Circassian is one of the three divisions of the
Northwest group of Caucasian languages, the other two being Abkhaz-Abaza and
the now extinct Ubykh (Pakhy). Though genetically related, the three languages
are mutually unintelligible, the lexical differences between them being quite
substantial. Some linguistic research suggests that more than 5,000 years ago
all Northwest Caucasians spoke proto-West Caucasian, much the same way as
Semites conversed in proto-Semitic. However, because of geographical
separation, the original language differentiated into three distinct entities:
proto-Circassian, proto-Abkhaz, and proto-Ubykh.
According to recent research, Ubykh was originally
closer to Abkhaz, but it subsequently underwent substantial Western Circassian
influence. Some travellers thought that Ubykh was a dialect of Adiga. It may be
possible that initially proto-West Caucasian split into proto-Circassian and
proto-Abkhaz-Ubykh, which later divided into proto-Abkhaz and proto-Ubykh.
These ancient languages were further ramified into divergent dialects.
There has been some interesting work on proto-Circassian, the forebear of all
Circassian dialects, and even a dictionary was published. More recently some
research was conducted on Proto-Abkhaz. Attempts have also been made at
reconstruction of the system of Proto-Northwest Caucasian.
Origin and ancient
relatives
Japhetic Theory and Sino-Caucasian
super-family
The Japhetic
Theory of the Soviet linguist N. Y. Marr proposed that all native language
families in the Caucasus, including Northwest, Northeast, and South Caucasian
belonged to the same ‘Japhetic’ language group, which in linguistics implied
common ancestry.
This theory, one of the products of Soviet ideological drive to emphasize
ethnic and linguistic unity of all Caucasian nations, was later discredited and
superseded by the theory of language super-families, in which languages and
language families that have common roots and basic lexicons are lumped together
into conglomerations called ‘super-families’.
The linguist S.
A. Starostin proposed the existence of the Sino-Caucasian super-family, which
encompasses Nakh-Daghestani and the related Hurrian-Urartian and Etruscan, and
Northwest Caucasian, namely Circassian, Abkhaz-Abaza, and Ubykh, and the
related Hattian. In addition, this super-family, also called ‘Dene-Caucasian’
or ‘Sino-Dene-Caucasian’, includes Sumerian and its proposed descendants
Iberian and Basque,
Pelasgian (pre-Hellenic language of Greece), Sino-Tibetan, Burushaski, spoken in the
Karakoram Mountains of Pakistan,
Yeniseian, and Na-Dene, which includes Tlingit and Eyak in western Canada and
Alaska and Navajo and Apache in southwest USA. It is thought that (Caucasian) Albanian, a dead
language that used to be spoken in the Eastern Caucasus, was also related to
Nakh-Daghestani. On the other hand, genetic connection between Kartvelian and
North Caucasian is negated in this scheme, apparent links between the two
groups being explained away as results of neighbourly contacts. Instead,
Kartvelian, together with Indo-European, is posited in the ‘Nostratic’
super-family.
Starostin and S. L. Nikolaev, who had been spearheading an
ambitious project to reconstruct proto-North Caucasian as the parent language
of both proto-Northeast Caucasian and proto-Northwest Caucasian, came up with a
comparative dictionary of North Caucasian languages. However, this work stirred
up a controversy between its proponents and Johanna Nichols, who expressed her
scepticism about these efforts to reproduce proto-North-Caucasian, negating the
existence of relations between Northeast Caucasian and any other language
group.
According to the other camp, it was the linguist Nikolai F. Troubetzkoy who
first demonstrated firm connectedness between the two groups by establishing
regular phonetic correspondences.
The third group in the Caucasian language family is
South Caucasian or Kartvelian: Georgian, Mingrelian, Svan, Adjar, and Laz, all
of which are spoken by about 4.5 million people in the Transcaucasus. Some
linguists dispute the existence of any genetic link between North and South
Caucasian. Also, suggested genetic links between the Caucasian languages and
other languages and language families (Basque, Semito-Hamitic, Burushaski,
Tibetan, Paleoasiatic, ancient languages of Asia Minor and Mesopotamia, etc.)
are open to serious doubt.
In 1919, E. Forrer established that Hattic, the oldest
known language in Asia Minor, but extinct since the early second millennium BC,
was not an Indo-European language, and proposed its kinship to ancient
Abkhazian and Circassian. R. Bleichsteiner arrived at this conclusion roughly
at the same time. Both researchers were struck by the structural similarities
between Hattic and Abkhazo-Circassian, especially the inordinate use of
prefixes.
General
characteristics
The phonological structure of the NW Caucasian
languages is unique, and is characterized by an extreme abundance of consonants
and a scarcity of vowels. Some of the dialects were entered in The Guinness
Book of Records on this account, before languages of greater number of
consonants were discovered.
The vowel systems of these languages are simple and stable. There is a tendency
to accumulate consonants in the same word. Declension is reduced to a minimum.
Verbal forms are very complex; gerundive and participial forms being much used.
Lexical material is analyzable into a small number of short roots and
grammatical morphemes show semantic transparency. Abkhaz-Abaza, Circassian and
Ubykh are characterised by large consonantal inventories, by mainly
monosyllabic root-morphemes, and by an extreme polypersonalism within the
verbal system, whereby virtually the entire syntactic structure of the clause
is recapitulated in the verbal complex. These features have been the subject of
study by a great number of scholars in the Soviet Union and the West.
From the perspective of a non-native speaker, Circassian presents a number of
difficulties, some of which are often insurmountable. According to Olli Salmi,
a Finnish expert on Kabardian, ‘the main problem of understanding Kabardian
verbs is the great number of prefixes that can precede a verb stem, with
pronominal prefixes in different places. Usually there are up to three pronominal
prefixes, but some verbal prefixes can take pronominal prefixes as well.
[These] places have to be indicated for non-native speakers.’ It has been
suggested that for each verb in a lexical list, the infinitive and third person
singular forms should be given at the very least, yet it is impossible for any
dictionary of manageable proportions to include all verb forms.
Language divisions
Circassian is made up of Eastern and Western language
groups. All Adigabze dialects are mutually intelligible. Face to face, an
Adigean and a Kabardian could soon learn the peculiarities of each other’s
dialect. Eastern Circassian is composed of two main dialects, Kabardian and
Beslanay. However, these dialects are so close that some linguists consider the
latter a divergent sub-dialect of the former. There has been a suggestion that
there existed in the middle of the 19th century a dialect intermediate between
Kabardian and Beslanay, which at first was thought to be an earlier form of
Kabardian proper.
Kabardian in Kabardino-Balkaria is divided into four
sub-dialects named after the main rivers in the republic: Balhq (Malka),
Bax’sen (Bakhsan), Terch (Terek), and Shejem (Chegem). Some authorities divide
the language into Greater and Lesser Kabardian, the dialects spoken in Kabarda
to the west and east of the Terch (Terek), respectively. Lesser Kabardian is
also informally called Jilax’steney. Outside the nominal republic there are two
more dialects, one spoken by the Christian community in Mozdok in North
Ossetia, and Kuban Kabardian in Adigea, spoken in a few villages. In the heyday
of Kabarda’s dominance in the 16th to 18th centuries, Kabardian influenced
Digor, a western dialect of Ossetian, in which Circassian loanwords are to be
found in the semantic fields of economic life, especially in agriculture and
animal husbandry.
Beslanay is spoken in a few villages in the Karachai-Cherkess Republic, and by
a larger group in Turkey in many villages in the region of Çorum in Anatolia.
The language was meticulously documented and recorded by Western scholars, like
Georges Dumézil and his disciple Catherine Paris, and by native speakers, such
as Orhan Alparslan.
Western Circassian shows more marked dialect-divisions
than Kabardian, which is on the whole comparatively homogeneous. This is a
reflection of the differences in tribal and social structures between Eastern
and Western Circassians. It comprises many dialects: Temirgoi, Abzakh,
Bzhedugh, Mokhosh, Shapsugh, Agwey, Hatuqwey, Nartkhuaj, Zhaney, Adaley, and so
on. Each Kiakh tribe had its own dialect, and some larger ones had sub-dialects
as well. However, after the end of the Russian-Circassian War many of these
dialects were lost either through extinction of their speakers or assimilation
by other Adiga tribes in the diaspora. At present, only representatives of
Temirgoi, Bzhedugh and Shapsugh are found in significant numbers in the
Caucasus. Abzakh is only spoken in one village, Hakurina-Habla, in the
Caucasus. Nevertheless, it is still possible to salvage many of these lost
dialects and record their characteristics and peculiarities.
