Northwest Caucasian languages: Encyclopedia II - Northwest Caucasian languages - Main features

Northwest Caucasian languages - Main features

Northwest Caucasian languages - Phonetics

The entire family is characterised by a paucity of phonemic vowels (two or three, depending upon the analysis) coupled with rich consonantal systems that include many forms of secondary articulation. Ubykh (Ubyx), for example, had both the minimal number of vowels (two), and probably the largest inventory of consonants outside Southern Africa.

Linguistic reconstructions suggest that both the richness of the consonantal systems and the poverty of the vocalic systems may be the result of a historical process, whereby vowel features such as labialisation and palatalisation were reassigned to adjacent consonants. For example, ancestral */ko/ may have become /kʷa/ and */ke/ may have become /kʲa/, losing the old vowels */e/ and */o/ but gaining the new consonants /kʷ/ and /kʲ/. The linguist John Colarusso has further postulated that some instances of this may also be due to the levelling of an old grammatical class prefix system (so */w-ka/ may have become /kʷa/), on the basis of pairs like Ubykh /gʲə/ vs Kabardian and Abkhaz /gʷə/ heart.

Northwest Caucasian languages - Grammar

Northwest Caucasian languages have rather simple noun systems, manifesting only a handful of cases at the most, coupled with highly agglutinative verbal systems so complex that virtually the entire syntactic structure of the sentence is contained within the verb. They do not generally permit more than one finite verb in a sentence, which precludes the existence of subordinate clauses in the Indo-European sense; equivalent functions are performed by extensive arrays of nominal and participial non-finite verb forms (although Abkhaz appears to be developing limited subordinate clauses, perhaps under the influence of Russian).

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Main features", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki