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Old April 5th, 2015 #1
Theodore
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jewsign Ashkenazi Khazars

Maykop' Capital & Peoples
The valley of Apple trees

Older than the Scythian, Sarmatian and Celtic.

Adyghe is the autonym (self-designation) of the group. Moreover, Kabardins refer to themselves as Kebertei or Kebertei-Adyghe, and Shapsugs use Shapsyg-Adyghe. In contrast, the term Circassian is the exonym by which speakers of Northwest Caucasian languages are most commonly known to the outside world. It derives from the Turkic designation “Cherkess” that has been adopted by Russian and other languages and became fixed in the European and Asian literatures.

Curiously, the linguistic classification of Northwest Caucasian languages correlates closely with the self-designations of these groups. As the alternative name of this family, Abkhazo-Adygean, indicates, it consists of two main subfamilies: Abkhazian and Adygean. The latter includes two literary languages, Adyghe and Kabardian, and their local dialects (e.g. Shapsug, Temirgoy, and Abadzakh are properly considered dialects of Adyghe). These two languages exhibit close affinity to each other, and some scholars consider them to form a dialect continuum, meaning that some local dialects occupy an intermediate position between the literary standards of Adyghe and Kabardian (for example, the Beslenei dialect is closer to Kabardian except its pronunciation of consonants is more Adyghe-like). This high degree of similarity between Adyghe and Kabardian means that the two languages share a relatively recent common ancestor; indeed, we learn from historical sources that the split between the two subgroups of the Adyghe people happened about 1,500 years ago. Today, Adyghe is spoken by approximately 500,000 people in Turkey, Russia, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Israel, Macedonia, and in the United States (there is even Circassian Association of California). Its closest relative, Kabardian, has about 1,600,000 speakers in Turkey, Russia, Jordan, Syria, and Germany. To avoid further confusion, in what follows I will use the term Circassian as an umbrella designation for Adyghe and Kabardians, but not for the rest of the Northwest Caucasian groups.

The second branch of the Northwest Caucasian language family, the Abkhaz–Abaza branch consists of two languages: Abaza (with 48,000 speakers in Russia and Turkey) and Abkhaz (with 117,000 speakers mostly in the Great Caucasus Mountain range in Abkhazia, as well as in smaller communities in Turkey). The fifth Northwest Caucasian language, Ubykh, now extinct, was once spoken in the area around Sochi in Russia. After the expulsions in 1864, Ubykh was mostly spoken in the Istanbul area, near the Sea of Marmara, but its use gradually declined and its last fully competent speaker Tevfik Esenç died on October 7, 1992. The ethnic Ubykh community now speaks a distinct dialect of Adyghe, according to the Ethnologue website.

Among the linguistic peculiarities of the Northwest Caucasian languages, including Adyghe, is the relative paucity of vowels coupled with the abundance and complexity of consonants. Depending on the analysis, Northwest Caucasian languages have just 2 or 3 vowels, but to compensate for the shortage of vowels, they have very rich systems of consonants. Adyghe and Kabardian actually have the simplest consonantal inventories of the five Northwest Caucasian languages. For example, Kabardian features a “mere” 48 consonants, including some rather unusual ejective fricatives, pharyngeals (i.e. sounds articulated with the root of the tongue against the pharynx, at the back of the throat) and interdentals (i.e. “th”-sounds). Ubykh, on the other hand, had one of the largest consonant inventories in the world, and probably the largest outside the Khoisan languages – a whopping 81 consonants (according to some analyses).

How does a language end up with such a skewed ratio of consonants to vowels? Historical linguists believe that Northwest Caucasian languages developed so many consonants at the expense of vowels because of a historical change in which vowel features were reassigned to preceding consonants. For example, ancestral */ki/ became /kʲə/, with palatalization (i.e. moving the tongue closer to the roof of the mouth) being reassigned from the vowel /i/ to the consonant /kʲ/; similarly, ancestral */ku/ became /kʷə/, with labialization (i.e. the rounding of lips) similarly reassigned. Note that in both cases, the vowels have been neutralized to a schwa /ə/.

From the grammatical point of view, the most interesting property of the Northwest Caucasian languages, including Adyghe, is their polysynthetiс nature: each verb is marked for agreement with all arguments, not only with subjects (as in more familiar Indo-European languages like English: The children play but The child plays), but also with objects and indirect objects. (Other polysythetic languages around the world include: Wichita, a Caddoan languages spoken in west-central Oklahoma; Nahuatl, an Uto-Aztecan language of central Mexico; Mapudungun, an Araucanian language spoken in central Chile; Nunggubuyu, an Australian aboriginal language from the Gunwingguan family; Chukchi and Koryak, two Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages in northeastern Siberia; Ainu of northern Japan; and Sora, a Munda language spoken in India.)

Since agreement prefixes on the verb encode “who did what to whom”, the systems of noun cases in Northwest Caucasian languages are rather underdeveloped (for instance, Abkhaz distinguishes just two cases, the nominative and the adverbial). More generally, the verb is where the morphosyntactic “action” is centered in these languages, and the verb may include not only agreement prefixes but also locative, directional, reflexive, causative, and other morphemes. In effect, virtually the entire syntactic structure of the sentence can be packed within the verb, as in the following examples of Adyghe verbs:

(1) i- zo- gˆa- tq
him- I- make- write
‘I will force him to write.’
(2) nə- pq- ue- z- gˆa- tqa
there- to.you- you- I- make- write
‘I forced him to write you something.’
(3) u- q̣a- ze- gˆa- pṭl
you- here- on.me make- look
‘He forces you to look here at me.’

