Re: Abkhaz

On Sun, 1 Aug 2004 13:47:07 -0700, Philippe Caquant <herodote92@...>
wrote:

>In case somebody would be interested, here are some
>features of Abkhaz grammar I picked up (deciphering
>from Russian) on the site John Quijada mentioned. As
>usually, I'm mainly interested in concepts, rather
>than in pronunciation, lexicon or others.
>
>http://www.apsny.net/
[snip]
>Well, I found all this very interesting. It's very
>likely quite a short introduction to Abkhaz grammar,
>and the fun is still to begin, I believe.
___________________________
I know what you mean by "fun" when it comes to Abkhaz.  Discovering these
truth-is-stranger-than-fiction Northwest Caucasian languages as a college
student 25 years ago (along with the writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf) were
the defining inspirations for embarking on the conlang that eventually
became Ithkuil.  Examples of Abkhaz single-word verb complexes like the
following (from Comrie's 1981 book "The Languages of the Soviet Union")
fascinated me with their incredible compactness:

d@ts_>a"laza:p_>
d@-               ts_>a-      la-    za:p_>
3SG/HUMAN/COL1 - (TO)/UNDER - "go" - INFERENTIAL
Translation:  "He apparently crawled under it."

wats_>@mts_>@
wa-             ts_>@-                    m-    ts_>@
2SG/MALE/Col1 - 3SG/COL2 - (FROM)/UNDER - NEG - "come"
Translation:  "Don't come out from under it."

j@q_>alts_>a"lon
j@-                  q_>a-     l-             ts_>a- la-         wa-
3SG/INANIMATE/COL1 - PREVERB - 3SG/FEM/COL3 - "do" - ITERATIVE - DYNAMIC -
-n
IMPERFECTIVE
Translation:  "She used to do it regularly."

The COL1, COL2, and COL3 morphemes refer to categories Comrie
calls "columns" which indicate the semantic (case) relations between the
participants.  This is necessary because Abkhaz is an ergative language
but does not have an Ergative case -- it shows ergative vs. absolutive
case relations using these "column" morphemes within the verb.

--John Quijada

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