Yezhoù kaokazek ar gwalarn

Diwar Wikipedia, an holloueziadur digor



Image:32px-Labour_zo.png Ar pennad-mañ n'eo ket peurechu c'hoazh ; ma fell deoc'h labourat warnañ deuit da welout ha lakait hoc'h ali e pajenn ar gaozeadenn.



Ur familh-yezhoù eo yezhoù kaokazek ar gwalarn (anvet ivez yezhoù pontek pe yezhoù kirkasek) komzet e Caucasian Russia, Turkey, Jordan, Kabardino-Balkaria (an autonomous republic in Russia) and Abkhazia ( de facto independent formally an autonomous republic in Georgia). The entire group is characterised by paucity of phonemic vowels, rich consonantal systems with many forms of secondary articulation, and high levels of agglutinativity.

Current theory holds that the richness of consonantal phoneme systems in the Northwest Caucasian languages is the result of a process which removes vowel features such as labialisation and palatalisation from the vowels in a root and reassigns them instead to the consonants which surround them. This theory also explains why there are so few vowels in Northwest Caucasian languages.

Northwest Caucasian languages have rather simple noun systems, manifesting only a handful of cases at the most, coupled with a verbal system so complex that virtually the entire syntactic structure of the sentence is repeated in the verb. They do not generally permit more than one finite verb in a sentence, which precludes the existence of subordinate clauses (although Abkhaz appears to be developing limited subordinate clauses, perhaps under the influence of Russian); to get around this, they have impressive arrays of nominal and participial non-finite verb forms. Despite this, most of the Northwest Caucasian languages do not have true infinitives: the basic non-finite verb is a noun called the masdar.

There are five languages in the Northwest Caucasian family: Abkhaz, Abaza, Kabardian or East Circassian, Adyghe or West Circassian, and Ubykh. The languages in the Northwest Caucasian family are related as follows:

Taolenn

[kemmañ] Yezhoù kirkasek

[kemmañ] Adigeg

Adigeg (kirkaseg pe tcherkeseg), is one of the more widely spoken North-West Caucasian languages. It can be found everywhere from Russia to Turkey. There is even a small community in the United States. Four main dialects are recognised: Kemirgoy, Abdzakh, Bzhedugh and Shapsugh, as well as many minor ones (for instance, the Turkish dialect Hakuchi spoken by the last speakers of Ubykh). Adyghe has three phonemic vowels, and is less consonantally complex than the Abkhaz-Abaza group.

[kemmañ] Kabardeg

Kabardeg is split into two dialects, Kabardian and Cherkess (Circassian). Furthermore, Kabardian proper has several dialects, including Terek, the literary standard, and Besney, which occupies a position intermediate between Terek Kabardian and the Adyghe. It has the least number of consonants of any North-Western Caucasian language, with 48. Kabardian is characterised by ejective fricatives and a small number of acoustic vowels.

[kemmañ] Yezhoù abc'hazek-abazek

[kemmañ] Abc'hazeg

The Abc'hazeg has approximately 100,000 speakers in Abkhazia, with possibly up to 500,000 speakers in Turkey. It has been a literary language from the beginning of the 20th century. Abkhaz is often claimed to be simply a divergent dialect of a larger language, Abkhaz-Abaza. It makes better linguistic sense, however, to separate Abkhaz and Abaza into two separate languages, since Abaza preserves phonemes which Abkhaz lacks, and vice-versa. Abkhaz is generally viewed as having three major dialects, Abzhuy, Bzyp (both spoken in Georgia) and Sadz (spoken in Turkey). Abkhaz is characterised by unusual consonant clusters and a small vowel inventory. It has only two distinctive vowels: an open vowel /a/ and a closed vowel /ı, ǝ/. Depending on the environment the vowels can be realized as [e,i,o,u]. See also Abkhaz alphabet.

[kemmañ] Abazeg

The Abazeg shares with Abkhaz the distinction of having just two phonemic vowels in its sound inventory. Abaza is phonologically more complex than Abkhaz, but the two share a great number of linguistic ties. Abaza has two major dialects, Akhchepse and T'ap'anta. Abaza is characterised by large consonant clusters, similar to those that can be found in Georgian.

[kemmañ] Yezhoù oubic'hek

[kemmañ] Oubic'heg

The Oubic'heg is more closely related to Abkhaz and Abaza than to Adyghe and Kabardian. It became extinct on October 7, 1992, with the death of Tevfik Esenç, the language's last native speaker. Ubykh has the largest number of consonants of any North-West Caucasian language, with 80. Ubykh is characterised by pharyngealised consonants and a four-way contrast between sibilants. It was the only Northwest Caucasian language never to have a literary form.


[kemmañ] Gwelet ivez

[kemmañ] Liammoù diavaez