa ||ɕʷ-f-aa-nə-j ||qʼa-n ||ʁa-aa-dzʁa-qʼa
|-
|why ||that-OBL-as.much.as ||fish ||you.all-eat-PL-PRES-QU
Question
A question may be either a linguistic expression used to make a request for information, or else the request itself made by such an expression. This information may be provided with an answer....
||say-ADV ||him-to-ask-past
|}
- "Psa wufəba wutɕʼa jeda ʃoːt,"
- "If you eat fish, you get smarter,"
- {|class=wikitable
|-class=IPA
|psa ||wə-fə-ba ||wə-tɕʼa ||jada ||ʃ-awt
|-
|fish ||you-eat-if ||your-knowledge ||much ||become-FUT
|}
- "Wonaʁaːfa ʃəʁoɬa psa jeda ʃfən," qʼaqʼa.
- "so we eat a lot of fish," he answered.
- {|class=wikitable
|-class=IPA
|wana-ʁaafa ||ʃəʁʷaɬa ||psa ||jada ||ʃ-fə-n ||qʼa-qʼa
|-
|that-for ||we ||fish ||much ||we-eat-PRES ||say-PAST
|}