Bats language

Bats is the endangered language of the Bats people, a North Caucasian minority group living in the Republic of Georgia. Batsbi is part of the Nakh branch of Northeast Caucasian languages. It had 2,500 to 3,000 speakers in 1975, with only one dialect. Batsbi is only used for spoken communication, as Bats people tend to use Georgian when writing.

History

Tusheti, the northeastern mountainous region of Georgia, is home to four tribes that consider themselves Tushetians: the Batsbi, the Gometsari, the Piriqiti, and the Chagma-Tush. Tsova-Tush people make up 50% of Tushetians. Only several hundred Tsova-Tush people speak the Bats language, whereas the other tribes have lost the language. Evidence from toponymics indicates that the other three Tushetian tribes formerly spoke Batsbi, suggesting that all Tushetians once did and over time the Georgian language replaced Batsbi.
By linguistic lineage, the Bats language can be traced back to Ghalghai origins.
The mountainous terrain preserved the culture and traditions of Tushetians, but the history of isolation makes it more difficult to document them as only a few records exist.
The first grammar of Batsbi, Über die Thusch-Sprache, was compiled by the German orientalist Anton Schiefner, making it into the first grammar of an indigenous Caucasian language based on sound scientific principles.

Classification & Distribution

Batsbi belongs to the Nakh branch of the Northeast Caucasian language family. The language is not mutually intelligible with either Chechen or Ingush, the other two Nakh languages.

Geographic distribution

Most speakers of Batsbi live in the village of Zemo-Alvani, on the Kakheti Plain, in the Akhmeta Municipality of Georgia. There are some families of Batsbi in Tbilisi and other bigger towns in Georgia.

Phonology

Vowels

Batsbi has a typologically common five-vowel system. Although some authors claim that all vowels but /u/ contrast in length, no minimal pairs are given in any studies of Batsbi, nor are many examples of long vowels available in the literature.
Batsbi also has the following diphthongs:,,,,, and.
All vowels and diphthongs have nasalised allophones that are the result of phonetic and morphophonemic processes: . Nasalised vowels are represented in the Mkhedruli script via a superscript ⟨ნ⟩ following the vowel in question, as in კნათე^ნ for .

Consonants

Batsbi has a large consonant inventory, relatively typical for a Nakh-Dagestanian language, containing ejectives, pharyngeals and uvulars. Unlike its close Nakh relatives, Chechen and Ingush, Batsbi has on the other hand retained the voiceless lateral fricative /ɬ/. Also notable is the presence of two geminate ejectives, /tʼː/ and /qʼː/, which are cross-linguistically rare.

Phonotactics

The most common syllable type in Batsbi is CVC. However, Batsbi words commonly contain sequences of two consonants, the second of which is often a fricative. Stop-stop clusters often contain an ejective. Those two-consonant clusters can occur in any position within the word, although less commonly word-finally. Sequences of three consonants do occur as well, although many are borrowings from Georgian. Like many clusters in non-Indo-European languages, consonant sequences in Batsbi often fail to conform to the sonority sequencing principle.
Of the words containing three-consonant onsets above, only /pstʼu/ "wife" and /tʼkʼmel/ "dust" are native to Batsbi, the rest being loanwords from Georgian.

Morphosyntax

Batsbi is an SOV language with ergative-absolutive alignment which makes extensive use of bound morphological derivation and inflection. It has both grammatical gender and several grammatical cases.

Pronouns

Personal pronouns - first and second persons

Batsbi pronouns encode three persons, two numbers, and clusivity for first person plural. Demonstratives work as third person pronouns.
It is noteworthy that for singular first person and second person almost always differ systematically by a single consonant, first person having /s/ and second person /ħ/, whereas the plural forms regularly have /txo/ for first person exclusive, and /ʃu/ for second person. Case endings are regular for all pronouns, shown below.

Third person pronouns/Demonstratives

In Batsbi, the distal demonstrative also serves as a third person pronoun. As such, the language does not encode gender in its pronouns. However, gender may still be indexed on verbs and adjectives.

	Singular	Plural
Nominative	ო o	ობი obi
Ergative	ოჴუს oqus	ოჴარ oqar
Genitive	ოჴუი^ნ oquĩ	ოჴრი^ნ oqrĩ
Dative	ოჴუინ oquin	ოჴარნ oqarn
Instrumental	ოჴუვ oquv
English	s/he	they

Adnominal demonstratives

Adnominal demonstratives code no gender in Batsbi.

Noun classes

As in other Nakh languages, Batsbi has several noun classes that are indexed through class prefixes on some vowel-initial verbs, adjectives, numerals, and a few other words. That is, nouns themselves show no morphologically marks for gender. Gender indexing is highly complex in the language, with subject gender agreement on intransitive verbs, but object agreement on transitive verbs. The table below shows gender agreement on verbs for three of the noun classes:

Number of classes

Holisky and Gagua analyse Batsbi as having five noun classes, whereas Alice Harris posits that Batsbi has eight genders in total, based on the behaviour of words that fail to conform to the patterns of the five major classes. The breakdown below follows Harris:

Exceptions and Nouns without inherent gender

According to Holisky and Gagua, the class with the largest number of nouns is the D-class, followed by the J-class. Class D markers are also used when the noun class is unknown and in clauses with mixed genders.
Additionally, some nouns referring to humans have no inherent gender, so that class agreement is contextual. These include the words for "teacher", "friend", "enemy", "neighbor" and others.
Gender is lexicalized in a few words such as vašu vs. jašu, in that -ašu could be translated as "sibling".

