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АЛИСЭ ТЕЛЪЫДЖЭЩӀЫМ ЗЭРЫЩЫӀАР


         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.

         xx
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