I was perusing Wikipedia today at lunch since I left the book, “An Taistealaí”, which I’m currently reading, at home. I recently finished my first Irish book “Bagairt Ón Spás”. The latter is *much* easier reading than the former, since it was written for the instruction of teens between the ages of 12 and 15.
In any case I was roaming around the sections on syntax and morphology and I stumbled onto an article concerning Ubykh. This extremely strange Northerwestern Caucasian language is sometimes classified as polysynthetic due to the capacity of verbs to incorporate large parts of the sentence. The following sentence is, to me, quite facinating:
“aχʲazbatʂʾaʁawdətʷaajlafaqʾajtʾmadaχ!”
which translates to:
“If only you had not been able to make him take it all out from under me again for them!”
If you can’t read that because of the strange characters that you need to have present in your font, or because you don’t understand how to read IPA then don’t worry too much. You probably couldn’t pronounce it even if you could read it, since Ubykh has one of the largest consonant sets outside of South Africa. In order to compensate however it has an almost ridiculous paucity of vowels, totaling to only two.
I first learned about the Ubykh language while reading a facinating book Nart Sagas from the Caucasus. This book has one of the most incredible collections of folk tales that I have ever read. At the same time strange and familiar, the Narts hold many values that are incredibly modern and egalitarian (for instance the recognition of the sexual rights of women), whilst at the same time holding traditions that are incredibly alien (the ability to avoid blood feud by suckling at the nipple of your adversaries wife). I HIGHLY recommend this book. Really, these stories should be up there with the greek myths and the story of Cúchulainn.
Unfortunately as I was reading, I also learned of something else about the Ubykh language. “The Ubykh language died out on October 7, 1992, when its last fluent speaker (Tevfik Esenç) died in his sleep.” (wikipedia)
A tragedy to be sure. I remember the excitement I felt in reading the Nart Sagas and in the possiblity of reading the sagas in their native language, and I even contemplated the possibity of going to Caucasia and speaking with the Ubykh people in their native tongue. Alas, there are none to speak to.