Ubykh was a Northwest Caucasian language once spoken by the Ubykh people, an ethnic group of Circassians who originally inhabited the eastern coast of the Black Sea before being killed or deported en masse by Russia to the Ottoman Empire during the Circassian genocide.

Ubykh is ergative and polysynthetic, with a high degree of agglutination, with polypersonal verbal agreement and a very large number of distinct consonants but only two phonemically distinct vowels. With around eighty consonants, it has one of the largest inventories of consonants in the world, and the largest number for any language without clicks.

The name Ubykh is derived from (), from , its name in the Adyghe language. It is known in linguistic literature by many names: variants of Ubykh, such as Ubikh, (French); and its Germanised variant (from Ubykh ).

Major features

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 agglutinating and polysynthetic, 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 three 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). It has three phonemic vowels [ ] which correspond to Dumézil's [aa a ə] respectively and this is evident in the minimal triplet of ('I milk X'), ('I reap X'), and ('I milk them; I reap them').

Phonology

Ubykh has 84 phonemic consonants, a record high amongst languages without click consonants, but only 3 phonemic vowels. Four of these consonants are found only in loanwords and onomatopoeiae. There are nine basic places of articulation for the consonants and extensive use of secondary articulation, such that Ubykh has 20 different uvular phonemes. Ubykh distinguishes three types of postalveolar consonants: apical, laminal, and laminal closed. Regarding the vowels, since there are only three phonemic vowels, there is a great deal of allophony.

Orthography

Writing systems for the Ubykh language have been proposed,

Nouns

Nouns in Ubykh have three main 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 (e.g. '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.

There are X other cases that exist in Ubykh too:

  • instrumental case (-) was also treated as a case in Dumézil (1975).
  • instrumental-comitative case (-).
  • Another pair of postpositions, - ('to[wards]') and - ('for'), have been noted as synthetic datives (e.g. '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 (e.g. 'the man'). There is no indefinite article directly equivalent to the English a or an, but -(root)- (literally 'one'-(root)-'certain') translates French un : e.g. ('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'). The second person plural prefix - triggers this plural suffix regardless of whether that prefix represents the ergative, the absolutive, or an oblique argument:

  • Absolutive: ('I give you all to him')
  • Oblique: ('he gives me to you all')
  • Ergative: ('you all give it/them to me')

Note that, in this last sentence, the plurality of it (-) is obscured; the meaning can be either 'You all give it to me' or 'You all give them to me'.

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').

Pronouns

Free pronouns in all North-West Caucasian languages lack an ergative-absolutive distinction. as in .

Reduplication occurs in some roots, often those with onomatopoeic values (, from ; , [a loan from Adyghe]); and , ).

Roots and affixes can be as small as one phoneme. The word , , for instance, contains six phonemes, each 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): ().

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. As mentioned above, the phrase meaning "You loved him" translates literally as 'You saw him well'; similarly, "she pleased you" is literally 'she cut your heart'. The term ('Russian') has come to be a slang term meaning "infidel", "non-Muslim" or "enemy" (see History below).

Foreign loans

The majority of loanwords in Ubykh are derived from either Adyghe or Arabic, 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 Arabic and Adyghe. also appears to come from Adyghe, although it seems to have arrived earlier on. 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 Arabic, Circassian, and Russian equivalents:

  • ('to make a hole in, to perforate' from Iranic languages) =
  • ('tea' from Chinese) =
  • ('enemy' from Persian) =

Some words, usually much older ones, are borrowed from less influential stock: Colarusso (1994) sees ('pig') as a borrowing from Proto-Semitic *huka, and ('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 Adyghe and 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, Adyghe, and Kabardian. Ubykh also possesses groups of pharyngealised consonants. 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 Adyghe and Kabardian but shares many features with Abkhaz due to geographic influence;<!-- how so? Ubykh was not spoken in Abkhazia --> many later Ubykh speakers were bilingual in Ubykh and Adyghe.<!-- this actually suggests that Abkhaz language#Classification is right and that it is the other way round: Bilinguality suggests geographical/areal contact influence from Adyghe, rather than Abkhaz, which wasn't spoken in the same area, after all -->

Dialects

While not many dialects of Ubykh existed, one divergent dialect 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 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.