[examples from Shakryl 1971, pp. 24-25, using standard transliteration]

The polysynthetic nature of verbs coupled with the paucity of cases is rather peculiar to Northwest Caucasian languages; Northeast Caucasian languages, in contrast, place the morphosyntactic “action” on nouns rather than on verbs (i.e. these languages have rich case systems and little to no agreement on verbs), whereas South Caucasian languages combine a relatively rich verbal agreement with relatively rich case systems.

Another notable aspect of Adyghe is its vocabulary. In addition to the core word stock shared with other Northwest Caucasian languages, Adyghe also has a significant number of loanwords (some of which are also shared with other Northwest Caucasian languages, especially with Kabardian). The main sources of such loanwords are Russian, Arabic, Farsi (Persian) and Turkic languages. According to A. K. Shagirov, loanwords from Russian constitute the bulk of the foreign vocabulary in Adyghe, indicating the extent and diversity of contacts between the Russian and the Adyghes. However, unsurprisingly, the Adyghe language of diasporic communities in the former Ottoman lands features many more loanwords from Turkic languages.

Each language source contributed words in certain semantic domains. For example, Russian borrowings include words for everyday objects (Adyghe kastrul ‘pot’, cf. Russian kastrjulja), clothing (Adyghe trusik ‘underpants’, cf. Russian trusiki), foods (Adyghe pičen ‘cookie’, cf. Russian pečenje), construction and engineering terms (Adyghe tormaz ‘breaks’, cf. Russian tormoz), medicine (Adyghe prastud ‘common cold’, cf. Russian prostuda), education, science, culture and sports (Adyghe mestaimenija ‘pronoun’, cf. Russian mestoimenije), government, administration, military and the law (Adyghe zakon ‘law’, cf. Russian zakon). In contrast, many of the Arabic loanwords in Adyghe have to do with Islam and Muslim ethics, traditions and holidays: älah ‘God’, hädžə ‘one who made pilgrimage to Mecca’, din ‘religion, faith’, among others. Some of these Arabic loanwords, and all loanwords from Farsi, are said to have been borrowed into Adyghe via such Turkic languages as Turkish and Crimean Tatar. Turkic-derived vocabulary in Adyghe – borrowed from a variety of languages including Turkish, Tatar, Nogai, Karachai-Balkar, and others – includes words for everyday objects, foods, items of clothing, names of animals and plants, trade and military terms, such as bajäu ‘paint’, ästlän ‘lion’, äjvä ‘quince’, äqšə ‘money’, and many others.

One particularly interesting loanword in Adyghe, mentioned by Shagirov, is the word qazar meaning ‘one who asks too much for his goods and does not reduce the price’. Shagirov relates the etymology of this word to the enthnonym Khazars, a Turkic-speaking group whose territory comprised large portions of the northern Caucasus, including the lands of the Adyghe. It is well-known that Khazars were instrumental in maintaining trade networks between Europe and the East; if the etymology of the Adyghe word qazar proposed by Shagirov is correct, it speaks volumes to the trade relations between the Adyghe and the Khazars.

Last edited by Theodore; April 6th, 2015 at 01:04 AM.
 
Old April 5th, 2015 #2
Theodore
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Default Expert Hebrew Historian: We are not Khazarians

Why Ashkenazi Jews Are Not Descended
From Khazars — and What It Means

Mass Conversion Claim Cast Doubt on Mideast Origins


Stampfer said his research had no political motives, though he recognizes that the topic is politically fraught.

Stampfer believes the persistence of the Khazar conversion myth attests to researchers’ reluctance to abandon familiar paradigms.

Quote:
“Those who believed this story – and they are many – usually didn’t do so for malicious reasons,” he says. “I tell my students that the only thing I want them to remember from my classes is the need to investigate and ask – to investigate whether the arguments they hear are credible, reasonable and well-founded.”

Read more: http://forward.com/articles/200825/w...#ixzz3WV8b4YKF

Last edited by Theodore; April 6th, 2015 at 12:34 AM.
 
Old April 6th, 2015 #3
Theodore
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jewsign

Shaul Stampfers statements are bizarre, as there seems to be a good amount of evidence indicating a Jewish presence in this region of the world. He's abusing his position as an academic 'authority' to assure his fellow tribesmen that they are not from Khazaria.

As a historian, he said he was surprised to discover how hard it is “to prove that something didn’t happen. Until now, most of my research has been aimed at discovering or clarifying what did happen in the past … It’s a much more difficult challenge to prove that something didn’t happen than to prove it did.”

"Khazarian Hebrew Documents of the Tenth Century," published by Cornell University Press in 1983.

this "expert" in Jewish History is apparently very ignorant of the excavated documents.

Last edited by Theodore; April 6th, 2015 at 12:34 AM.
 
Old April 6th, 2015 #4
Theodore
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jewsign The other wingnut

 
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