Abkhazian language

Abkhazian (autoglottonym: Аҧсуа aphsua) is a language belonging to the North Caucasian family, within the Abkhaz-Adygee or northwestern branch, to which they also belong the Cabardian-Circassian and the extinct Ubijé. It has about 105,000 speakers, the majority in the Republic of Abkhazia, a partially recognized state northwest of Georgia on the eastern Black Sea coast.

Abkhaz has a very old traditional oral literature (around the first millennium BC), which recalls, with mythological mixtures, the origins of Persian society and its culture. It is believed that it may have inspired some passages in Greek literature.

Its speakers number up to 100,000 in the region of Abkhazia and Mingrelia (Georgia), and also in small communities in Turkey. It has been preserved in Syria since the ancestors of the current speakers fled to the Ottoman Empire to escape Christianity in the conquest of that area of the Caucasus in 1864 by the Russian Empire.

Alphabet

After some experiments to write with Latin or Georgian characters, since 1954 he only uses the Cyrillic alphabet with some complementary signs.

Linguistic description

• Its phonetic includes eye consonants, and a wide range of fricatives, Africans and pharyngees, almost lungs, according to some descriptions. A total of 58 consonants. However, he is very poor in vowels: only two in writing, although he uses two or three other oral performances.
• The form of the adjective coincides with that of the name.
• It classifies human and non-human names and distinguishes the number (singular and plural), but not the grammatical gender.
• In the pronominal system, however, it distinguishes gender in the second and third persons of the singular.
• The numbering system is vigesimal and uses two series: one for human names and one for nonhumans.

The verb

Abkhaz distribution in the Caucasus.

Verbs, which usually appear at the end of the sentence, are classified as stative or dynamic, and the latter are in turn transitive and intransitive.

They distinguish gender by means of a morpheme in the second person singular and the condition of human and non-human in the third person singular. It has five moods: indicative, imperative, conditional, optative, and subjunctive. It also uses a complex series of preverbs that indicate direction or location.