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Concept
Archi language
Summary
Archi ɑrˈtʃiː is a Northeast Caucasian language spoken by the Archis in the village of Archib, southern Dagestan, Russia, and the six surrounding smaller villages.
It is unusual for its many phonemes and for its contrast between several voiceless velar lateral fricatives, /𝼄, 𝼄w, 𝼄ː, 𝼄ːw/, voiceless and ejective velar lateral affricates, /k͡𝼄, k͡𝼄w, k͡𝼄ʼ, k͡𝼄wʼ/, and a voiced velar lateral fricative, /ʟ̝/. It is an ergative–absolutive language with four noun classes and has a remarkable morphological system with irregularities on all levels. Mathematically, there are 1,502,839 possible forms that can be derived from a single verb root.
The classification of the Archi language has not been definitively established. Peter von Uslar felt it should be considered a variant of Avar, but Roderich von Erckert saw it as closer to Lak. The language has also been considered as a separate entity that could be placed somewhere between Avar and Lak. The Italian linguist Alfredo Trombetti placed Archi within an Avar–Ando–Dido group, but today the most widely recognized opinion follows that of the Soviet scholar Bokarev, who regards Archi as one of the Lezgian–Samur group of the Dagestan languages. Schulze places it in the Lezgian branch with all other Lezgian languages belonging to the Samur group.
Archi has, like its Northeast Caucasian relatives, a very complicated phonological system, with Archi being an extreme example. It has 26 vowel phonemes and, depending on analysis, between 74 and 82 consonant phonemes.
Archi has a symmetric six-vowel system (/i e ə a o u/).
All vowels except for /ə/ can occur in five varieties: short, pharyngealized, high tone, long (with high tone), and pharyngealized with high tone (e.g. /a/, /aʕ/, /á/, /áː/, and /áʕ/). Of all these, only /ə/ and /íʕ/ do not occur word-initially. Examples of non-initial /íʕ/ are /díʕt͡ʃa/ ('to be fat') and /iʕntíʕmmaj/ ('brain').
Of all known languages, Archi has the world's largest phonemic non-click consonant inventory, with only the recently extinct Ubykh of the Northwest Caucasian languages having a few more.
Official source
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