Tsez language

Northeast Caucasian language

Tsez, also known as Dido (Tsez: цезйас мец (cezyas mec) or цез мец (cez mec)), is a Northeast Caucasian language with about 15,000 speakers (15,354 in 2002) spoken by the Tsez, a Muslim people in the mountainous Tsunta District of southwestern Dagestan in Russia. The name is said to derive from the Tsez word for "eagle", but this is most likely a folk etymology. The name Dido is derived from the Georgian word დიდი (didi), meaning "big". Tsez lacks a literary tradition and is poorly represented in written form. Avar and Russian are used as literary languages locally, even in schools. However, attempts have been made to develop a stable orthography for the Tsez language as well as its relatives, mainly for the purpose of recording traditional folklore; thus, a Cyrillic script based on that of Avar is often used. Fluency in Avar is usually higher among men than women, and the younger people tend to be more fluent in Russian than in Tsez, which is probably due to the lack of education in and about the language. Tsez is not taught in school and instead Avar is taught for the first five years and Russian afterwards. The vocabulary shows many traces of influences of Avar, Georgian, Arabic, and Russian, mainly through loanwords and, in the case of Russian, even in grammar and style. There are also loanwords of Turkic origin. These factors may eventually lead to the decline of use of the Tsez language, as it is more and more replaced by Avar and Russian, partly due to loss of traditional culture among the people and the adoption of Western clothing, technology and architecture. Tsez grammar was first analyzed by the Georgian linguist Davit Imnaishvili in 1963. Currently, a collection of Tsez folklore texts (written in the Mokok dialect) is in production.

Each phoneme is listed with its IPA [brackets], Latin, and Cyrillic transcriptions.

The syllable structure is generally CV(C). There are no vowel clusters. It is an agglutinative language with a complex morphology. Suffixes are either C, V, CV, VC or C+CV (where the first consonant belongs to the preceding syllable), depending on the structure of the stem. An example is the superessive suffix ƛʼ(o), which attached to the word besuro (fish) forms besuro ƛʼ (on the fish) and together with is (bull) forms is ƛʼo in order to maintain the syllable restriction.

Nouns are inflected for number and case, and have noun classes assigned to them.

Nouns can either be singular or plural. The plural is formed by adding bi to the stem in the absolutive case: besuro (fish [sg.]) → besuro bi (fish [pl.]). For all other cases, the suffix is za; thus, "of the fish [pl.]" becomes besuro za s.

There are eight syntactical and a much larger number of locative cases, which distinguish three categories: location, orientation, and direction. Thus, counting the locative and non locative cases together overall, there are 39 cases. Tsez is an ergative–absolutive language, which means that it makes no distinction between the subject of an intransitive sentence and the object of a transitive one. Both are in the unmarked absolutive case; the agent of the transitive sentence is in the ergative case. According to Ramazan Rajabov, the oblique stem of 42% of the nouns is different from the absolutive stem. Some nouns change their internal structure (such as a vowel), but others add one of about 20 so called "thematic suffixes" to their end, to which the other case suffixes are attached. For example, the word for "language" or "tongue" is mec, but its oblique stem is mecre , hence its plural is mecrebi, the ergative mecrā and so on. Rajabov says that the choice of the correct thematic suffix is sometimes difficult even for native speakers. It is likely that their origin lies in an application of two different plural forms, similar to the way the English word "children" actually has two archaic plural endings: (e)r and en. In Tsez it is sometimes even possible to use both the archaic and the regular and more productive bi plural for a word.

