Re: Ubykh phonology

A belated _doomo arigatoo_...

>From: Rob Nierse <rnierse@...>
>Danny Wier asked for the Ubykh phonology
>yesterday. Here it is:
>
>1. b b- d d0 3 3^ 3^0 3*' 3*   g` g
>2. p p- t  t0 c c^c^0 c*' c*  k` k k0 q` q q0 q- q-0
>3. p' p-' t'  t'0 c' c^'c^'0 c*' c*' l-' k`' k' k'0 q`' q' q'0 q'- q-'0
>
>4. v v-    z z^ z^0  z*' z*0 z* l   g^  g* g g*
>5. f        s s^ s^0  s*' s*0 s* l- x^ x*` x* x*0 x- x-0 h
>sonorants: m w, m- w-, n y r
>
>1.= voiced, 2.= voiceless, 3.= ejective 4.=voiced fric
>5.=voiceless fricative
Sergei Starostin claims (and he's got a good case -- see his site at
http://starling.rinet.ru) to have created a Pan-Caucasian lexicon (Caucasian
meaning North Caucasian, excluding Kartvelian).  He came up with a pretty
large consonant inventory, but also a seven-vowel system, which is much
different than the paltry vowel systems of Abkhaz, Adyghe, Kabardian and
this Ubykh.

I am aware of Abkhaz's numerous labialized and palatized consonants, as well
as the three-way structure of voiced-voiceless-ejective stops/affricates.  I
did not know that Ubykh has pharyngealized consonants along with palatized
and labialvelarized -- and labiopalatized too?!  (Uh oh, now I have to add
another three hundred consonant phonemes to Tech... ;)

>A lot of diacritics, so I have to explain something:
>- = pharyngialisation
>0 = labialisation
>3 = j as in English "Jim" (alveolar) <--- you mean /dz/ right?
>^= palatal
>l-=  tl as in Aztec "tletl"
>c= ts
>*=caron
What do the ' and ` represent?

Yeah, hard to represent a language such as this in ASCII.  What was Ubykh
written in, scriptwise?  I assume Latin since the remnant of the Ubykh
community (the language might already be dead) is in Istanbul.  Or maybe
Arabic...

>And now for the vowels:
>
>@, e, a
Heh... all those consonants and three vowels.  I read that there may only be
two phonemic vowels, with /e/ being an allophone.  (Abkhaz, a sister
language in NW Caucasian, has two vowel phonemes @, a; with allophonic
distribution i-@-u and e-a-o.  It's written with a pretty clever
modification of Cyrillic; check out the codepages at unicode.org...)

Tech incidentally has between seven and ten vowels -- don't quite know yet.
Consonant phonology is pretty much decided on; I posted it some months ago,
but [and y'all be in for a shock] I didn't include labio-palatized,
pharyngealized, and labio-pharyngealized consonants, which results in a
consonant phonology somewhere around 600-700...

DaW.
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