About Opentopia
Opentopia Directory Encyclopedia Tools

Ubykh language

Encyclopedia : U : UB : UBY : Ubykh language

Ubykh or Ubyx is a language of the Northwestern Caucasian group, spoken by the Ubykh people up until the early 1990s.

The word 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 Germanicised variant Päkhy.

Contents

Major features

Ubykh is distinguished by the following features, some of which are shared with other Northwest Caucasian languages:

Grammar

Phonology

See Ubykh phonology for information on the phonetics of Ubykh.

Morphosyntax

Ubykh is agglutinative and polysynthetic: 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).Dumézil, G. 1975 Le verbe oubykh: études descriptives et comparatives. Imprimerie Nationale: Paris.Hewitt, B. G. 2005 North-West Caucasian. Lingua 115: 91-145.

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): 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)-gʷara (literally one-(root)-certain) translates French un and Turkish bir: zanaynʃʷgʷara 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:

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 gave them to you all.

Adjectives, 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 preverbal elements: awəsχʲatxəɬqʼa you wrote it for me. However, there are a few postpositions: səʁʷa səgʲaatɕʼ like me; aχʲəlaaq near the prince.

Verbs

(Dumézil 1975 passim) A past-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 causatives are not uncommon. The conjunctions and and but are given with verb suffixes: 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: awəsχʲantʷən he gives it to you (normal; gender-neutral) for me, but compare aχasχʲantʷən he gives it to you (feminine) for me.

Adverbials

A few meanings covered in English by adverbs or auxiliary verbs are given in Ubykh by verb suffixes:

Questions

Questions 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?

Preverbs and determinants

Many local, prepositional, and other functions are provided by preverbal elements providing a large series of applicatives, 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.

Lexicon

Native vocabulary

Ubykh 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, 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 (χˁaχˁa to curry(comb) from χˁa 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:

However, some words may be as long as seven syllables (although these are usually compounds): ʂəqʷʼawəɕaɬaadətʃa staircase.

Slang and idioms

As with all other languages, Ubykh is replete with idioms. 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 Adyghe 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 [g 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:

Some words, usually much older ones, are borrowed from less influential stock: Colarusso (1994) sees χˁʷa pig as a borrowing from a proto-Semitic *huka, and agʲarə slave from an Iranian root.

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, gʲə, corresponds to the reflex gʷə 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 exist, one divergent dialect of Ubykh has been noted (in Dumézil 1965:266-269). Grammatically, it is similar to standard Ubykh, but has a very different sound system, which has collapsed into just 62-odd phonemes:

History

Ubykh was spoken in the eastern coast of the Black Sea around Sochi until 1864, when the Ubykhs were driven out of the region by the Russians. 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.

Tevfik Esenç at age 82
Enlarge
Tevfik Esenç at age 82

The Ubykh language died out on October 7 1992, when its last fluent speaker (Tevfik Esenç) died 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 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 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.

People who have published literature on Ubykh include

Trivia

Samples of Ubykh

All examples from Dumézil 1968.

faaχʲa tʼqʷʼa.kʷabʒa kʲʼaʁə.n a.za.χʲa.ʃə.na.n a.mʁʲa.n gʲə.kʲa.qʼa.n.
once two.man friend.ADV they.each-other.BEN.become.PL.ADV the.road.OBL on.enter(PL).past.PL
Once, two men set out together on the road.

a.f.awtə.nə mʁʲawəf a.χʷad(a).awtə.n a.kʲa.na.n, a.za.n fatɕʼ.aala ɕʷəbˁ(a).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
They went to buy some provisions for the journey; the one bought cheese and bread,

ajdə.χə.n.gʲə ɕʷəbˁ(a).aala ps(a).aala χʷada.n a.j.nə.w.qʼa.
other.of.ERG.and bread.and fish.and buy.ADV it.hither.he.bring.past
and the other bought bread and fish.

a.mʁʲa.n gʲə.kʲa.na.gʲə,
the.road.OBL on.enter(PL).PL.GER
While they were on the road,

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
the one who had bought the cheese asked the other, "You people eat a lot of fish;"

"saaba wana.n.gʲaafə psa ɕʷ.f.aa.nə.j?" qʼa.n ʁ(a).aa.dzʁa.qʼa.
why that.OBL.as-much-as fish you-all.eat.PL.PRES.QU say.ADV him.to.ask.past
"why do you eat fish as much as that?"

"psa wə.fə.ba wə.tɕʼa jada ʃ.awt,"
fish you.eat.if your.knowledge much become.FUT
"If you eat fish, you get smarter,"

"wana.ʁaafa ʃəʁʷaɬa psa jada ʃ.fə.n," qʼa.qʼa.
that.for we fish much we.eat.PRES say.PAST
"so we eat a lot of fish," he answered.

See also

References

External links


Northwest Caucasian languages
Abaza | Abkhaz | Adyghe | Kabardian | Ubykh

 

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.

Search Titles
0123456789
ABCDEFGHIJ
KLMNOPQRST
UVWXYZ?

E-mail this article to:

Personal Message: