Death of Ubice | Ubykh

“Ubıh dili ayakta ölecek. Dağılmıyor. Tevfik bu dili bizim için konuşuyor, tanıklar var, yakın zamanlara kadar bu dili konuştuğu yaşlılar vardı. Sözgelimi Latincenin Roman dillerini doğurarak dağılmış olduğu söylenebilir. Ama Ubıh dili, hayır. Dağılmadı. Kaybolacak, hepsi bu.” 

Prof. Georges Dumézil

Mavi Boncuk | 

Ubykh, or Ubyx (also known as Ubice in Turkey, or Pekhi), is an extinct Northwest Caucasian language once spoken by the Ubykh tribe of Circassians (who originally lived along the eastern coast of the Black Sea before being deported en masse to Turkey in the Circassian genocide).

The Ubykh language was ergative and polysynthetic, with a high degree of agglutination, with polypersonal verbal agreement and a very large number of distinct consonants but only two phonemically distinct vowels. With around eighty consonants, it had one of the largest inventories of consonants in the world, and the largest number for any language without clicks.

The name Ubykh is derived from Убыхыбзэ (/wɨbɨx/), its name in the Abdzakh Adyghe language. It is known in linguistic literature by many names: variants of Ubykh, such as Ubikh, Oubykh (French); and Pekhi (from Ubykh /tʷɜχɨ/) and its Germanised variant Päkhy.

Ubykh was spoken in the eastern coast of the Black Sea around Sochi until 1864, when the Ubykhs were driven out of the region by the Russians. They eventually came to settle in Turkey, founding the villages of Hacı Osman, Kırkpınar, Masukiye and Hacı Yakup. Arabic and Circassian eventually became the preferred languages for everyday communication, and many words from these languages entered Ubykh in that period.

The Ubykh language died out on 7 October 1992, when its last fluent speaker, Tevfik Esenç, died. Before his death, thousands of pages of material and many audio recordings had been collected and collated by a number of linguists, including Georges Charachidzé, Georges Dumézil, Hans Vogt, George Hewitt and A. Sumru Özsoy, with the help of some of its last speakers, particularly Tevfik Esenç and Huseyin Kozan. Ubykh was never written by its speech community, but a few phrases were transcribed by Evliya Celebi in his Seyahatname and a substantial portion of the oral literature, along with some cycles of the Nart saga, was transcribed. Tevfik Esenç also eventually learned to write Ubykh in the transcription that Dumézil devised.

Julius von Mészáros, a Hungarian linguist, visited Turkey in 1930 and took down some notes on Ubykh. His work Die Päkhy-Sprache was extensive and accurate to the extent allowed by his transcription system (which could not represent all the phonemes of Ubykh) and marked the foundation of Ubykh linguistics.

The Frenchman Georges Dumézil also visited Turkey in 1930 to record some Ubykh and would eventually become the most celebrated Ubykh linguist. He published a collection of Ubykh folktales in the late 1950s, and the language soon attracted the attention of linguists for its small number of phonemic vowels. Hans Vogt, a Norwegian, produced a monumental dictionary that, in spite of its many errors (later corrected by Dumézil), is still one of the masterpieces and essential tools of Ubykh linguistics.

Later in the 1960s and into the early 1970s, Dumézil published a series of papers on Ubykh etymology in particular and Northwest Caucasian etymology in general. Dumézil's book Le Verbe Oubykh (1975), a comprehensive account of the verbal and nominal morphology of the language, is another cornerstone of Ubykh linguistics.

Since the 1980s, Ubykh linguistics has slowed drastically with the most recent treatise being Fenwick's A Grammar of Ubykh and is also working on a dictionary. The Ubykh themselves have shown interest in relearning their language.

The Abkhaz writer Bagrat Shinkuba's historical novel Bagrat Shinkuba. The Last of the Departed treats the fate of the Ubykh people.

HANDWRITTEN TRANSCRIPTION OF AN UBYKH STORY AS TOLD BY TEVFIK ESEN

Georges Dumézil's handwritten transcription of an Ubykh story as told by Tevfik Esenç, the language's last speaker. https://doi.org/10.24397/pangloss-0004320

Tevfik Esenç 1906- October 8, 1992

“Büyük dostum Prof. Charachidzé, [1]

Çok Laf Yalansız Olmaz, Çok Mal Çobansız Olmaz (Ubıh Atasözü). Hata yaptımsa da kusura bakmayın. Ubıhçanın sonunu böyle bitiriyorum. Bundan sonra benden fazla Ubıhça bilen birisini bulursam yine onunla da konuşurum. Ubıhça bugünden sonra sensin. Bugünden sonra anlatacak, konuşacak sensin.Bunları okuyanlara sesleniyorum; daha doğrusunu, daha gerçeğini bilen varsa söylesinler, çok memnun olurum.Allah size iyilikler, güzellikler versin! Ubıh dili burada sona eriyor.”

