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 , 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
Germanicised variant
Päkhy.
Ubykh is distinguished by the following features, some of which are shared with other Northwest Caucasian languages:
* It is
ergative, making no syntactic distinction between the
subject of an
intransitive sentence and the
direct object of a
transitive sentence.
Split ergativity plays only a small part, if at all.
* It is highly
agglutinative, using mainly monosyllabic or bisyllabic roots, but with single
morphological words sometimes reaching nine or more syllables in length:
if only you had not been able to make him take (it) all out from under me again for them.
Affixes rarely fuse in any way.
* It has a simple
nominal system, contrasting just four
noun cases, and not always marking
grammatical number 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
phonologically complex as well, with 84 distinct
consonants (four of which, however, appear only in
loan words). However, according to some linguistic analyses, it only has two phonological vowels, but these vowels have a large range of
allophones because the range of consonants which surround them is so large.
Phonology
See
Ubykh phonology for information on the phonetics of Ubykh.
Morphosyntax
Ubykh 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.
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).
[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):
* direct or
absolutive case, marked with the bare
root; this indicates the
subject of an intransitive sentence and the
direct object of a transitive sentence (
a man)
* oblique-
ergative case, marked in -; this indicates either the subject of a
transitive sentence, targets of
preverbs, or
indirect objects which do not take any other suffixes (
(to) a child)
*
locative case, marked in -, which is the equivalent of English
in,
on or
at.
The
instrumental (-
by means of,
by using) was also treated as a case in Dumézil (1975). Another pair of
postpositions, -
to(wards) and -
for, have been noted as synthetic
datives (
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 -
the:
the man. There is no
indefinite article directly equivalent to the English
a or
an, 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 verb suffixes:
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:
*
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 (-) 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.
Verbs
(Dumézil 1975
passim)A
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 usually given with verb suffixes, but there is also a free particle for each:
*-
and (free particle , borrowed from Turkish);
*-
but, however, although (free particle
Pronominal
benefactives are also part of the verbal complex, marked with the preverb -, 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 -, 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.
Adverbials
A few meanings covered in
English by
adverbs or
auxiliary verbs are given in Ubykh by verb suffixes:
*
I need to eat it*
I can eat it*
I eat it all the time*
I am eating it all up*
I eat it too much*
I eat it againQuestions
Questions may be marked grammatically, using verb suffixes or prefixes:
*Yes-no questions with -: ?
did you see that?*Complex questions with -: ?
what is your name?Other types of questions, involving the pronouns
where and
what, may also be marked only in the verbal complex:
where are you going?,
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 -
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):
* 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 spaceThere 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.
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 -
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:
* - 2nd singular absolutive
* - 3rd singular dative
* - 3rd ergative
* - to give
* - ergative plural
* - present tense
However, some words may be as long as seven
syllables (although these are usually compounds):
staircase.
Slang and idioms
As with all other languages, Ubykh is replete with
idioms. The word
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
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 were borrowed from Turkish and Adyghe. also appears to be an Adyghe loan, although at a greater time depth. It is possible, too, that is a loan from Adyghe, since most of the few words with this phoneme are obvious Adyghe loans:
proud,
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) =
*
tea (Turkish) =
*
enemy (Turkish) =
Some words, usually much older ones, are borrowed from less influential stock: Colarusso (1994) sees
pig as a borrowing from a proto-
Semitic *
huka, and
slave from an
Iranian root.
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, , 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 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:
* have collapsed into .
* are indistinguishable from .
* 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.
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.
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
* Brian George Hewitt
* Catherine Paris
* Christine Leroy
* Georg Bossong
* Georges Dumézil
* Hans Vogt
* John Colarusso
* Julius von Mészáros
* Rieks Smeets
* Tevfik Esenç
* Wim Lucassen
Trivia
* Ubykh has been cited in the
Guinness Book of Records (1996 ed.) as the language with the most consonants, although it may have been overtaken by some of the
Khoisan languages.
* Ubykh has 20
uvular and 27 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.
Samples of Ubykh
All examples from Dumézil 1968.
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.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,other.of.ERG.and bread.and fish.and buy.ADV it.hither.he.bring.past
and the other bought bread and fish.the.road.OBL on.enter(PL).PL.
GERWhile they were on the road,that.cheese.
REL.buy.
PLUP.GER his.friend.towards you-all fish much you-all.eat.PL.
PRESthe one who had bought the cheese asked the other, "You people eat a lot of fish;"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?"fish you.eat.if your.knowledge much become.FUT
"If you eat fish, you get smarter,"that.for we fish much we.eat.PRES say.PAST
"so we eat a lot of fish," he answered.*
Caucasian languages* Colarusso, J. 1994
Proto-Northwest Caucasian, or, How to Crack a Very Hard Nut. Journal of Indo-European Studies 22: 1-17.
*
Dumézil, G. 1961
Etudes oubykhs. Librairie A. Maisonneuve: Paris.
* Dumézil, G. 1965
Documents anatoliens sur les langues et les traditions du Caucase, III: Nouvelles études oubykhs. Librairie A. Maisonneuve: Paris.
* Dumézil, G. 1968
Eating fish makes you clever. Annotated recording available via [
1].
* Dumézil, G. 1975
Le verbe oubykh: études descriptives et comparatives. Imprimerie Nationale: Paris.
* Hewitt, B. G. 2005
North-West Caucasian. Lingua 115: 91-145.
* Mészáros, J. von. 1930
Die Päkhy-Sprache. University of Chicago Press: Chicago.
* Vogt, H. 1963
Dictionnaire de la langue oubykh. Universitetsforlaget: Oslo.
*
Two proposals for a practical orthography for Ubykh
