Eurasiatica 19 - April 2023 | Eurasian Studies Balkans, Anatolia, Iran, Caucasus and Central Asia Studies Notebooks | Venice University Press.

According to Viacheslav Chirikba, a linguist and doctor of philology, Abkhazians used to speak five dialects until the middle of the 19th century. 

From Mahmud Kaşgari to Evliya Çelebi
Studies in Middle Turkic and Ottoman Literatures [Chapter 19]

Robert Dankoff
Professor Emeritus of Ottoman & Turkish Studies, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations.

For roughly forty years, from 1640 to 1680, Evliya Çelebi, who was born and raised in Istanbul, travelled throughout the Ottoman domains, and into its peripheries — west as far as Vienna, north to Kiev and the land of the Kalmuks, east to Tabriz, south to Sinnar and Abyssinia. Wherever he went, he recorded local speech, and included the samples in his voluminous Seyahatname. Although he states repeatedly that the world-traveller must know 147 languages, he gives specimens of some thirty non-Turkic languages, plus samples of at least the same number of Turkish dialects or other Turkic languages.

Linguistic Typology 2020; 24(2): 211–251

Abstract
Abaza, a polysynthetic ergative Northwest Caucasian language, possesses a typologically unique system of forming content questions by means of inflectional marking in the verb. I offer a detailed description of this peculiar system, showing how it is grounded in the more general pattern of encoding relativization by means of prefixes forming part of the basic cross-referencing paradigms. I also discuss a tentative diachronic scenario, explaining how at least a subpart of the synthetic interrogative marking in Abaza (and its close relative Abkhaz) could have emerged via univerbation of pseudocleft focus constructions.

John D. Bengtson
Santa Fe Institute, Evolution of Human Languages Project 

Corinna Leschber
Institute for Linguistic and Cross-Cultural Studies, Berlin

Journal of Language Relationship • Вопросыязыковогородства • 19/2 (2021) • Pp. 71–98 • © John D. Bengtson, Corinna Leschber, 2021

A “Pre-Greek” substratum underlying the Indo-European Greek language has been sus-pected for a long time. There is no reason to suppose that there was only one “Pre-Greek” language; the region where Greek was and is spoken may have been multilingual, with lan-guages of diverse origins. In the following study a limited number of etyma are examined that seem to bear witness to a widespread Euskaro-Caucasian language (or language family) associated with the spread of agriculture out of Anatolia. Greek words like ἀκαρί ‘mite’, μαστός ‘breast, teat’, β/μύσταξ ‘upper lip, mustache’, ξύλον ‘wood, timber’, and ψῡχή‘breath’ are basic and not likely to be cultural loans, and could reflect genuine relics of a Euskaro-Caucasian Pre-Greek language. The examples discussed here are probably part of a much larger subset that a thorough study of Furnée’s and Beekes’ total list of “Pre-Greek” words might yield.

in Bedi Kartlisa, 1981, 256-267.

In this paper we present for comparison the kinship-lexicon of three languages. Georgian and Mingrelian are closely related South Caucasian (Kartvel) languages spoken in the Trans-Caucasian republic of Soviet Georgia. Abkhaz is also spoken in Soviet Georgia but only in the north-western region (apart from a few villages near Batumi), which is known as the Abkhaz Autonomous Republic. However, it belongs to a different language-family, known as North West Caucasian/ Although the majority of the Abkhaz terms given below maybe found in Benet (1974: 54ff.), the transcription there employed is too inexact for linguistic purposes. It was, therefore, deemed advantageous to make the Abkhaz material available once again to the English reader.

Transactions of the Philological Society, Volume 24

Philological Society (Great Britain) 1879, pp. 593 - 602.

The Philological Society is formed to investigate, and to promote the study and knowledge of, the Structure, the Affinities, and the History of Languages.

Transactions of the Philosophical Society, Oxford 1956, 127-176.

The Abaza (tapanta) language is spoken on the northern side of the Caucasus in the district of Cherkesskz (formerly Yezhov, formerly Sulimov, formerly Batalpashinsk), and by exiled communities in Turkey. It belongs to a closely related group with Abkhaz (apsawa) and other dialects, including (a)sqarawa; this group, which is sometimes also referred to as Abkhaz, is related in turn to Circassian or Adyghe (including Kabardian) and Ubykh, to form the western branch of the North Caucasian family.

Iran & the Caucasus, Vol. 12, No. 2 (2008), pp. 307-323

The NorthWest Caucasian language-family is noted (notorious) for the polysynthetic nature of its verbs. If one couples this with fact (a) that morphemes typically take the shape C(V) and fact (b) that the language has a minimum of 58 consonantal phonemes (sc. in its literary dialect) and that homonymy is widespread, one might expect that, for ease of encoding/decoding, verb-forms would shew great regularity and structural transparency. On the whole, this is indeed the case. However, there are instances where analysis presents some problems.

Georgica | A Journal of Georgian and Caucasian Studies.
No:4 & 5 Autumn 1937, pp. 287-289

Editors: W.E.D. Allen & A. Gugushvili