TRANSLATION: "A lot of words can't be without lies, a lot of goods can't be without a shepherd (Ubıh Proverb). I'm sorry if I made a mistake. This is how I end the end of Ubykh. After that, if I find someone who knows more Ubykh than me, I will talk to him again. Ubykh, you are after today. After today, it is you who will tell and talk. I call out to those who read these; If anyone knows the truth or the truth, let them tell me, I would be very pleased. May Allah give you goodness and beauty! The Ubykh language ends here."

Tevfik Esenç 

[1] Georges Charachidzé (1930 - 20 February 2010)

Born in 1930 in France of a Georgian father and a French mother, Georges Charachidzé became a pupil of the great French scholar Georges Dumézil in 1953 when the latter agreed to supervise Charachidzé's doctoral thesis, which turned into his first publication ('Le Système religieux de la Géorgie païenne' = 'The Religious System of Pagan Georgia'). He was to adopt his supervisor's interests in the Caucasus and eventually, after Dumézil's death, take on his mantle as main collaborator with Ubykh's last fully competent speaker Tevfik Esenç in order to continue research on this soon-to-become-extinct North West Caucasian language -- Tevfik himself died in 1992.

He studied Ossetic religion and language with Dumézil, which resulted in 'La Mémoire indo-européenne du Caucase' (= 'The Indo-European Memoir of the Caucasus'), Ossetic belonging to the Iranian branch of the Indo-European language-family. Comparison of the Greek mythological character Prometheus with such Caucasian counterparts as Georgian Amiran and Abkhaz Abryskj’yl led to 'Prométhée ou le Caucase' (= 'Prometheus or the Caucasus'). Charachidzé first accompanied his master on a field-work trip to Turkey in the the 1960s. But Ubykh was not the only object of his research based on work with native speakers resident there, producing a monograph 'Grammaire de la langue avar' (= 'Grammar of the Avar Language', 1981), Avar being a Daghestanian language (and, of course, one on which Dumézil himself had worked in the 1930s!).

Dumézil had agreed to write the description of Ubykh for volume 2 of the series The Indigenous Languages of the Caucasus, which volume was devoted to the North West Caucasian languages and edited by George Hewitt; it appeared in 1989. However, Dumézil, who died in 1987, was unable to write the article, and the task passed to Charachidzé.

Upon the deaths of K’alist’rat’e and Nino Salia, the founders and financiers of the long-running, Paris-based journal for Caucasian studies 'Bedi Kartlisa' (= 'Destiny of Kartli/Georgia'), Charachidzé was the prime mover in organising, editing and publishing the successor journal 'Revue des Etudes Géorgiennes et Caucasiennes' (= 'Review of Georgian and Caucasian Studies'), which, sadly, did not enjoy as long a run as its illustrious predecessor. In this outlet Charachidzé published a number of articles with Esenç offering further analyses of Ubykh after the pattern of Dumézil's earlier articles. He also published there on Abkhaz. If one examines the list of contributions that appeared under Charachidzé's editorship, it will be seen that Charachidzé was happily free from the chauvinism that so blighted his paternal homeland from its late Soviet period through to its (ongoing) years of tortured independence, and this is to Charachidzé's eternal credit.

It was well-known that Dumézil was not totally enamoured of Hans Vogt's 'gift' to him in 1963 of 'Dictionnaire de la langue oubykh' (= 'Dictionary of the Ubykh Language') and warned against its use without the sizeable list of emendations that Dumézil himself included in his 'Documents Anatoliens III'. For years Charachidzé worked on a new Ubykh dictionary but never felt able to promise a date for its appearance. 

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See also: Viacheslav Chirikba is a linguist and politician from Abkhazia. He was Minister for Foreign Affairs of Abkhazia between 2011 and 2016.

Goerges Charachidze, The Languages of the Caucasus.

Georges Charachidzé to evoke the languages of the Caucasus, and more particularly the last lecture of Ubykh.