ayearinlanguage: A Years in Language, Day 22: Kabardian Kabardian is a Northwest Caucasian language

ayearinlanguage: A Years in Language, Day 22: Kabardian Kabardian is a Northwest Caucasian language spoken in Turkey, Jordan, and Syria. Interestingly enough the Northwest Caucasian language family stands alone, unrelated to the other language families of the Caucasus. In typical style the Caucasian languages are linguistic “problem children”, full of strange features and questionable geneologies. Karbardian has over 40 consonants. Among these are egressive consonants like I explained yesterday with Aymara. However, while Aymara was content to limit itself to egressive versions of stop consonants (consonants that are made with a full obstruction of airflow like English “b”, “t”, or “k”) which are the most common kinds of eggressive, Kabardian has the very rare egressive fricatives as well (sounds that are made with a restrictive turbulent airflow like English “v”, or “s”). Normally a large consonant inventory is also paired with a large vowel inventory, and vice versa (the average ratio is somewhere between 2.75 and 4.5). Karbadian, with its mighty consonant inventory, has a total of two vowels, three if you account for contrastive vowel length. This is a schwa, the English unstressed vowel sound, and an open vowel similar to English “a” as in “father”. -- source link
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