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Chuvash (Чӑвашла, Căvašla; IPA: )[3] is a Turkic language spoken in central Russia, primarily in the Chuvash Republic and adjacent areas. It is the only surviving member of the Oghur branch of Turkic languages. While many Turkic languages demonstrate mutual intelligibility to varying degrees, Chuvash has diverged considerably from the other languages in the group.
The writing system for the Chuvash language is based on the Cyrillic script, employing all of the letters used in the Russian alphabet, and adding four letters of its own: Ӑ, Ӗ, Ҫ and Ӳ.
Chuvash is the native language of the Chuvash people and an official language of Chuvashia.[4][5] It is spoken by 1,640,000 persons in Russia and another 34,000 in other countries.[6] 86% of ethnic Chuvash and 8% of the people of other ethnicities living in Chuvashia claimed knowledge of Chuvash language during the 2002 census.[7] Despite that, and although Chuvash is taught at schools and sometimes used in the media, it is considered endangered,[8][9] because Russian dominates in most spheres of life and few children learning the language are likely to become active users.
A fairly significant production and publication of literature in Chuvash continues to the present day. According to UNESCO's Index Translationum, at least 202 books translated from Chuvash were published in other languages (mostly Russian) since ca. 1979.[10] However, as with most of other languages of the former USSR, most of the translation activity took place before the dissolution of the USSR: out of these 202 translations, 170 books were published in the USSR,[11] and just 17, in the post-1991 Russia (mostly, in the 1990s).[12] A similar situation takes place with the translation of books from other languages (mostly Russian) into Chuvash (the total of 175 titles published since ca. 1979, but just 18 out of them, in the post-1991 Russia).[13]
Chuvash is the most distinctive of the Turkic languages and cannot be understood by speakers of other Turkic tongues. Today, Chuvash is classified, alongside Khazar, Turkic Avar, Bulgar, and (possibly) Hunnic, as a member of the Oghuric branch of the Turkic language family. It is the only language of this family which is not extinct. The conclusion that Chuvash belongs to the Oghuric branch of Turkic arises from the reasoning that the vocabulary shows the language to belong to the r- and l- type which is typical for all languages of this branch. The rest of the Turkic languages (Common Turkic) are of the z- and š- type."[14]
Since the surviving literary records for the non-Chuvash members of Oghuric are scant, the exact position of Chuvash within the Oghuric family cannot be determined.
Formerly, scholars considered Chuvash not properly a Turkic language at all but, rather, a Turkicized Finno-Ugric (Uralic) language.[15]
The modern Chuvash alphabet was devised in 1873 by school inspector Ivan Yakovlevich Yakovlev.[16]
In 1938, the alphabet underwent significant modification which brought it to its current form.
The most ancient writing system, known as the Orkhon script, disappeared after the Volga Bulgars converted to Islam. Later, the Arabic script was adopted. After the Mongol invasion, writing degraded. After Peter the Great's reforms Chuvash elites disappeared, blacksmiths and some other crafts were prohibited for non-Russian nations, the Chuvash were educated in Russian, while writing in runes recurred with simple folks.
Diacritic marks are used to specify: Apostrophe ' - phonemic palatalization; Breve ̆ - unstressed vowels.
The consonants are the following (the corresponding Cyrillic letters are in brackets): /p/ (п), /t/ (т), /k/ (к), /tɕ/ (ч), /s/ (с), /ʂ/ (ш), /ɕ/ (ҫ), /χ/ (х), /ʋ/ (в), /m/ (м), /n/ (н), /l/ (л), /r/ (р), /j/ (й). The stops, sibilants and affricates are voiceless and fortes, but instead become lenes (sounding similar to voiced) in intervocalic position and after liquids, nasals and semi-vowels. E.g. Аннепе sounds like annebe, кушакпа sounds like kuzhakpa. However, geminate consonants don't undergo this lenition. Furthermore, the voiced consonants occurring in Russian are used in modern Russian-language loans. Consonants also become palatalized before and after front vowels.
According to Krueger (1961), the Chuvash vowel system is as follows (the precise IPA symbols are chosen based on his description, since he uses a different transcription).
András Róna-Tas (1997)[18] provides a somewhat different description, also with a partly idiosyncratic transcription. The following table is based on his version, with additional information from Petrov (2001). Again, the IPA symbols are not directly taken from the works, so they could be inaccurate.
The vowels ӑ and ӗ are described as reduced, thereby differing in quantity from the rest. In unstressed positions, they often resemble a schwa or tend to be dropped altogether in fast speech. At times, especially when stressed, they may be somewhat rounded and sound similar to /o/ and /ø/.
Additionally, ɔ (о) occurs in loanwords from Russian where the syllable is unstressed in Russian.
There are two dialects of Chuvash: Viryal or Upper (which has both o and u) and Anatri or Lower (which has u for both o and u: up. totă "full", tută "taste" – lo. tută "full, taste" ). The literary language is based on both the Lower and Upper dialects. Both Tatar and the neighboring Uralic languages such as Mari have influenced the Chuvash language, as have Russian, Mongolian, Arabic, and Persian, which have all added many words to the Chuvash lexicon.
Chuvash is an agglutinative language and as such has an abundance of suffixes, but no native prefixes (apart from the reduplicating intensifier prefix as in шурă = white, шап-шурă = very white). One word can have many suffixes and these can also be used to create new words (like creating a verb from a noun, or a noun from a verbal root, see Vocabulary section further below) or to indicate the grammatical function of the word.
Chuvash nouns can take endings indicating the person of a possessor. They can take case-endings. There are six noun cases in the Chuvash declension system:
Also:
Taking кун (day) as an example:
Possession is expressed by means of constructions based on verbs meaning "to exist" and "to not exist" ("пур" and "ҫук"). For example, in order to say, "My cat had no shoes," we form:
which literally translates as, "cat-mine-of foot-cover(of)-plural-his non-existent-was."
Chuvash verbs exhibit person. They can be made negative or impotential; they can also be made potential. Finally, Chuvash verbs exhibit various distinctions of tense, mood, and aspect: a verb can be progressive, necessitative, aorist, future, inferential, present, past, conditional, imperative, or optative.
"Vowel harmony" is the principle by which a native Chuvash word generally incorporates either exclusively back vowels (а, ӑ, у, ы) or exclusively front vowels (е, ӗ, и, ӳ). As such, a notation for a Chuvash suffix such as -тен means either -тан or -тен, whichever promotes vowel harmony; a notation such as -тпӗр means either -тпӑр, -тпӗр again with vowel harmony constituting the deciding factor.
Chuvash has two classes of vowels – front and back (see the table above). Vowel harmony states that words may not contain both front and back vowels. Therefore, most grammatical suffixes come in front and back forms, e.g. Шупашкарта "in Cheboksary" but килте "at home".
Compound words are considered separate words with respect to vowel harmony: vowels do not have to harmonize between members of the compound (thus forms like сӗтел|пукан "furniture" are permissible). In addition, vowel harmony does not apply for loanwords and some invariant suffixes (such as -ӗ); there are also a few native Chuvash words that do not follow the rule (such as анне "mother"). In such words suffixes harmonize with the final vowel; thus Аннепе "With the mother".
Word order in Chuvash is generally subject–object–verb.
Oghuz languages, Turkish language, Altaic languages, Uyghur language, Azerbaijani language
Turkic languages, Chuvash language, Oghur languages, Central Asia, Caucasus
Mongolia, Tatar language, Chuvash language, Uyghur language, Turkish language
Chuvash language, Cheboksary, World War II, Russian Empire, Chuvashia
Russian language, Sakha Republic, Turkic languages, Turkish language, Russia