The Caucasian Languages of The Caucasus Mountains

hello everyone welcome to the Laing focused Channel and my name is Paul today we're going to talk about the Caucasian languages the Caucasian languages are named after the Caucasus Mountains which are situated between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea and more or less serve as a geographic border between Europe and Asia the Caucasian languages are spoken in and around the Caucasus Mountains the caucasian languages are actually not a language family they are a regional grouping of languages and within that regional grouping there are several language families the families normally included within the regional grouping our car trillion which used to be referred to as South Caucasian northwest caucasian and northeast caucasian there are other language families present in the caucasus including indo-european semitic Turkic and mongolic but they're distributed over a wider area and have indigenous speakers outside of the region these particular three language families are indigenous only to the Caucasus which is what makes them members of this group of languages car trilliant has around 5.2 million speakers mainly in Georgia around 4 million of them speak Georgian in Georgia of course but also by a minority over the border in Turkey Azerbaijan and Russia the other car trillion languages armed ingre lien laws which has spoken mainly on the southeast coast of the Black Sea and Turkey and spun spun branched off from proto car villian around 5,000 years ago and the other branch split into Kart or Georgian and zon around 4000 years ago then zan began diverging into Ming gree lien and laws in the 7th century when their speakers were separated into different territories mean gree lien and laws are the closest car trillion languages and have some degree of mutual intelligibility however it's worth noting that many or even most speakers of Ming Grillin laws and spawn the ones who live in Georgia that is also speak Georgian and Georgian has traditionally been the written language for all court villian speakers so of course those bilingual speakers can also understand Georgian Northeast Caucasian languages are spoken by around 3.8 million people mainly in Dagestan Chechnya Ingushetia and parts of northern Azerbaijan the most widely spoken languages include Chechen with 1.5 million speakers of are with 1 million lesbian with around 800,000 and English with around 500,000 northwest caucasian languages are spoken by around 2.5 million people mainly in Abkhazia the khabar dinoball Korean Republic the Karachi Cherokees Republic and Adi gaya there are 4 or 5 main languages kabardian or East Circassian with around 1.6 million speakers Adi gay or West Circassian with around half a million speakers many of them in Turkey in the Middle East AB cos with around a hundred and ninety thousand speakers and Abaza with around fifty thousand I should point out that the Circassian people also known as the Adi gay people consider both the east and west branches to be the same language and refer to all varieties as Adi gay and they are mutually intelligible with each other there's also the extinct Ubah language which was quite an intriguing language as we'll see later the North West and the North East Caucasian languages are thought by some linguists to be branches of a single language family the North Caucasian languages but this is still controversial car trillion is widely accepted to be unrelated to them yet despite the huge diversity within these three language families there are also numerous shared features due to mutual regional influence in other words the sprach both affect common features all Caucasian languages are continental languages meaning that consonants are heard with more frequency than vowels in cart villians specifically there are lots of big consonant clusters for example goonie this means they peel us of course the meaning is nonsensical but it's an example of how big the consonant clusters can potentially get the Caucasian languages are also known for their rich consonant inventories in other words they have lots of distinct consonants the degree to which this is true depends on the language family and on the individual language the core trillion languages have comparable few distinct consonants 28 for Georgian and 34 laws that's similar to the 28 of Arabic and the 36 of Russian note that I'm talking about consonant sounds not written consonant symbols the Northwest and northeast Caucasian languages have much larger inventories especially in northwest caucasian the now extinct uber language had over eighty distinct consonants and Circassian has fifty to sixty consonants depending on the dialect that may sound impossible how could there be so many consonants well it's in large part due to secondary articulation if a consonant has secondary articulation that basically means that it's pronounced in two different places in the vocal tract at the same time like two consonants at the same time one primary consonant and then one extra consonant pronounced along with it that secondary articulation might be palatalization with the tongue raised towards the hard palate labial ization articulation with the lips valorization the back of the tongue raises towards the velum go authorization the closure of the glottis and so on one type of consonant with secondary articulation that's common to the caucasian language families is ejected consonants in an objective consonant the glottis at the back of your throat is closed and the larynx is quickly raised which raises the air pressure in the mouth this creates a popping sound when the primary consonant is produced all of the languages have eject of stops let's hear some ejectives in georgia uh uh sir and an example word charlie meaning water in all of the languages stops have at least a three-way distinction between voiceless aspirated stops voiced stops and ejective stops / / / here's an example word in chechen meaning bridge listen for the slight popping sound that accompanies that sound they Circassian in the northwest caucasian family has ejected fricatives as well for a total of at least 10 dejected or even more depending on the dialect oh sure and the word meaning black another common feature is contrast between velar and uvular stops for example in chechen cun-cun agglutination the word agglutination comes from the latin word a glutton ra meaning to glue together that gives us an image of how words are formed in agglutinative languages words are created by gluing together a linear sequence of morphemes with each morpheme representing one piece of meaning that's slightly different from fusional languages in which those additional morphemes can't contain multiple pieces of meaning here's an example from Chechen mullah this is a verb in the infinitive form meaning to drink moe Dola this means to start drinking this suffix creates the inceptive form to change to the past tense we can first remove part of the ending and replace it with this mal delete this means started drinking in the recent past but it's something the speaker has no direct knowledge of mulled ELISA this means started drinking and I saw it happen with the suffix ER ah the verb is in the witnessed past the speaker witnessed the action happening this type of feature is called evidential tea all three families have a feature called evidential tea which means that verbs are inflected to show whether the speaker has evidence of the action or not this feature entered court billion through Turkic influence though in the other families it likely existed before contact with Turkic speakers especially in the northwest caucasian family caucasian languages also generally display sov word order though this is not equally true for all families or languages georgian for example has sov but also SVO depending on what the focus of the sentence is with the focus coming before the verb ergative 'ti all three families display or give 'ti though the court villian language mean Brillion does not you may be wondering what the heck is a Givet II sometimes I still ask myself that same question it's a feature that's quite rare among the languages of the world some other argot of languages include Basque Kurdish Hindi and Tibetan basically in an ERG ative language the subject of an intransitive verb and the direct object of a transitive verb are treated as the same they are in the same case the absolutive case let's give an example in fake English will pretend English as ergative he sleeps him loves XI you can see that the object of this sentence is in the same case as the subject of this sentence why that's so weird think of it like this these two pronouns are in the same case because they both fully receive the verbs action in an intransitive verb the subject undergoes the action in a transitive verb the object undergoes the action so they are both in the same case the absolutive case the subject of the transitive verb is treated differently because it doesn't receive the action it's in the ergative case yeah but that's in fake English right here's an example in Georgian meaning the student went student in mérida this sentence means the student wrote the letter student mutt ideally dadada so you can see that student in the first sentence is in the same case as letter in the second sentence student in the second sentence is in a different case Georgian has mixed purgative ax T with the feature not appearing in all tenses or with all verbs but other caucasian languages are more consistently ergative features shared by two of the three families as I said before the Northeast Caucasian and northwest caucasian languages are thought by some linguists to be part of a single language family referred to as north caucasian so they have some shared features that car Trillian doesn't have or does have but two lesser degree I already mentioned that they have much larger consonant inventories than car trillion for example they have laryngeal consonants these are consonants pronounced in your voice box at the back of your throat your pharynx or your glottis Northeast Caucasian has the most for example in chechen Oh a couple of example words that meaning custom or habit and um meaning swamp or marsh and in Circassian uh it's easier to hear these sounds in an actual word loop one this means Bay or Gulf the only laryngeal sounded car trillion is hot like the H sound in English they also have labia lized consonants which means the consonants are produced with the lips rounded at the same time for example in Circassian and an example word offset they also exist in chechen but in chechen they are non phonemic they are allophonic which means they're not perceived as separate consonants merely as variations of an existing consonant North Caucasian languages often use non-finite verb forms verb forms that don't indicate any tense like participles in English such as reading these are normally used as modifiers instead of relative clauses northwest caucasian and car Trillian also have some things in common that Northeast Caucasian doesn't have one major example is Polly personal verbs Polly personal verbs can have inflections for more than one person in the sentence including the subject direct object and indirect object here's an example in Georgia quatrain and this means they will show us this is the direct object marker meaning us this is the pre verb which helps distinguish certain tenses this is the root meaning show and this is the subject marker meaning they and in Circassian yes - this means I gave it to him or her this is the indirect object marker meaning him or her this is the subject marker meaning I this is the root meaning give this indicates the preterite form in other words the past tense this indicates the verb is in the affirmative here the direct object is left out because it's clear from the context but sentences that included are also possible the genetic links of the Caucasian languages to other language families are completely unknown which has led to some interesting theories some people believe that car trillion or the North Caucasian languages or both are related to Basque that's because of some shared features like purgative 'ti and pali personal verbs the Bhaskar trillion connection is not widely believed anymore but there are still some who think Basque might be very distantly related to the North Caucasian languages Danae Caucasian this is a proposed language family spanning Eurasia and North America which includes North Caucasian gurus ASCII in Pakistan sino-tibetan Jana Saiyan the Noddin a languages and the VAS conic languages including Basque this theory is not widely accepted and remains very controversial the huge linguistic diversity of the Caucasus as well as the difficulty in clearly determining the connection between the different languages there makes it a fascinating region to examine caucasian languages also have quite different free from languages elsewhere which makes learning about them a mind-bending experience the question of the day what do you think about some of the unique features of Caucasian languages that I talked about in this video do any of these features appear in your language a big special thanks goes out to my patreon supporters especially these ones right here on the screen they're my top tier patreon supporters and that's why their names appear in the video patrons of different tiers get different benefits such as access to the private LAN focus online community check out patreon.com/lenguin and to everyone thank you for watching and have a nice stay [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Langfocus

