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Encyclopedia :
U :
UB :
UBY :
Ubykh language |
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Ubykh languageUbykh is a language of the Northwestern Caucasian group, spoken by the Ubykh people up until the early 1990s. The word is derived from , 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 ) and its Germanicisedicised variant Päkhy.
Major featuresUbykh is distinguished by the following features, some of which are shared with other Northwest Caucasian languages:
VowelsUbykh has only two (arguably three) basic phonemic vowels: closed - schwa, as in English "about" - and open [a] and [aa] (which actually differ in quality but do not differ in length, although diachronically aa is derived from sequences of a + a). However, there are many vowel allophones, which are affected by the secondary articulation of the consonants that surround them. Ten basic phonetic vowels appear, derived from the two phonemic vowels adjacent to labialised or palatalised consonants. These ten phonetic vowels are and . The phonetic vowels are the standard five found in many of the world's languages, such as Georgian, and the same five vowels with increased phonetic length. In general, the following rules apply:
Both vowels appear without restriction finally, although when is unstressed finally, it tends to be dropped: father becomes the definite form the father. ConsonantsEighty-three basic consonants are noted at nine basic points of articulation. Labialisation is present on all classes barring the glottal, bilabial, labiodental and retroflex consonants; palatalisation may be noted on uvulars and velars. Pharyngealisation of consonants, rare among the world's languages, is a distinctive feature. The system is very symmetrical in the main - for instance, the sets of affricates are all complete - but some interesting asymmetries may be noted, such as the presence of a pharyngealised labiodental fricative in the absence of a non-pharyngealised version. An IPA rendition of the Ubykh consonant system is available in the Ubykh phonology article. All but three of the 83 consonants are found in native vocabulary. The plain velars [] are found only in loans: crow (from Turkish), slat, batten (from Abdzakh Adyghe), estate, legacy. As well, the pharyngealised labial consonants are almost exclusively noted in words where they are associated with another pharyngealised consonant (for instance, handful), but are occasionally found outside this context (the verb root is an example, meaning to explode, to burst). Finally, is mainly found in interjections and loans, with now the only real native word to contain the phoneme. Some consonants are extremely rare: is noted in the words Circassia and testis, and is noted in just five words: (four homophones meaning oak, to spy on, moustache and acorn), spark, firebrand, thick (of fabric) and coarse flour. The frequency of consonants in Ubykh is very variable; the two phonemes and account for over 20% of the consonant phonemes encountered. Far fewer allophones of consonants are noted, mainly because a small acoustic difference can be phonemic when so many consonants are involved. However, the alveolopalatal labialised fricatives were sometimes realised as alveolar labialised fricatives, and the uvular ejective stop in the past tense suffix - was often pronounced as glottal stop, due to the influence of the Kabardian and Adyghe languages. All consonants can appear word-initially. Restrictions on word-final consonants have not yet been investigated; however, Ubykh has a slight preference for open syllables (CV) over closed ones (VC or CVC). The pharyngealised consonants , , and have not been noted word-finally. GrammarUbykh is agglutinative and polysynthetic: we shall not be able to go back, if you had said it. Ubykh is often extremely concise in its word forms: if only you had been able to take it all out from under me again is just nine syllables, much shorter than the 19 syllables of the English translation. The boundaries between nouns and verbs in Ubykh is somewhat blurred. Any noun can be used as the root of a stative verb ( child, I was a child), and many verb roots can become nouns simply by the use of noun affixes ( to say, my speech, what I say). NounsThe noun system in Ubykh is quite simple. Ubykh has four noun cases (the oblique-ergative case may be two homophonous cases with differing function, thus presenting five cases in total): A pair of postpositions, - and -, have been noted as synthetic datives (cf. I will send it to the prince), but their status as cases is best discounted. Nouns do not distinguish grammatical gender; feminine gender is distinguished in the verb paradigm only. The definite article is -: the man. There is no indefinite article, but -(root)- (literally one-(root)-certain) translates French un and Turkish bir: a certain young man. Number is only marked on the noun in the ergative case, with -. The number marking of the absolutive argument is either by suppletive verb roots (e.g. he is in the car vs they are in the car) or by a verb suffix -: he goes, they go. Interestingly, the second person plural prefix - triggers this plural suffix regardless of whether that prefix represents the ergative, the absolutive or the oblique argument: Note that in this last sentence, the plurality of it (-) is obscured; the meaning can be either I give it to you all or I gave them to you all. Adjectives, in most cases, are simply suffixed to the noun: pepper with red becomes red pepper. Adjectives do not decline. Postpositions are