Proto-Northwest Caucasian language


Proto-Northwest Caucasian, also Proto-Adyghe-Abazgi or Proto-Adyghe-Abkhaz, is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Northwest Caucasian languages.

Phonology

Vowels

Proto-Northwest Caucasian, just like its descendants, had a very small vowel inventory, most commonly reconstructed as consisting of 2 vowels: and. Some degree of allophony might have existed, especially near labialized and palatalized consonants.
Some scholars assume that the rich consonantal distinctions appeared from a formerly rich vowel inventory, so ** would result in *, ** in *, and so on. However, this view is doubted due to the tendency of vowel systems to get richer over time, and the opposite being much more rare.

Consonants

There was a primary four-way distinction of almost all obstruents in Proto-Northwest Caucasian. The following variations have been proposed:
The only living descendants to have kept the 4-way distinction are the Shapsug and Bzhedug dialects. They both feature an unaspirated /C˭/, aspirated /Cʰ/, ejective /Cʼ/ and voiced /C̬/ distinction, where all the remaining languages have merged them to plain /C/, ejective /Cʼ/ and voiced /C̬/.
Additionally, there also were distinctions in labialization, palatalization and glottalization, with combinations of those also possible, such as in case of.

Sound shifts

  1. In Circassian and Abkhaz, gʷǝ is heart and in Ubykh it's gʲǝ.
The most noticeable changes are: