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А ЛИСЭ Т ЕЛЪЫДЖЭЩӀЫМ ЗЭРЫШЫӀАР

repaired over the next 100 years by the labour of many selfless
enlighteners and educators who created written Circassian
literature—first based on the Arabic alphabet, then on the
Latin one, and eventually on Cyrillic. These efforts secured
the continuity of the Circassian mythology, which exists today
and is being transmitted to new generations.
The Circassian language sounds quite exotic to the Euro -
pean ear. Phonetically, it is notable for its high number of
consonants; the Kabardian-Circassian dialect has 48 con -
sonant phonemes, and up to 56 are found in the Kiakh
(Adyghe) dialects, There are three simple vowel phonemes: an
open а (a /aː/); э (ė /a/), and ы (y /ə/) (an irrational vowel);
both “ė” and “y” are a variation of the sound “a” but
depending on their phonetic environment and the position of
emphasis they can be represented by different allophones.
Circassian is a polysynthetic language where the boundaries
between its vocabulary and grammar, on one hand, and
between the morphology and syntax, on the other, lie in
completely unusual places. For instance, if in European
languages a verb changes according to the person of a single
part of the sentence (the subject), in Circassian it changes
according to the person of all major parts of the sentence, so
the syntactic information is expressed by the verb through
purely morphological means.
A Circassian verb “to give” must reflect the person who
gives, number of objects that are given, the person to whom
they are given, the number of these persons, and the time and
place of giving. Therefore, a Circassian verb expresses an
enormous amount of information, which in other languages is
expressed in other parts of the sentence. Nouns, which in
Indo-European languages have descriptions expressed by
adjectives, are portmanteaux in Circassian: quite often several
roots are combined into a single word that might include, for
example, both an adjective and a numeral.

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