Talk:Ubykh language

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[edit] Seeking other Ubykh enthusiasts

I want to invite any Wikipedia user who stumbles across this page to leave a note at my user page. I'm learning Ubykh, but it's an extremely slow process, so if there's anyone else out there in Wiki-land who'd like to help, or to learn it themselves, please let me know. thefamouseccles 23:17 September 10, 2003 (UTC)

[edit] Number of consonants

I noticed, while creating the SAMPA version of the consonant chart, that the introduction states that there are 83 consonants in the inventory, but the chart only lists 71. Which is correct? I assume that, at the very least, / ’ / (glottal stop) is missing. (Then again, Korean also has ejectives with no glottal stop phoneme.) pgdudda 01:39 Apr 30, 2003 (UTC)

My apologies - I was the one who wrote this article. You have made a good point - a few series of labialised consonants are missing from this chart. You assume correctly that glottal stop is missing; it is only an allophone of q' in Ubykh, and is not present phonemically. The phoneme chart in Ubykh language should now contain the 81 consonant phonemes; the vowels remain the same. There are no alveolar labialised fricatives, these having merged with the alveolopalatal labialised fricatives. Thanks for pointing out my error. thefamouseccles 22:53 May 8, 2003 (GMT)

No problem, that's why I asked. I'm curious about something, though. After revising the SAMPA version of the chart, I notice that you cite a 4 points of articulation for coronal fricatives. Might there be a distinction of apical vs. laminal, rather than 4 separate points of articulation? The difference between, say, apical palatal vs. true retroflex fricatives is quite small. pgdudda 21:15 May 10, 2003 (UTC)
True; the distinction between "alveolar" and "postalveolar" is an apical vs laminal distinction, as in English. However, the IPA chart I refer to glosses these as two separate points of articulation; I'm not sure what the phonetic distinction is, having had no formal phonetic (or linguistic, for that matter) training. If this distinction is better, by all means I will change the table. This, then, would leave Ubykh with three points of articulation for coronal fricatives. thefamouseccles 02:54 May 12, 2003 (GMT)
Hrm... are you referring to the difference between IPA /s/ and /ʃ/ in English, which does indeed involve slightly different places of articulation (the former usually apical, and the latter always laminal)? Or to IPA /s̺/ and /s̻/, a true apical vs. laminal distinction found in Basque? Just wondering...... pgdudda 01:32 May 14, 2003 (UTC)
Yes, the difference appears to be fairly much the same as in English. Bernard Comrie's The Languages Of The Soviet Union posits these phonemes as "palato-alveolar", but this is the term used for the Georgian and Avar postalveolar fricatives in this book as well, which do correspond to the English sh sound. thefamouseccles 01:45 May 16, 2003 (GMT)
After laying hands on some X-ray films of the phonemes, it appears that the lamino-alveolar coronal differs only slightly from that in English; the Ubykh one lacks the sublingual cavity typical of the English version. Acoustically, the difference is negligible, and can only be heard by an extremely good ear. thefamouseccles 22:34, September 15, 2003 (UTC)

My apologies again; after reviewing the Ubykh phonetic chart in Bernard Comrie's Languages Of The Soviet Union, it would appear that I inserted two phonemes where none exist (the alveolar labialised fricatives I posited have merged with the alveolopalatal labialised fricatives), and omitted three which do (labialised alveolar stops). This has been changed in the Ubykh language article, now reflecting the 83 consonant phonemes that Ubykh has. thefamouseccles 01:42 May 16, 2003 (GMT)

[edit] Useful link?

Hi. i stumbled & fell & dropped you this link:

http://email.eva.mpg.de/~vandenbe/Mekegi.html

in case you, havent been there before. (the author is sadly no longer with us.)

- peace

Ish ishwar 02:13, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Thanks! I haven't much experience with the Northeast Caucasian languages, but this is certainly interesting. thefamouseccles 10:29, 2 Dec 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Brackets and slashes

It seems phonetic [brackets] and phonemic /slashes/ are mixed up in this article. BenctPhilipJonsson 21:23, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Be bold! No-one will kill you for editing - that's what a Wiki is all about. Plus this language is something I hold very dear to my heart, and I want this page to be the best it can be. I was under the impression that the convention was square brackets for phonetic or phonemic transcriptions, and slashes for conventional orthographic representations. thefamouseccles 03:40, 16 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Well, there is broad(er) and narrow(er) phonetic notation, and a broad notation may be practically equivalent to phonemic. But when you put something between slashes, you're making a theoretical claim, and technically you aren't tied down by phonetics at all. So, for example, if you decide that <h> and <ng> are allophonic in English, you could transcribe <hang> as /NaN/ or some such. Or you could transcribe <sky> as /sgai/, if you are claiming that it has the same stop as <guy>. So if the standard orthography is perfectly phonemic, yes, you could use it between slashes. This can be handy with historical reconstructions. You may reconstruct a phoneme for a protolanguage, but have no idea what it sounded like. In such cases people choose whichever symbol they like, and purposefully do not use the IPA, which might give a misleading impression of phonetic accuracy.
Here are the conventions:
  • [phonetic notation] (at any level of detail; no theoretical claims involved)
  • /phonemic notation/
  • |morphophonemic notation|
  • <original orthography>
The pipes represent the "underlying" form. So, for example, if you decide that the English plural suffix is underlyingly voiced (that is, essentially a z that is devoiced in some environments), the word <cats> would be a phonemic /kats/, but morphophonemically |katz|. However, the latter two bracket conventions aren't as well known as the first two. kwami 06:10, 2005 Jun 20 (UTC)
hi. just to emphasize kwami's point with an example. Historical linguist, Mark Hale, has published a paper concerning the Marshallese language where he represents the 4 vowels with pictures of a cup of coffee, a soccer ball, etc. he did this so that no one would misinterpret the vowel symbols (as there is no suitable IPA symbol for these underspecified vowels). (plus he has a sense of humor). peace – ishwar  (speak) 21:31, 2005 July 25 (UTC)

[edit] Päkhy

Noticed Päkhy in the refs. Does the person who added the ref know the material? I've only heard that Päkhy was spoken far to the west of the other Caucasic languages, but it appears from wikipedia that it was a local name for Ubykh. Was the Päkhy community in western Anatolia a "recent" (post-Ottoman conquest or post Russian-conquest) emigre population of Ubykh, or did they have a long history in the region? kwami 02:33, 1 November 2005 (UTC)

"Päkhy" is simply the German name for the same people. The Ubykhs had two self-designations, tʷaχə (the native term, phonetically [t͡paχə], from thich the German form comes) and wəbəx (the designation used by the Abdzakh Adyghe, who were in very close proximity to the Ubykhs in the Caucasus; this is the source of the English and French forms of the word). The Ubykh population in Anatolia was the Ubykh people; the nation was uprooted by the Russian invasion, and moved en masse to western Turkey in 1864. So yes, I guess you could say that it is spoken far to the west of the other Caucasic languages. :) However, Ubykh's original, pre-1864 centre was northwestern Abkhazia, around Sochi, which is pretty much as far west as you can get in the Caucasus AFAIK. (I've recently read in John Colarusso's Nart Sagas of the Caucasus that the Abkhazian government, if it can get full independence from Georgia, plans to release the region for the Ubykhs to "come home to".) Just out of interest, where did you hear about the term "Päkhy"? I hadn't heard it until I was well into studying the language. thefamouseccles 01:37, 2 Nov 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for the info. It's been several years, and I no longer remember where I came across the word. The context, however, seemed to give Pakhy as evidence that the Caucasic languages were originally more widespread than their current extent, which you've laid to rest. (Though they presumably were, of course, from other evidence.) kwami 01:53, 2 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Phonology to Phonology page

Perhaps the bulk of the Phonetics section should be moved to the Ubykh phonology page? Jorge Stolfi 22:56, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Ubykh in userboxes

It is now possible to have Ubykh as one of your user languages in the Wikipedia Userboxes, thanks to Wikipedia:Babel. The relevant ISO tag is uby. Thefamouseccles 08:57, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Was/is

If it's a dead language, shouldn't a lot of the article switch to past tense? AEuSoes1 08:05, 7 August 2006 (UTC)

I suppose there is a logical reason for that. However, most other pages on extinct languages (Latin, Akkadian and Sanskrit, for instance) also use present tense when giving information about the language itself - phonology, grammar and so on. Thefamouseccles 12:14, 13 August 2006 (UTC)