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Concept
Ubykh language
Summary
Ubykh or Päkhy is an extinct Northwest Caucasian language once spoken by the Ubykh people, a subgroup of Circassians who originally inhabited the eastern coast of the Black Sea before being deported en masse to the Ottoman Empire in the Circassian genocide.
The Ubykh language was 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 had 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 Убыхыбзэ (/wɨbɨx/), its name in the Adyghe language. It is known in linguistic literature by many names: variants of Ubykh, such as Ubikh, Oubykh (French); and its Germanised variant Päkhy (from Ubykh /twɜχɨ/).
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: /ɜχjɜzbɜtɕʼɜʁɜwdɨtwɐjlɜfɜqʼɜjtʼmɜdɜχ/ ('if only you had not been able to make him take [it] all out from under me again for them'). 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 (four of which, however, appear only in loan words).
Official source
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