Views: 214,076

Rating: 4.9600658 out of 5

Keywords: language study, polyglot, foreign language, linguist, linguistics, Caucasian languages, Kartvelian language family, Northeast Caucasian languages, Northwest Caucasian languages, Georgian language, Chechen language, Circassian language, Adyghe, Zan language, Mingrelian language, Kabardian, consonant inventory, phonology, phonology of Caucasian languages, languages of Russia, minority languages in Russia

Id: GvIVI-hGbRg

Length: 14min 59sec (899 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 15 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Aedlo]

Horrible Chechen pronunciations, they could have at least picked a Chechen guy to do it..

[u/planetof]

As an outsider those consonants are very hard to pronounce .

[u/[deleted]]

He mostly ignored Georgian , i know there are a lot of languages here but considering were the biggest country of the caucasus i found that kind of weird (edit) actually i think the one I’m talking about was the nativlang video on the caucasus

[u/ZD_17]

I used to watch him, till he covered several languages I partly understand. Then I realised that he does way too many mistakes.

[u/Berdk1ant]

The Chechen pronunciation is horrible, I feel bad for the main author of the video since his work is fascinating and well researched.

[u/NorthCaucasusPatriot]

So many inaccuracies. Northeast Caucasian contains 5 million speakers not 3.8 million.