 Dyna, dyna, ond wedi ar ôl o ddim yn Eisteddf Blwych Glawchau, o'r Eisteddf Blwch Glawchau, yr hyn yn yma ychydigol y cantigol. Yng Nghael Llywodraethol yn unaill y byd eich gynhyrchu gwanedd yng Nghael Llywodraeth. Nid yw eisteddf blwch i chael y challwchur mwyaf i'r training. Yn ymgylchionGoedd Yn Gymhwyl, yr eich Cyngor Celf, ond nid yw gydag ar eich gynhyrchol so fydd rydyn i fynd o gymryd y gynhyrch gael yng Nghyml sydd eich hyn o gwbl sydw i chi'n cael ei diagramsref ar alt, a phwylo'r pan whadrwyll ynghylch yn rhan. You could say a social linguistic situation because we're dealing in this case with. a language family on a very small area on the map highly fragmented area on the map where the ideas that these languages have been around for a very long time and they've been Ac mae oedd yn gyfnod ysgol dros ychydig o'r profiadau unigol, oherwydd yn tynnu i Europaeth, cyn heddiw, sy'n cwestloedd hynny, i wneud nhw'n mynd i'w hefyd yn fwylo'r fasale o'r fanol yma, mae'r bobl yn dig 시�tydol, mae'r llangwchau yma. Felly mae'n bwysig i ddifattaeth, ac mae'n defnyddio cwysu am wychlo'i hynny, Searaed o gwnaeth i'w lefnod ar gyfer dydych yn gyffredinol byddai'r unig i'r Llywodraeth Wrth three languages pretty closely related to one another all of them north of the main Caucasus mountain range apart from butts which moved over into Georgia so to the south and the Dagestania language is what Dagestan is as we probably know republic in Russia about the size of Bavaria but with more than 40 languages being spoken which falls apart into a number of subgroups and the subgroup I'll be pestering you with is the so-called Avar-Andi-Dido subgroup which consists of Avar which is a big fairly big language with about three quarters of a million speakers which also functions as a lingua franca or contact language with everybody in Dagestan especially in the mountainous Dagestan area we'll be able to speak Avar beside other Dagestan languages so Avar is the only really big language with a quarter of a million speakers and the Andian languages and the Achwach, Chamalau, Tindi, Bachwalau, Boclych, Carata and Golubiri they're all very small languages and so are the Tido languages consisting of a western branch, Cez, Hinoch, Chwarshi, Ingwchwar and eastern branch, Besta and Hunzi talking about size of speaker numbers the biggest language among the Andian Dido languages is Cez which has 10,000 speakers approximately and the smallest is Hinoch which is the language of just one village namely the village of Hinoch which has 200 speakers and the others are somewhere in between so that's the group for the central Dagestanian group in the high mountain area bordering on Chechnya which is the western most neighbour and Georgia in the south that's the area where you'll find the Andi-Dido languages and if you go further to the south in Dagestan you'll enter other languages which also belong to this family like Luck with about 100,000 speakers Darchwa with almost half a million and a large family called the Leschian family with big languages like Leschi about half a million speakers and very small languages in that group as well like Kinalu if it belongs there or Archi which are basically the languages of one village each that's the family now when I try to some previous work has been done on the family but it's not really what you would call following the comparative method because most of the work that's been done on the family has been descriptive and typological and there have been some attempts to sort of reconstruct in one go for example from the modern languages to Proto Dagestanian or Proto Nakh or Proto Nakh Dagestanian without much attention to intermediate stages which is slightly problematic because the best guesses as to the date of the Proto language would be between four and six thousand years ago which is a hell of a long time so um when I tried to work on this language it was quite interesting to see whether the comparative method would work or not well it works wonderfully Ausnamslosigkeit all over the place those languages are also extremely happy to go through an enormous amount of sound changes at the same time and some of them shallow and some of them probably rather deep because they connect more than one branch and the complexity resides in the fact that the sound changes are the as you would know from in european probably the output of one rule is the input of a following rule so relative chronology of your sound changes is a very important thing to establish it's also very complex to find out if you know nothing so a very lively historical phonology comparative method works a treat also these languages in the central area so the Avar on the Dedo they are morphologically very regular which is bad for reconstructive purposes because that will mean if they have undergone lots of sound changes and are morphologically regular you know there's been an enormous amount of analogical levelling that's a certainty um what i wanted to pester you with today is they'll not go into all the gory details of the language family which is completely unknown to most of you but focus on a few points basically one point that struck me as an europeanist and which i didn't really expect to find coming from an european background and the first point i'd like to make starts from an example based on the akwach language akwach is a language with 5000 speakers approximately it belongs to the andian group and akwach is um one should distinguish between northern akwach and southern akwach northern akwach is spoken in four villages in a pretty remote part of the mountains um not that there are no near villages but these villages are very difficult to get at because of the nature of the terrain so basically you reach northern akwach through a broad valley and neighboring languages will be high up on the mountains or either side of the valley and will be out of reach so you go through the broad valley and then you enter into a river valley because most of these villages would be on along rivers where you have four villages and those four villages they have no distinguishing features amongst one another so that they all of them speak the same dialect which is extremely unusual in the Caucasus and also the speakers of those villages have very little contact with people outside of their villages which also is very unusual in the northeastern Caucasus because especially men traditionally would travel quite a lot first of all to get their women because these societies are generally exogamous and secondly because they're usually cattle breeders and especially men would travel with their herds of sheep or cattle would travel between winter pasture and summer pasture and sometimes cross mountain ranges sometimes with the effect that some of them wouldn't return um but so akwach among northeast Caucasian is in some respect exceptional so there's north akwach you reach that through a valley four villages same dialect and then you run up against a high mountain wall if you were to cross that which is pretty difficult to do especially if you have vertical um if you cross that you come into the area of southern akwach three villages with three dialects and they're rather different from one another the Ratlub which is closest dialectally to northern akwach but it's geographically remotest and and they live there those speakers among speakers of Avar and um the linguist who especially did an enormous amount of work among the akwach both north and south uh was a linguist a russian and soviet linguist called Magomed Bekorra and she traveled widely and did an enormous amount of field work between 1948 and 1959 continue to do so later and she has written the reference grammar what is still a reference grammar of that particular language and she states that northern akwach people look very different from southern akwach people because southern akwach people they look like they're Avar neighbors so dark hair dark eyes uh culturally very very similar to Avar neighbors and of course they would all be bilingual but that's trivial so all speakers of southern akwach would be bilingual because they would also speak Avar Avar an akwach now northern akwach they would also be able to speak Avar but they look very different she says she says um there's a preponderance of people with red hair so if you're looking for a reason why a person specializing in Celtic ends up in northern akwachers there's your answer it's all to do with hair so they're red hair fair skin light blue eyes and as she says Magomed Bekorra their women have a sharp tongue which is very uncharacteristic for Caucasian speakers she says so this is the isolated position of northern akwach in Dagestal and that expresses itself in some archasins shown in the akwach language i've given you the continental system of northern akwach which is fairly extensive and also typical of this type of language in the world i would like to point you especially to the difference between long and short consonants or also a better frame probably not long and short but simple and intensive because the long consonants usually have a larger area of occlusion to them so they're not only longer and so you could say intense which is pretty stable among those languages a large amount of consonants in the lateral spectrum so we have six voiceless laterals short tle long tle glottolized short tle and long glottolized tle and the two um fricatives and a similar elaborate system in the uvular range so short aspirated non aspirated long glottolized as the long glottolized not so long ago it would be capable you would be able to to to listen to the news in avar and avar has those consonants as well on radio free europe so they would sort of repeat news news broadcasts in avar and it's particularly those long intensive glottolized consonants that jump out of the radio so you wouldn't need to know understand a lot of avar to be able to recognise it in one go because of these consonants the long intensive ones um the consonants between brackets are suspect of being only present in borrowed words but if you would take away the brackets you sort of end up in the proto uh easton crokesian system of consonants and it's to be the case now norden achwach innovates a bit so it's very archaic but it also innovates it innovates in having a reshuffle of sibilance and sibilance so sibilance being the zy type sounds and sibilance being the zy type sounds so the short sibilance all become sibilance and the long sibilance all become sibilance that's what they do why do they do that so it only occurs in avar northern and southern sorry in in achwach in northern and southern and it occurs in the particular dialect of avar that is being spoken among the southern achwach people so it's likely to be a contact phenomenon although it's very difficult to decide who started this but this is not the thing i'm after i'm after what's at the top of page two the particularly unstable sounds in this very large system of consonants are the short africates so but they behave extremely asymmetrically so that become fricatives in all andian languages in fact also in avar and also in the dydo languages so basically in all languages apart from northern achwach sir becomes a fricative of the type sir in all andian languages in all dydo languages and mostly in avar but not completely in avar whereas short ch is retained everywhere apart from the dydo languages so completely asymmetric treatment of the africates the short africates but let's have a look at the two short africates that in this huge language family in terms of diversity are only retained in northern achwach and that's the short and the short I've given you basically the data there ch becomes ch in southern achwach but it remains ch in northern ch becomes ch in southern achwach but it remains in northern and let's not talk about sir here now if it weren't for northern achwach so those four villages with a couple of hundred speakers in them um because all the other languages in the family have slur instead of ch they have ch instead of ch if it weren't for northern achwach we would no doubt reconstruct the sound change from the africate to the fricative to proto avar on the dydo it's only because we happen to have northern achwach that we can't anymore and this is I feel one of the typical things here if you look at in european the oppression you get always is at least I have the impression I have is most of the stuff is gone most of the stuff in the dialect continuum is gone so it's the equivalent of having say the romance language family as it is today and the only thing we would left we would be left with after 2000 years is the dialect of paris the dialect of bucarest and the dialect of madrid so no messiness basically no continuum and I think it's quite different in the caucuses it seems that all these intermediates or at least very many intermediate stages are still preserved uh now I want to take you through the developments of in the dydo languages but I do so extremely briefly I've given you the material to read at your leisure if you feel like it or not feel like it you can skip it this is basically my etymological dictionary of those languages in in in the state of being and becoming um in the dydo languages that has a fairly complex treatment in some languages so not in all of them so it becomes which is basically what happens all over the place in four languages i'm now page two number five but in the language there's a pretty complex set of correspondences beginning of the word the reflex is h after val it's l and after constant it's and the other complex language is which has at the beginning and after constant but and that's based on the material I gave you on page two on page three and four and five and now I'm in page five at the bottom at the page five at the bottom I again repeat the situation there so if you look at what happened to proto avar on the dydo club short africate this is what happens in those languages now normally you would be inclined if you if you saw a change happening especially across many languages to use that in order to draw up a family tree so to look for common innovations and then plot them and save and more or more or less pinpoint when this development happened by looking at which languages to partner it and we use it in order to draw up a family tree that is pretty difficult in this particular case because there are four languages in which nothing very spectacular happens you just get slur the fricative but there are two of them which do different things especially in ho qvar and hon zib but the isoglosses you can then draw through the family they don't align with any deep distinction between the languages so the the deep isogloss or deep isogloss at the isogloss separating in ho qvar from the rest also separates the village basically three villages of in ho qvar from the neighboring village of quarch which is almost the same language almost the same language and it's the same with besta versus hon zib they're very closely related to one another the one has the trivial treatment to slur and the other has the non-trivial treatment so you get isoglosses that do not conform to the genetic grouping you might expect and that i find is slightly unusual well anyway what we can basically say on the basis of this reconstruction of the daido languages is because in ho qvar and hon zib have a very specific a particular set of correspondences that the short africate must still have existed in proto daido so it was lost earlier you wouldn't expect this so there's a unique correspondence set for proto avar on the dido kle in in ho qvar and in besta sorry and in hon zib it follows from that that a proto language of the daido language cannot yet have lost kle it was lost definitely but it was lost at a later stage and separately in each individual language and that's again is something i would normally not be i would not expect to find very often in european of course it's quite natural that this might happen languages doing the same thing independently of one another uh but here you can actually pinpoint it that it does happen in this particular case sort of the same story that goes a bit quicker for the usula and again there's a bit of material and turn a few pages you end up on page 11 and there the set of correspondences is slightly more difficult so i've given you a diagram there but again it depends on the position in the word and in which particular language you're looking what this short africate will do the word initial position there's a correspondence set which is unique to cut so no other sound has that correspondence set i skipped the second line of that diagram after a vowel again there's a unique set of correspondences among the languages which you wouldn't find for any other sound and after consonants there's a non unique set of correspondences because