Ubykh
Extinct. The last Ubykh speaker, Tevfik Esenç, died in Istanbul at the age of 88 in 1992.
Ubykh is member of the Northwest Caucasian language family.
Until 1864 the Ubykh people lived along the eastern shore of the Black Sea in the area of Sochi (Russia, Krasnodarskiy Kray, northwest of Abkhazia). The entire Ubykh population left its homeland when Russia conquered the Muslim northern Caucasus in the 1860s. Most of the people migrated to Turkey.
The sound system is characterised by a large consonant inventory. Ubykh has more than 80 consonant phonemes. The basic set-up of the system is the phonological opposition between voiced vs. voiceless aspirate vs. voiceless ejective obstruents. The widespread use of secondary articulatory features multiplies the number of consonant phonemes. There are only two vowel phonemes: an open /a/ and a closed central vowel /ə/.
Ubykh has two formally marked cases: The ergative case is marked by -m and the absolutive case by -r. The ergative case is used with the subject of transitive ('agentive') verbs. The absolutive case is used with subjects of intransitive ('factitive') verbs and with objects of transitive ('agentive') verbs.
The Ubykh verb is polysynthetic and has an intricate morphology. The verb is the absolute center of the sentence and mirrors the syntactic structure of the sentence by means of incorporation. The conjugation is characterised by a split into transitive ('agentive') and intransitive ('factitive') verbs. The grammatical categories person, number, tense, mood, version, potentiality, comitativity, sociativity, reciprocity, and inferenciality are expressed on the verb. Agreement is marked by cross-referencing pronominal affixes. The verb can agree with subject, direct object, and indirect object at the same time.
Ubykh is an ergative language: intransitive subjects and direct objects are marked in the same way on the participants of the verb and on the verb, transitive subjects are treated differently.
Word-order is predominantly SOV, the possessor precedes the possessed, the adjective usually follows the head noun, relative sentences precede the head and the language has postpositions rather than prepositions.
<<<Back Northwest Caucasian Languages
An Ubykh Sampler
Compiled, translated and analyzed By John Colarusso, 2001
Tevfik Esenç
The Last Ubykh. He was the last person
able to speak the language they called Ubykh
