Ubykh language

Ubykh is an extinct Northwest Caucasian language once spoken by the Ubykh people, an ethnic group of Circassian nation who originally inhabited the eastern coast of the Black Sea before being deported en masse to the Ottoman Empire during the Circassian genocide.
The Ubykh language 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 Убых, from Убыхыбзэ, its name in the Adyghe language. It is known in linguistic literature by many names: variants of Ubykh, such as Ubikh, Oubykh ; and its Germanised variant Päkhy.

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: . 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. It has three phonemic vowels which correspond to Dumézil's respectively and this is evident in the minimal triplet of , , and .

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, but there has never been a standard written form. However, Fenwick gives a guide for their "practical Ubykh orthography", intended to be typeable on a Turkish computer keyboard, which is shown below:

IPA	Orthography	IPA	Orthography	IPA	Orthography	IPA	Orthography
	a		z		ç'		q'
	e		s		j		ğ
	ı		r		ş		x
	b		n		ju		qi
	p		l		şu		q'i
	p'		lh		cr		ği
	v		l'h		çr		xi
	f		du		ç'r		qu
	w		tu		y		q'u
	m		t'u		g		ğu
	bh		ci		k		xu
	ph		çi		k'		qh
	p'h		ç'i		ĝ		q'h
	vh		ji		x̂		ğh
	wh		şi		gi		xh
	mh		cü		ki		qö
	d		çü		k'i		q'ö
	t		ç'ü		gu		ğö
	t'		jü		ku		xö
	dz		şü		k'u		h
	ts		c		x̂u		jr
	ts'		ç		q		şr

Grammar

Morphosyntax

Ubykh is agglutinative and polysynthetic: , . It is often extremely concise in its word forms.
The boundaries between nouns and verbs is somewhat blurred. Any noun can be used as the root of a stative verb, and many verb roots can become nouns simply by the use of noun affixes.

Nouns

The noun system in Ubykh is quite simple. It has three main noun cases :

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
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
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.
instrumental-comitative case.
Another pair of postpositions, - and -, have been noted as synthetic datives, but their status as cases is also best discounted.

Nouns do not distinguish grammatical gender. The definite article is . There is no indefinite article directly equivalent to the English a or an, but -- translates French un : e.g. .
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 or by verb suffixes: , . The second person plural prefix - triggers this plural suffix regardless of whether that prefix represents the ergative, the absolutive, or an oblique argument:

Absolutive:
Oblique:
Ergative:

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: with becomes . Adjectives do not decline.
Postpositions are rare; most locative semantic functions, as well as some non-local ones, are provided with preverbal elements: . However, there are a few postpositions: , .

Pronouns

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

		First person	Second person	Third person
Singular	Standard
Singular	AB
Plural	Standard
Plural	Tevfik Esenç
Plural	Osman Güngür

Possession

Possessed nouns have their plurality marked with the affix.

Verbs

A past present future distinction of verb tense exists and an imperfective aspect suffix is also found. Dynamic and stative verbs are contrasted, as in Arabic, and verbs have several nominal forms. Morphological causatives are not uncommon. The conjunctions and are usually given with verb suffixes, but there is also a free particle corresponding to each:

- 'and' ;
- 'but'

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: .

Agreement

Oblique 1 markers are limited to marking the agreement of a noun before a relational preverb and Oblique 2 markers are used for not only marking agreement with local and directional preverbs but also the simple oblique, or dative, arguments.

		Absolutive	Oblique	Ergative
First person	sg.		~	~
First person	pl.		~	~
Second person	sg.
Second person	pl.		~	~
Second person	sg.
Third person	sg.
Third person	pl.

The second-person is an archaic pronoun used to indicate that the person being referred to is a female, or heckling the speaker in some way.

Dynamic verb conjugation

Dynamic Ubykh verbs are split up in two groups: Group I which contain the simple tenses and Group II which contain derived counterpart tenses. Only the Karaclar dialect uses the progressive tense and the plural is unknown.
The singular-plural distinction is used when the subject, the ergative, is singular or plural.
Square brackets indicate elided vowels; parenthesis indicate optional parts of the stem; and the colon indicates the boundary of a morpheme.

	Singular	Plural
Simple Past	-	-
Mirative Past	-	-
Present	-	-
Future I	-	-
Future II	-	-
	-	?

Simple past

The verbs in the simple past tense are conjugated with - in the singular and - in the plural.
Examples:

- to say → he said
- to eat → he ate
- to know → he knew
- to go → he went

Plurality	Person	Ubykh	Meaning
Singular	First-person		I ate
Singular	Second-person		you ate
Singular	Third-person		he ate
Plural	First-person		we ate
Plural	Second-person		you ate
Plural	Third-person		they ate

Mirative past

The verbs in the mirative past tense are conjugated with - in the singular and - in the plural.
Examples:

- to say → he said apparently
- to eat → he ate apparently
- to know → he knew apparently
- to go → he went apparently

Plurality	Person	Ubykh	Meaning
Singular	First-person		I ate apparently
Singular	Second-person		you ate apparently
Singular	Third-person		he ate apparently
Plural	First-person		we ate apparently
Plural	Second-person		you ate apparently
Plural	Third-person		they ate apparently

Present

The verbs in the present tense are conjugated with - in the singular and - in the plural.
Examples:

- to say → he says
- to eat → he eats
- to know → he knows
- to go → he goes

Plurality	Person	Ubykh	Meaning
Singular	First-person		I eat
Singular	Second-person		you eat
Singular	Third-person		he eats
Plural	First-person		we eat
Plural	Second-person		you eat
Plural	Third-person		they eat

Future I

The verbs in the present tense are conjugated with - in the singular and - in the plural. It conveys a sense of certainty, immediacy, obligation, or intentionality.
Examples:

- to say → he certainly will say
- to eat → he certainly will eat
- to know → he certainly will know
- to go → he certainly will go

Plurality	Person	Ubykh	Meaning
Singular	First-person		I certainly will eat
Singular	Second-person		you certainly will eat
Singular	Third-person		he certainly will eat
Plural	First-person		we certainly will eat
Plural	Second-person		you certainly will eat
Plural	Third-person		they certainly will eat

Future II

The verbs in the present tense are conjugated with - in the singular and - in the plural. It conveys a generic sense of the future as well as an exhortative sense such as: .
Examples:

- to say → he will say
- to eat → he will eat
- to know → he will know
- to go → he will go

Plurality	Person	Ubykh	Meaning
Singular	First-person		I will eat
Singular	Second-person		you will eat
Singular	Third-person		he will eat
Plural	First-person		we will eat
Plural	Second-person		you will eat
Plural	Third-person		they will eat

Static verb conjugation

In all dialects and speakers, only two static tenses exist: present and past.

	Singular	Plural
Present	-	-
Past	-	-

Aspect

There are five basic aspects that exist besides the aspects that exist within the Ubykh tense system. They are: habitual, iterative, exhaustive, excessive, and potential.
A speaker may combine one of these aspects with another to convey more complex aspects in conjunction with the tenses.

habitual	-
iterative	-
exhaustive	-
excessive	-
potential	-

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

Questions

s may be marked grammatically, using verb suffixes or prefixes:

Yesno questions with -: ?
Complex questions with -: ?

Other types of questions, involving the pronouns 'where' and 'what', may also be marked only in the verbal complex: , .

Preverbs and determinants

Many local, prepositional, and other functions are provided by preverbal elements providing a large series of applicatives, and here Ubykh shows remarkable complexity. Two main types of preverbal elements exist: 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 - and -.
For simple locations, there are a number of possibilities that can be encoded with preverbs, including :

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 space

There is also a separate directional preverb meaning 'towards the speaker': -, 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: . Even more narrowly, the preverb - signifies that an action is done out of, into or with regard to a fire: .

Lexicon

Native vocabulary

Ubykh syllables have a strong tendency to be CV, although VC and CVC also exist. Consonant clusters are not as large as in Abzhywa Abkhaz or in Georgian, rarely being larger than two terms. Three-term clusters exist in two words - and , 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. For instance, the verb to love is expressed as , as in .
Reduplication occurs in some roots, often those with onomatopoeic values.
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 : .

Slang and idioms

As with all other languages, Ubykh is replete with idioms. The word , 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 , an Arabic loan, has come to be a slang term meaning "infidel", "non-Muslim" or "enemy".

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 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: , .
Many loanwords have Ubykh equivalents, but were dwindling in usage under the influence of Arabic, Circassian, and Russian equivalents:

Some words, usually much older ones, are borrowed from less influential stock: Colarusso sees as a borrowing from Proto-Semitic *huka, and from an Iranian root; however, Chirikba regards the latter as being of Abkhaz origin.

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; many later Ubykh speakers were bilingual in Ubykh and Adyghe.

Dialects

While not many dialects of Ubykh existed, one divergent dialect of Ubykh has been noted. Grammatically, it is similar to standard Ubykh, but has a very different sound system, which had 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.

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. Before his death, thousands of pages of material and many audio recordings had been collected and collated by a number of linguists, including Georges Charachidzé, Georges Dumézil, Hans Vogt, George Hewitt and A. Sumru Özsoy, 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 Çelebi 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 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. He published a collection of Ubykh folktales in the late 1950s, and the language soon attracted the attention of linguists for its small number of phonemic vowels. Hans Vogt, a Norwegian, produced a monumental dictionary that, in spite of its many errors, 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, 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 with the most recent treatise being Fenwick's A Grammar of Ubykh, who was also working on a dictionary.
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:

Notable characteristics

Ubykh had been cited in the Guinness Book of Records as the language with the most consonant phonemes, but since 2017 the !Xóõ language 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."