rare; most locative semantic functions, as well as some non-local ones, are provided with preverbal elements: you wrote it for me. However, there are a few postpositions: like me; near the prince. VerbsA past-present-future distinction of verb tense exists (the suffixes - and - represent past and future) and an imperfective aspect suffix is also found (-, which can combine with tense suffixes). Dynamic and stative verbs are contrasted, as in Arabic, and verbs have several nominal forms. Morphological causatives are not uncommon. The conjunctions and and but are given with verb suffixes: Verbs agree with the subject, the direct object and the indirect object. Pronominal benefactives are also part of the verbal complex, marked with the preverb -: he gives it to you for me. Gender only appears as part of the second person paradigm, and then only at the speaker's discretion. The feminine second person index is -, which behaves like other pronominal prefixes: he gives it to you (normal; gender-neutral) for me, but compare he gives it to you (feminine) for me
AdverbialsA few meanings covered in English by adverbs or auxiliary verbs are given in Ubykh by verb suffixes:
Preverbs and DeterminantsMany local and other functions are provided by preverbal elements, 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 - with regard to a horse and - 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 - signifies on the earth or in the earth, for instance: they buried his body (lit. they put his body in the earth). Even more narrowly, the preverb - signifies that an action is done out of, into or with regard to a fire: I take a brand out of the fire. LexiconNative VocabularyUbykh syllables have a strong tendency to be CV, although VC and CVC also exist. Consonant clusters are not so large as in Abzhui Abkhaz or in Georgian, being almost always of two terms. Three-term clusters exist in two words - sun and to swell up, but the latter is a loan from Adyghe, and the former more often pronounced 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 I see you well. Reduplication occurs in some roots, often those with onomatopoeic values ( to curry(comb) from to scrape; , to cluck like a chicken (a loan from Adyghe); , to croak like a frog). Roots and affixes can be as small as one phoneme. The word they give you to him, for instance, contains six phonemes, and each is a separate morpheme:
Slang and IdiomsAs with all other languages, Ubykh is replete with idioms. The word door, for instance, is an idiom meaning either magistrate, court or government. Some slang terms and idioms can be shown to be caused by historical events; the term Russian, a Turkish loan, has come to be a slang term meaning infidel, non-Muslim or enemy (see section History). Foreign LoansThe majority of loanwords in Ubykh are derived from either Adyghe or Turkish. Towards the end of Ubykh's life, a large influx of Adyghe words was noted; Hans Vogt's Ubykh dictionary of some 3000 roots notes more than a hundred examples. The phonemes were borrowed from Turkish and Adyghe. also appears to be an Adyghe loan, although at a greater time depth. It is possible, too, that (fricative) is a loan from Adyghe. Many loanwords have Ubykh equivalents, but were dwindling in usage under the influence of Turkish, Circassian and Russian equivalents: Some words, usually much older ones, are borrowed from less influential stock: pig is believed to be borrowed from a proto-Semitic *huka, and slave from an Iranian root. EvolutionIn the scheme of Northwest Caucasian evolution, Ubykh is the most divergent language of the Abkhaz-Abaza branch, and has a number of features which are unique even within that 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, , corresponds to the reflex 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 is quite close, both lexically and grammatically, to Adyghe. DialectsWhile not many dialects of Ubykh exist, one divergent dialect of Ubykh has been noted. Grammatically, it is basically the same as standard Ubykh, but has a very different sound system, which has collapsed into just 62-odd phonemes: HistoryUbykh was spoken in the eastern coast of the Black Sea, around Sochi until 1875, when the Ubykhs were driven out of the region by the Russians. They eventually came to settle in Turkey, and came to use Turkish and Circassian for everyday communication. 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) passed away in his sleep. Fortunately, before that time thousands of pages of material and many audio recordings had been collected and collated by a number of linguists, including 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 except for the few phrases Evliya Celebi transcribed in the Seyahetname, but a substantial portion of the oral literature, along with some cycles of the Nart saga, was transcribed. 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 of all time. 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 difficult language. A partial Ubykh to English dictionary (in Microsoft Word format) is available for downloading. People who have published literature on Ubykh include Books
Sample of UbykhOnce, two men set out together on the road.
They bought some provisions for the journey. The one bought cheese and bread;
the other bought bread and fish.
While they were on the road,
the one who had bought the cheese asked the other, "You people eat a lot of fish;"
"why do you eat fish as much as that?"
"If you eat fish, you get smarter,"
"so we eat a lot of fish," he answered. See also
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