Personal pronouns exist in Tsez only for the first and second person; for the third person the demonstratives že (singular) and žedi (plural) are used. As the singular personal pronouns have the same form in absolutive and ergative, a sentence like Di mi okʼsi is ambiguous, because it can both mean "I hit you" and "You hit me", due to the rather free word order. However, they have a different form for the oblique cases and an irregular form in the genitive 1 case, the same as the plural pronouns. The singular pronouns also have the same forms for all four noun classes, while the plurals make this distinction, as shown in the chart below. class I class II IV 1st person singular abs. & erg. di oblique dā genitive 1 dey 2nd person singular abs. & erg mi oblique debe 1dow 2 genitive 1 debi 1st person plural absolutive eli ela oblique elu ela special gen. 13 eli special gen. 23 eliz 2nd person plural absolutive meži meža oblique mežu meža special gen. 13 meži special gen. 23 mežiz

This form is used before a syllable final consonant, such as the suffix r.
This form is used before a syllable initial consonant, such as the suffix de. The special forms of the two genitives is used when the possessor is a close group, typically a family, thus eli eniy is used for "our mother" instead of elus eniy. The plural demonstrative žedi ("they") also shows this feature, being žedi in the close group genitive 1 and žediz in the close group genitive 2. For ordinary possessors these forms would be žedus and žeduz, respectively. There is also a reflexive personal pronoun, meaning "self" or "oneself", which is žo and ne in its oblique form, respectively.

Tsez has a rich verbal morphology with many categories. Despite the great variety in conjugation, the only truly irregular verb is "to be" with some forms being yoł (present), ānu (present negative), zow (past), etc. There are 4 morphological groups, according to the final phoneme of the stem: The first group ends in a consonant, the second in i, the third in u and the fourth group contains the verbs with the variable ending d (before a vowel) / y (elsewhere).

The potential mood receives the suffix (e)ł, while the causative mood suffix is (e)r. Again, the epenthetic vowel is dropped when the stem ends in a vowel or if another suffix starting with a vowel is attached. Together with the definite future suffixes an, for instance, the epenthetic vowel has to be dropped: iš er ("let him eat"), but iš r an ("will let him eat").

Tsez has a rich set of particles, most of them occurring as clitics. The particle tow shows general emphasis while kin shows general emphasis and focusing. A contrastively topicalized constituent is marked by the particle gon. Being clitics, they can be attached to any part of speech. There is also a quotation particle that is used in direct reported speech and appears as the suffix ƛin that always appears at the end of the quoted phrase or sentence. Example: Di žekʼu yołƛin eƛix kʼetʼā ("'I am a man', says the cat"). There are also other free particles like hudu ("yes, so") or āy ("no").

The following list is a selection of suffixes used to form nouns from other parts of speech as well as other nouns. bi / zi (added to place names): residentse. g. Newo bi / Newo zi ("resident of Mokok", from Newo "Mokok")
łi (added to singular absolutive nouns denoting persons or to adjectives in the class IV form): abstract nouns and occupationse. g. laɣ łi ("slavery", from laɣ "slave"), učitel łi ("teaching", from the Russian loan učitel "teacher"), r igu łi ("grace, kindness", from igu "good")
kʼu (added to verbs in the iterative stem forms): instruments or personal descriptionse. g. ˤuƛʼno kʼu ("coward", from ˤuƛʼ , "to be afraid"), ˤiya kʼu ("cryer", from ˤiyad , "to cry")
ni (added to verb stems and onomatopoeic nouns): abstract nounse. g. rečʼ ni ("sharpness", from rečʼ "to cut"), ˤoy ni ("mooing", from ˤoy "moo")
qu (added to nouns in their oblique stem) or the lesser used Awar suffix qan: container or occupatione. g. magala qu ("baker"), bocʼ a qu ("wolf trap"), qido qan ("mason")
qʼoy / qoy / ħoy (added to singular oblique noun stems): enveloping objectse. g. reƛʼi qoy ("glove", from reƛʼa "hand")
yo (added to the lative singular of a noun): possessore. g. kotʼu r yo ("bearded man", from kotʼu "beard")

Some verb forming suffixes, like the causative and potential derivatives, have already been mentioned in the section about the verbal morphology. Other examples include:
kʼ (added to qualitative adjectives, adverbs and some intransitive verbs ending in x): transitive verbse. g. atʼi kʼ ("to dampen, to soak", from atʼiy "wet"), bito kʼ ("to move sth. ", from bittay "over there"), łicʼo kʼ ("to unite", from łicʼox "to mix")
ł (added to qualitative adjectives and adverbs): intransitive verbse. g. atʼi ł ("to become wet", from atʼiy "wet"), ade x ("to move forward", from adāy "in front")

Verb phrases (VP) are phrases whose head is a verb or a copula. Verbs can have different transitivities that directly affect the case distribution for their nominal arguments.

The only argument of intransitive verbs stands in the unmarked absolutive case. The verb agrees with the noun in class. An example phrase would be: is b exu s ("the bull died").

Monotransitive verbs are verbs that take two arguments. As Tsez is an absolutive–ergative language, the subject, or—to be more precise—the agent, requires the ergative case, while the direct object (or patient) requires the absolutive case. The direct object of a transitive verb is thus marked in the same way as the subject of an intransitive verb. Again, the verb agrees in class with the absolutive (i. e. the direct object). Both arguments, the agent as well as the patient, can be omitted if they are clear from the context.

Affective clauses have either verbs of perception or psychological verbs as predicate. Those verbs are for example: "be bored/bother", "become known", "find", "forget", "hate", "hear", "know", "love/like", "miss", "see", etc. The experiencer (which would be the subject in the corresponding English sentence) is usually in the dative case, while the stimulus (the object in the English sentence) takes the absolutive case.

Potential clauses are the equivalent to English clauses involving the words "can" or "be able to". In Tsez this is expressed by the verbal suffix ł; the subject of the clause then takes the possessive case ( q(o)) instead of the ergative, while the object of the verb is in the absolutive.

Causative constructions ("to make/let someone do something") are formed by the causative suffix r. It increases the valency of any verb by 1. If a ditransitive verb is formed from a transitive one, the causee (i. e. the argument that is subject and object at the same time) appears in the possessive case ( q(o)); see the example below (the e before the causative suffix is an epenthetic vowel):

The interrogative suffix ā ( yā after vowels) is used to mark yes/no questions. It is added to the word focused by the question:

The negative particle ānu follows the negated constituent; if the entire sentence is to be negated, verb suffixes are used (see above in the section about the verb morphology). For the imperative, prohibitive and optative form, see the same section on verb morphology above.

Coordination of clauses (as in English with the conjunction "and") is rare in the Tsez language. Noun phrases are coordinated by adding the suffix n (after vowels) or no (after consonants) to all items of the enumeration, thus "the hen and the rooster" is onuču n mamalay no. In conditional sentences the conjunction "then" may be expressed by the word yołi:

There are several different kinds of adverbial clauses. Temporal adverbial clauses describe a chronological sequence of two actions, as in English "Before it started to rain, we were home." or "We talked, while we were going.". In Tsez this relation is marked by verbal suffixes that turn one verb into a converb. See the table for converb suffixes in the "Non finite forms" part of the verb morphology section. Local adverbial clauses use locative converbs, which are also formed by adding a suffix to the verb. This suffix is z ā and the vowel before the last consonant of the verb itself is lengthened to ā. This converb forms the head of the local phrase and can thus receive a locative suffix that is normally used on nouns. Causal adverbial clauses, which in English are usually expressed using "because", "as", "when", "since" or "that", receive the converb suffix xoy, za ƛʼ or za q. There are more kinds of adverbial clauses, see the part "Non finite forms" in the verb morphology section for more example suffixes.

Modal verbs, phrasal verbs, verbs of motion and psychological verbs can all be accompanied by an infinitive verb. Verbal nouns or "masdars" (formed by the suffix (a)ni) can be used instead of infinitive verbs; they express purpose more strongly. Those verbal nouns also occur with psychological verbs like "be afraid of" and then usually take the possessive case (ending q).

When a clause is used in place of a noun, as in "The father knew [that the boy wanted bread]. ", the optional nominalizing suffix łi can be attached to the predicate of the embedded clause. The clause belongs to noun class IV, then:

If a speech act verb like "say", "ask", "shout" introduces reported speech, the reported utterance is followed by the clitical quotation particle ƛin, which is suffixed to verbs and stands alone in all other cases. It is remarkable that the point of view and the tense of the original utterance is maintained, hence the only difference between direct and indirect speech is the particle ƛin. See this example:

This is a Tsez tale written in the Asakh dialect using a Latin based orthography.