Ubykh is an extinct Northwest Caucasian language once spoken by the Ubykh people, an ethnic group of Circassian nation who originally inhabited the eastern coast of the Black Sea before being deported en masse to the Ottoman Empire in the Circassian genocide.
Postpositions are rare; most locative semantic functions, as well as some non-local ones, are provided with preverbal elements: /ɐsχʲɜwtxqʼɜ/ ('you wrote it for me').
Free pronouns in all North-West Caucasian languages lack an ergative-absolutive distinction.
[5] The second-person /χɜ/- is an archaic pronoun used to indicate that the person being referred to is a female, or heckling the speaker in some way.
Square brackets indicate elided vowels; parenthesis indicate optional parts of the stem; and the colon indicates the boundary of a morpheme.
Examples: The verbs in the mirative past tense are conjugated with -/jtʼ/ in the singular and -/jɬ(ɜ)/ in the plural.
Examples: In all dialects and speakers, only two static tenses exist: present and past.
Writing systems for the Ubykh language have been proposed,[5] but there has never been a standard written form.
However, Fenwick gives a guide for their "practical Ubykh orthography", intended to be typeable on a Turkish computer keyboard, which is shown below:[8] Ubykh syllables have a strong tendency to be CV, although VC and CVC also exist.
Consonant clusters are not as large as in Abzhywa Abkhaz or in Georgian, rarely being larger than two terms.
Three-term clusters exist in two words - /ndʁɜ/ ('sun') and /pstɜ/ ('to swell up'),[9] but the latter is a loan from Adyghe, and the former more often pronounced /nədʁa/ when it appears alone.
Compounding plays a large part in Ubykh and, indeed, in all Northwest Caucasian semantics.
[11] Reduplication occurs in some roots, often those with onomatopoeic values (/χˤɜχˤɜ/, 'to curry[comb]' from /χˤɜ/ 'to scrape'; /kʼɨrkʼɨr/, 'to cluck like a chicken' [a loan from Adyghe]); and /wɜrqwɜrq/, 'to croak like a frog').
However, idiomatic constructions are even more common in Ubykh than in most other languages; the representation of abstract ideas with series of concrete elements is a characteristic of the Northwest Caucasian family.
The majority of loanwords in Ubykh are derived from either Adyghe or Arabic, with smaller numbers from Persian, Abkhaz, and the South Caucasian languages.
Many loanwords have Ubykh equivalents, but were dwindling in usage under the influence of Arabic, Circassian, and Russian equivalents: Some words, usually much older ones, are borrowed from less influential stock: Colarusso (1994) sees /χˤʷɜ/ ('pig') as a borrowing from a proto-Semitic *huka, and /ɜɡʲɜrɨ/ ('slave') from an Iranian root; however, Chirikba (1986) regards the latter as being of Abkhaz origin ( ← Abkhaz agər-wa 'lower cast of peasants; slave', literally 'Megrelian').
In the scheme of Northwest Caucasian evolution, despite its parallels with Adyghe and Abkhaz, Ubykh forms a separate third branch of the family.
It has fossilised palatal class markers where all other Northwest Caucasian languages preserve traces of an original labial class: the Ubykh word for 'heart', /ɡʲɨ/, corresponds to the reflex /ɡʷə/ in Abkhaz, Abaza, Adyghe, and Kabardian.
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.
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.
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.