Bats language
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Bats ( , or , ), also known as Batsbi, Batsi, Batsb, Batsaw, or Tsova-Tush is the endangered language of the Bats people, a North Caucasian minority group living in Georgia. Batsbi is part of the Nakh branch of Northeast Caucasian languages. It had 2,500 to 3,000 speakers in 1975, with only one dialect. Batsbi is only used for spoken communication, as Bats people tend to use Georgian when writing.
Bats ( , or , ), also known as Batsbi, Batsi, Batsb, Batsaw, or Tsova-Tush is the endangered language of the Bats people, a North Caucasian minority group living in Georgia. Batsbi is part of the Nakh branch of Northeast Caucasian languages. It had 2,500 to 3,000 speakers in 1975, with only one dialect. Batsbi is only used for spoken communication, as Bats people tend to use Georgian when writing.
History
Tusheti, the northeastern mountainous region of Georgia, is home to four tribes that consider themselves Tushetians: the Batsbi (also known as Tsova-Tush ), the Gometsari, the Piriqiti, and the Chagma-Tush. Tsova-Tush people make up 50% of Tushetians. Only several hundred Tsova-Tush people speak the Bats language, whereas the other tribes (Gometsari, Piriqiti and Chagma-Tush) have lost the language. Evidence from toponymics indicates that the other three Tushetian tribes formerly spoke Batsbi, suggesting that all Tushetians once did and over time the Georgian language replaced Batsbi. By linguistic lineage, the Bats (or Tsova-Tush) language can be traced back to Ghalghai (Ingush) origins. The mountainous terrain preserved the culture and traditions of Tushetians, but the history of isolation makes it more difficult to document them as only a few records exist. The first grammar of Batsbi, , was compiled by the German orientalist Anton Schiefner (1817–1879), making it into the first grammar of an indigenous Caucasian language based on sound scientific principles.
Classification
Batsbi belongs to the Nakh branch of the Northeast Caucasian language family. The language is not mutually intelligible with either Chechen or Ingush, the other two Nakh languages.
Writing system
Comparison table
Morphosyntax
Batsbi is an SOV language with ergative-absolutive alignment which makes extensive use of bound morphological derivation and inflection. It has both grammatical gender (i.e. noun classes) and several grammatical cases.
Noun classes
As in other Nakh languages, Batsbi has several noun classes (grammatical genders) that are indexed through class prefixes on some vowel-initial verbs, adjectives, numerals, and a few other words. That is, nouns themselves show no morphologically marks for gender. Gender indexing is highly complex in the language, with subject gender agreement on intransitive verbs (absolutive), but object agreement on transitive verbs. The table below shows gender agreement on verbs for three of the noun classes:
Grammatical number and case
Batsbi nouns are inflected for two numbers, singular and plural, and nine cases. Number inflection occurs via suffixation and/or root changes, and is chiefly unpredictable. Harris (ms) identifies nine suffixes for plural marking in the nominative case; note that vowel changes (i.e. ablaut) may also affect the root of the plural form. Batsbi makes use of nine noun cases total. In the majority of nouns, the ergative and instrumental cases have a common form.
Verbs
Verbs in Batsbi encode not only tense, and aspect, but also gender, person, mood, and other categories. Person suffixes also encode whether the subject of the verb is ergative or absolutive. Person suffixes for are shown in the table below. Note that Batsbi verbs also agree with the object through a prefix denoting a noun class, not shown in the table that follows. Batsbi has explicit inflections for agentivity of a verb; it makes a distinction between: (I fell down through no fault of my own) (I fell down and it was my own fault) Languages of the World report Bats basic lexicon at the Global Lexicostatistical Database
Text derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1376620028 under CC BY-SA 4.0; modifications have been made.