Gender agreement in adjectives

Only eight vowel-initial adjectives agree in gender with the noun they modify:

Gender	-aqqõ	-ut'q'ĩ	-avĩ	-acĩ	-uq'ĩ	-asẽ	-acũ	-axxẽ
Gender	-აჴჴო^ნ	-უტყი^ნ	-ავი^ნ	-აცი^ნ	-უყი^ნ	-ასე^ნ	-აცუ^ნ	-ახხე^ნ
M	v-aqqõ	v-ut'q'ĩ	v-avĩ	v-acĩ	v-uq'ĩ	v-asẽ	v-acũ	v-axxẽ
F	j-aqqõ	j-ut'q'ĩ	j-avĩ	j-acĩ	j-uq'ĩ	j-asẽ	j-acũ	j-axxẽ
D	d-aqqõ	d-ut'q'ĩ	d-avĩ	d-acĩ	d-uq'ĩ	d-asẽ	d-acũ	d-axxẽ
J	j-aqqõ	j-ut'q'ĩ	j-avĩ	j-acĩ	j-uq'ĩ	j-asẽ	j-acũ	j-axxẽ
Bd	b-aqqõ	b-ut'q'ĩ	b-avĩ	b-acĩ	b-uq'ĩ	b-asẽ	b-acũ	b-axxẽ
English	"big"	"small"	"light"	"heavy"	"thick"	"empty"	"short"	"long"

Grammatical number and case

Batsbi nouns are inflected for two numbers, singular and plural, and nine cases. Number inflection occurs via suffixation and/or root changes, and is chiefly unpredictable. Harris identifies nine suffixes for plural marking in the nominative case; note that vowel changes may also affect the root of the plural form.

Suffix	Nom-Singular	Nom-Plural	English
-i	საგ sag	საგი sag-i	deer
-iš	ნიყ niq'	ნიყიშ niq'-iš	road
-bi	ხე^ნ xẽ	ხენბი xen-bi	tree
-mi	დოკ dok'	დაკ'მი da'k'-mi	heart
-arč	ფჰჾუ pḥu	ფჰჾარჩ pḥ-arč	dog
-erč	ტჺირ tʼʕir	ტჺირერჩ tʼʕir-erč	star
-ar	კეჭ kʼeč̣	კაჭ'არ kʼa'č̣-ar	bundle
-er	ჲოპყ jopʼqʼ	აპყერ apʼqʼ-er	ash

Batsbi makes use of nine noun cases total. In the majority of nouns, the ergative and instrumental cases have a common form.

Verbs

Verbs in Batsbi encode not only tense, and aspect, but also gender, person, mood, and other categories. Person suffixes also encode whether the subject of the verb is ergative or absolutive. Person suffixes for are shown in the table below. Note that Batsbi verbs also agree with the object through a prefix denoting a noun class, not shown in the table that follows.
Batsbi has explicit inflections for agentivity of a verb; it makes a distinction between:

Postpositions

In Batsbi, a number of spatial and time relations are expressed via postpositions. In many cases, the nouns that precede the postposition occur in the dative case, although there are exceptions.

Postposition	Example	English
მაქ mak	ტივენ მაქ ბა t'iv-en mak ba	They ''are on the bridge
on	ტივენ მაქ ბა t'iv-en mak ba	They are on the bridge
კიკელ kʼikʼel	ტივენ კიკელ ვაიხნას tʼiv-en kʼikʼel vaixnas	I'' walked under the bridge
under	ტივენ კიკელ ვაიხნას tʼiv-en kʼikʼel vaixnas	I ''walked under the bridge
ფეხ pex	ნანენ ფეხ nan-en pex	Next to mother
next to	ნანენ ფეხ nan-en pex	Next to mother
ჰჾათხ ħatx	წენინ ჰჾათხე c'en-in ħatxe	In front of the house
in front of	წენინ ჰჾათხე c'en-in ħatxe	In front of the house''

Note that some of the directions or states which in English and Indo-European languages are expressed via prepositions, are in Batsbi expressed via locative cases.

Word order

The neutral word order in Batsbi is SOV.

Numerals

Like most of its relatives, Batsbi numerals are vigesimal, using 20 as a common base. This is mainly evident in the construction of higher decads, so:
When modifying nominals, the numeral precedes the noun it modifies.

1	11	1+10
2	12	2+10
3	13	3+10
4	14	4+10
5	15	5+10
6	16	6+10
7	17	7+10
8	18	8+10
9	19	20–1
10	20

21		20+1
22		20+2
30		20+10
31		+10
32		+10
40		2×20
50		+10
60		3×20
70		+10
80		4×20
90		+10
100		5×20
120		from 6x20
160		8×20
200		from 10x20
1000		from Georgian

In Bats, as in its closest relatives Chechen and Ingush, the number four begins with a noun-class marker, represented by D. This marker will agree in class with the class of the nominal which the number modifies, even if that nominal is not overtly expressed and is only apparent through pragmatic or discursive context, as in . This is seen in the word 'four' itself as well as its derivatives.