after a consonant short ge behaves like long ge and like the figurative ge and i've given you cle in the same type of diagram below that i'm now page 11 number seven so it turns out there's quite a parallel treatment between cle and cle in a sense that apparently it looks like this particular sound was preserved longest at the beginning of the word and after a vowel whereas it was lost perhaps earlier after a consonant okay now i'm almost there so first conclusion from all this would be proto duodo represents the same stage of the development of the short non ejective africates so currently as the modern northern akwag languages do um and what i find remarkable then is the second part of the conclusion having looked at dydo languages it isn't the case that proto dydo then innovated in some sort of way know all the individual languages at the certain point independently of one another got rid of the short africates independently of one another it seems does that make sense or perhaps it makes sense because as i said all speakers of dydo would also be speakers of avar and in avar the distinction was lost so if if sort of avar phonotactics takes over you could imagine there would always be a trigger nearby to get rid of the short africates it sort of makes sense the first consequence on bottom of page 11 i've already gone through i'd like to turn the page and that's sort of the last thing i want you to do uh that i now find it very difficult and again i have i have the impression that this is symptomatic for this dealing with this particular language family in this particular social linguistic setting that it is very difficult to distinguish chronologically deep isoglosses from recent ones so what you could imagine happening is um think of the northern akwag scenario right so why is northern akwag so conservative as opposed to the rest of the family well it could be that northern akwag was isolated at a certain point as it still is and the other language was sort of mooring to contact with one another or with avar and it was a common innovation that got rid of in the entire family apart from northern akwag because it was isolated but then isolation stopped and akwag took part in a whole host of developments that turned the Andean languages into akwag that's one possibility so it would be a deep isogloss separation not being the first step in the languages moving apart from one another but separation being just temporary just being temporary and then the next phase no separation anymore so that's a possibility the other possibility this is that we're actually looking at a very shallow isogloss so all Andean languages could have preserved up to the 19th century before baron usla came along to sort of make the first grammars of them and only relatively recently all of them got rid of those sounds perhaps under the influence of avar who may have started it apart from northern akwag because northern akwag is and still is pretty isolated from the other languages this apparently is what happened in dido where you can actually demonstrate the change to be recent and i'm disturbed by the fact that in indio european i'd normally have no problem in distinguishing an ancient isogloss from a modern one i do have this problem in this particular language family since i don't want to pitch indio european against northeast Caucasian i want to draw attention to a few indio european parallels to both scenarios there aren't many of them as far as i know so the first scenario so deep isogloss and then unification again across the language area you get something like that in the vulgar latin and so late antique latin vowels split so when the latin vowel system collapses you lose the difference between short long vowels and they collapse in some sort of way some sort of pattern and there's the eastern romance pattern and the western romance pattern the Romanian would be eastern romance and french would be western romance fine but that isogloss runs across italy so there are italian dialects who have the eastern type and there are italian dialects that have the western type that looks to me like a possible parallel for the isogloss is old there was a separation at some point but that separation was not the starting point for further differentiation language is moving apart but later changes then simply took over the entire area and it didn't really matter that it was a different vowel system and suddenly italy as opposed to northern italy both of them became italian and something similar could be said for the what i've called northern russian here i mean the the text of the the russian sorry the slavic language of the north world birch bark texts which failed to go through the second parallelisation apart from that look like the pretty normal standard medieval slavic possibility too so the shallow isogloss so for some sort of a reason all these languages held on to the sounds up to a very recent station then independently of one another or seemingly independently of one another then decided to throw them away or there is a parallel for that in european as well in terms of the loss of the laryngeal sounds and almost no language preserves them and it seems that as a conspiracy that almost right before written attestations starts they've gotten rid of their laryngeals and something similar with the slavic resonance so very few languages preserve them but they all get rid of them in different ways depending on the subgroup so we know it from inner european that type has changed uh we think it's exceptional my impression is that in the north Caucasus this is not exceptional but quite common thank you