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. Arabic 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 7 October 1992, when its last fluent speaker, Tevfik Esenç, died.

The Abkhaz writer Bagrat Shinkuba's historical novel The Last of the Departed is about the Ubykh people.

People who have published literature on Ubykh include:

  • Brian George Hewitt
  • Georges Dumézil
  • Hans Vogt
  • John Colarusso
  • Tevfik Esenç
  • Viacheslav Chirikba

Notable characteristics

Ubykh had been cited in the Guinness Book of Records (1996 ed.) as the language with the most consonant phonemes, but since 2017 the !Xóõ language (a member of the Tuu languages) has been considered by the book to have broken that record, with 130 consonants. Ubykh has 20 uvular and 29 pure fricative phonemes, more than any other known language.

Samples

All examples from Dumézil 1968 and retranscribed by Fenwick.

Free English translation

Once, a sheep and a goat went into the field to go grazing. Where they went to graze, they came upon a gully, and the sheep, who was in front, jumped over it. When the sheep jumped, its tail flew up. The goat, who had been following behind it, began to laugh.

"What are you laughing for?" the sheep asked the goat. "I saw your arse, that's what I'm laughing about," said the goat. The sheep turned to the goat and said, "your arse is out in the open every day without you knowing it. And you laugh because you saw mine once."

See also

  • North Caucasian languages

Notes

: Fenwick lists a plural form for ('to give') but it is never used in the grammar even when a plural form is expected.

References

Bibliography

  • Chirikba, V. (1986). Abxazskie leksicheskie zaimstvovanija v ubyxskom jazyke (Abkhaz Lexical Loans in Ubykh). Problemy leksiki i grammatiki jazykov narodov Karachaevo-Cherkesii: Sbornik nauchnyx trudov (Lexical and Grammatical Problems of the Karachay-Cherkessian National Languages: A Scientific Compilation). Cherkessk, 112–124.
  • Chirikba, V. (1996). Common West Caucasian. The Reconstruction of its Phonological System and Parts of its Lexicon and Morphology. Leiden: CNWS Publications.
  • Colarusso, J. (1994). Proto-Northwest Caucasian (Or How To Crack a Very Hard Nut). Journal of Indo-European Studies 22, 1–17.
  • Fenwick, R. (2011). A Grammar of Ubykh. Munich: Lincom Europa.
  • Dumézil, G. (1957). Contes et Légendes des Oubykhs (Tales and Legends of the Ubykhs). Paris: L'Institut d'ethnologie.
  • Dumézil, G. (1959). Trois récits oubykhs (Three Ubykh narratives). Baden: Anthropos, vol. 54.
  • Dumézil, G. (1961). Etudes oubykhs (Ubykh Studies). Paris: Librairie A. Maisonneuve.
  • Dumézil, G. (1965). Documents anatoliens sur les langues et les traditions du Caucase (Anatolian Documents on the Languages and Traditions of the Caucasus), III: Nouvelles études oubykhs (New Ubykh Studies). Paris: Librairie A. Maisonneuve.
  • Dumézil, G. (1968). Eating Fish Makes You Clever. Annotated recording available via [http://lacito.vjf.cnrs.fr/archivage/tools/show_text.php?id=crdo-UBY_POISSON_SOUND] .
  • Dumézil, G. (1975). Le verbe oubykh: études descriptives et comparatives (The Ubykh Verb: Descriptive and Comparative Studies). Paris: Imprimerie Nationale.
  • Hewitt, B. G. (2005). North-West Caucasian. Lingua. 115, 91–145.
  • Mészáros, J. von. (1930). Die Päkhy-Sprache (The Ubykh Language). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  • Vogt, H. (1963). Dictionnaire de la langue oubykh (Dictionary of the Ubykh Language). Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.
  • Two proposals for a practical orthography for Ubykh
  • YouTube: Tevfik Esenç narrating the story of the two travellers and the fish in Ubykh
  • A number of narrations by Tevfik Esenç, WAV format
  • Ubykh word list and recordings
  • Gülcan Altan - Setenay (in Ubykh)
  • Song in Ubykh - Ҳаҟоуп ҳара