Archi language
Archi is a Northeast Caucasian language spoken by the Archis in the village of Archib, southern Dagestan, Russia, and the six surrounding smaller villages.
It is unusual for its many phonemes and for its contrast between several voiceless velar lateral fricatives,, voiceless and ejective velar lateral affricates,, and a voiced velar lateral fricative,. It is an ergative–absolutive language with four noun classes and has a remarkable morphological system with huge paradigms and irregularities on all levels. Mathematically, there are 1,502,839 possible forms that can be derived from a single verb root.
Classification
The classification of the Archi language has not been definitively established. Peter von Uslar felt it should be considered a variant of Avar, but Roderich von Erckert saw it as closer to Lak. The language has also been considered as a separate entity that could be placed somewhere between Avar and Lak. The Italian linguist Alfredo Trombetti placed Archi within an Avar–Ando–Dido group, but today the most widely recognized opinion follows that of the Soviet scholar Bokarev, who regards Archi as one of the Lezgian–Samur group of the Dagestan languages. Schulze places it in the Lezgian branch with all other Lezgian languages belonging to the Samur group.Phonology
Archi has, like its Northeast Caucasian relatives, a very complicated phonological system, with Archi being an extreme example. It has 26 vowel phonemes and, depending on analysis, between 74 and 82 consonant phonemes.Vowels
Archi has a symmetric six-vowel system. All except can occur in five varieties: short, pharyngealized, high tone, long, and pharyngealized with high tone. Of all these, only and do not occur word-initially. Examples of non-initial are and .Consonants
Of the languages without click consonants, Archi has one of the largest consonant inventories, with only the recently extinct Ubykh of the Northwest Caucasian languages having a few more. The table below shows all consonants that can be found in the Archi Language Tutorial and the Archi Dictionary.Of the consonants listed above, the ones in orange have no word-initial dictionary entries, the one in green does not appear in the Tutorial but does have a word-internal dictionary entry, and the ones in blue appear in the Tutorial but have no dictionary entries.
Some of these sounds are very rare. For example, has only one dictionary entry word-internally and two entries word-initially. Likewise, has only two dictionary entries: and .
The fortis consonants are not simply two instances of the same consonant, though they do appear largely complementary, with the double instances,, and being the most common and less so. That said, can still be found in . This is also noted by, who describes the fortis consonants as follows:
"Strong phonemes are characterized by the intensiveness of the articulation. The intensity of the pronunciation leads to a natural lengthening of the duration of the sound, and that is why strong differ from weak ones by greater length. the adjoining of two single weak sounds does not produce a strong one Thus, the gemination of a sound does not by itself create its tension."
The voiceless velar lateral fricative, the voiced velar lateral fricative, and the corresponding voiceless and ejective affricates, are extremely unusual speech sounds among the languages of the world, because velar fricatives are usually central rather than lateral. The velar laterals are further forward than velars in most languages and could better be called prevelar, like the Tutorial does.
Orthography
Until recently Archi did not have a written form, except in studies by specialists who used the Latin script. In 2006, the Surrey Morphology Group developed a Cyrillic alphabet for Archi based on the Avar alphabet, which is used in the Archi–Russian–English Dictionary alongside an IPA transcription.Grammar
Nouns
Archi nouns inflect for number and for one of 10 regular cases and 5 locative cases that can all take one of 6 directional suffixes. There are four noun classes, which are only evident from verbal agreement.Case
| Case | Marker | Sg. 'ram' | Pl. 'rams' |
| Absolutive | -∅ | baˁkʼ | baˁkʼ-ur |
| Ergative | -∅ | beˁkʼ-iri | baˁkʼ-ur-čaj |
| Genitive | -n | beˁkʼ-iri-n | baˁkʼ-ur-če-n |
| Dative | -s, -sː | beˁkʼ-iri-s | baˁkʼ-ur-če-s |
| Comitative | -ʟ̝̊ːu | beˁkʼ-iri-ʟ̝̊ːu | baˁkʼ-ur-če-ʟ̝̊ːu |
| Similative | -qˁdi | beˁkʼ-iri-qˁdi | baˁkʼ-ur-če-qˁdi |
| Causal | -šːi | beˁkʼ-iri-šːi | baˁkʼ-ur-če-šːi |
| Comparative | -χur | beˁkʼ-iri-χur | baˁkʼ-ur-če-χur |
| Partitive | -qˁiš | beˁkʼ-iri-qˁiš | baˁkʼ-ur-če-qˁiš |
| Substitutive | -k͡ʟ̝̊ʼəna | beˁkʼ-iri-k͡ʟ̝̊ʼəna | baˁkʼ-ur-če-k͡ʟ̝̊ʼəna |
Depending on the specifics of the analysis, the ergative and the absolutive cases are not always marked by a specific suffix. Rather, they are marked by the use of the basic and oblique stems in the absence of other markers. There is also a locative-case series in which 6 directional-case suffixes are combined with 5 spatial cases to produce a total of 30 case-localization combinations. However, they do not constitute 30 distinct case forms because they are easily derivable from a pair of morphemes.
Noun classes
The four noun classes of Archi are only evident from verbal inflection. This table summarizes the noun classes and their associated verbal morphology:Example phrases
The following phrases were phonetically transcribed from Archi:| Archi transcription | English |
| x́it barḳur | The ladle breaks. |
| x́it ax̄u | The spoon became dirty. |
| k̂ut̄ali berx̄ur | The bag stays. |
| k̂ut̄ali eku | The little bag fell. |
| č̣ut abḳu | The jug broke. |
| č̣ut aḳu | The little jug broke. |
| ḳunḳum barx̄ur | The kettle becomes dirty. |
| ḳunḳum oq̄́u | The little kettle sank. |
| motol orq̄́ur | The young goat drowns. |
| uri arč̣ur | The young horse hides itself. |
| biš ač̣u | The young cow hid itself. |
| ḳêrt erkur | The young donkey falls. |
| dogi ebku | The donkey fell. |
| q̇on abč̣u | The goat hid itself. |
| nôiš ebx̄u | The horse stayed. |