Each branch of Circassian is represented by one
literary and official language: Kabardian in Kabardino-Balkaria and the
Karachai-Cherkess Republic, and Adigean in the Adigey Republic. Literary
Kabardian is based on the dialect of Greater Kabarda. Literary Adigey is an
advanced form of Temirgoi, with a substantive input of words and forms from
Bzhedugh and Shapsugh. It is to be noted that modern West Circassian is based
on the dialects of those tribes that remained in significant numbers in the
Caucasus after the exodus and which have escaped the worst. It is noteworthy
that both literary languages are based on the dialects spoken in the environs
of the capitals of the respective republics. One notable difference between
Kabardian and Adigean is that nouns in Adigean are subject to inflection,
whereas they are stable in Kabardian.
Literary languages employ modified forms of the Cyrillic alphabet, which were
introduced by the end of the 1930s. Both Kabardian and Adigean made the switch
from Latin to Cyrillic script in 1937. In each case the one additional letter
is the old Cyrillic capital I, which marks all ejectives in Adigean and some
ejectives in Kabardian.
There are 57 letters in standard Kabardian (as opposed
to symbols), 19 of which are digraphs (e.g. хъ, пI), five trigraphs (e.g. хъу),
and one tetragraph (кхъу). These combinations are used to represent the
inordinate number of consonants. In literary Adigean there are 50 letters of
which 18 are digraphs (e.g. жъ, жь, гъ). Cyrillic ordering is followed.
However, there is no uniform ordering of equivalent letters in the two
languages, which causes some confusion. In addition, there is often no uniform
representation of identical sounds, which fact could be rectified by common
consent between the two language communities.
Circassian Orthographies
Official
Kabardian Alphabet (Cyrillic)*
А
|
|
Б
|
В
|
Г
|
Гу
|
Гъ
|
Гъу
|
Д
|
Дж
|
Дз
|
Е
|
Ё
|
Ж
|
Жь
|
З
|
И
|
Й
|
К
|
Ку
|
КI
|
КIу
|
Къ
|
Къу
|
Кхъ
|
Кхъу
|
Л
|
Лъ
|
ЛI
|
М
|
Н
|
О
|
П
|
ПI
|
Р
|
С
|
Т
|
ТI
|
У
|
Ф
|
ФI
|
Х
|
Ху
|
Хь
|
Хъ
|
Хъу
|
Ц
|
ЦI
|
Ч
|
Ш
|
Щ
|
ЩI
|
Ы
|
|
Ю
|
Я
|
I
|
Iу
|
Ъ
|
Ь
|
* B. M. Kardanov (ed.),
Kabardinsko-russki slovar [Kabardian-Russian Dictionary], Kabardino-Balkarian
Science and Research Institute, Moscow: State Press of Foreign and National
Dictionaries, 1957, p12.
Official
Adigean Alphabet (Cyrillic)**
А
|
Б
|
В
|
Г
|
Гъ
|
Д
|
Дж
|
Дз
|
Е
|
Ё
|
Ж
|
Жъ
|
Жь
|
З
|
И
|
Й
|
К
|
Къ
|
КI
|
Л
|
Лъ
|
ЛI
|
М
|
Н
|
О
|
П
|
ПI
|
Р
|
С
|
Т
|
ТI
|
У
|
Ф
|
Х
|
Хъ
|
Хь
|
Ц
|
ЦI
|
Ч
|
Чъ
|
ЧI
|
Ш
|
Шъ
|
ШI
|
Щ
|
Ы
|
Э
|
Ю
|
Я
|
I
|
Ъ
|
Ь
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
** A. A. Hat’ene & Z. I.
Ch’erashe, Adigabzem Yizexef Gwshi’alh [Explanatory Dictionary of the Adigean
Language], Bzem, Literaturem, Istoriem ya Adige Nauchne-Issledovatelske
Institut [Adigean Science and Research Institute of Language, Literature and
History], Maikop: Circassian Book Press, 1960, pxvi.