Bats language

Bats
ბაცბა მოტტ Batsba Moṭṭ batsba motjiti
Pronunciation	[batsʰba motʼː] [batsbur mɔt’ː]
Native to	North Caucasus
Region	Zemo-Alvani in Kakheti
Ethnicity	Bats people
Native speakers	(500 cited 1997)[1] far fewer than 3,000 active (2007)
Language family	Northeast Caucasian Nakh Bats
Writing system	Georgian script[2]
Language codes
ISO 639-3	bbl
Glottolog	bats1242
ELP	Batsbi
Bats
Bats is classified as Severely Endangered by the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger
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Bats (Batsbur Mott, or Batsba Moṭṭ ბაცბა მოტტ, /batsʰba motʼː/), also known as Batsbi, Batsi, Batsb, Batsaw, or Tsova-Tush) is the endangered language of the Bats people, a North Caucasian minority group living in the Republic of Georgia. Batsbi is part of the Nakh branch of Northeast Caucasian languages. It had 2,500 to 3,000 speakers in 1975, with only one dialect. Batsbi is only used for spoken communication, as Bats people tend to use Georgian when writing.

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Tusheti, the northeastern mountainous region of Georgia, is home to four tribes that consider themselves Tushetians: the Batsbi (also known as Tsovatush), the Gometsari, the Piriqiti, and the Chagma-Tush. Tsovatush people make up 50% of Tushetians. Only several hundred Tsovatush people speak Bats, whereas the other tribes (Gometsari, Piriqiti and Chagma-Tush) have lost the language. Evidence from toponymics indicates that the other three Tushetian tribes formerly spoke Bats, suggesting that all Tushetians once did and over time the Georgian language replaced Bats.

The mountainous terrain preserved the culture and traditions of Tushetians, but the history of isolation makes it more difficult to document them as only a few records exist.

The first grammar of Bats, Über die Thusch-Sprache, was compiled by the German orientalist Anton Schiefner (1817–1879), making it into the first grammar of an indigenous Caucasian language based on sound scientific principles.^[3]

Batsbi belongs to the Nakh branch of the Northeast Caucasian language family. The language is not mutually intelligible with either Chechen or Ingush, the other two Nakh languages.

Most speakers of Bats live in the village of Zemo-Alvani, on the Kakheti Plain, in the Akhmeta Municipality of Georgia. There are some families of Bats in Tbilisi and other bigger towns in Georgia.

Bats has a typologically common five-vowel system. Although some authors claim that all vowels but /u/ contrast in length, no minimal pairs are given in any studies of Batsbi, nor are examples of long vowels available in the literature.

Bats also has the following diphthongs: /ei/, /ui/, /oi/, /ai/, /ou/, and /au/.^[4]

All vowels and diphthongs have nasalised allophones that are the result of phonetic and morphophonemic processes: [ ĩ ẽ ã õ ũ ]. Nasalised vowels are represented in the Mkhedruli script via a superscript ⟨ნ⟩ following the vowel in question, as in კნათე^ნ for [k’natẽ] 'boy-GEN'.

Batsbi has a large consonant inventory, relatively typical for a Nakh-Dagestanian language, containing ejectives, pharyngeals and uvulars. Unlike its close Nakh relatives, Chechen and Ingush, Batsbi has on the other hand retained the voiceless lateral fricative /ɬ/. Also notable is the presence of two geminate ejectives, /tːʼ/ and /qːʼ/, which are cross-linguistically rare.^[5]

The most common syllable type in Batsbi is CVC.^[6] However, Batsbi words commonly contain sequences of two consonants, the second of which is often a fricative.^[7] Stop-stop clusters often contain an ejective. Those two-consonant clusters can occur in any position within the word, although less commonly word-finally. Sequences of three consonants do occur as well, although many are borrowings from Georgian. Like many clusters in non-Indo-European languages,^[8] consonant sequences in Batsbi often fail to conform to the sonority sequencing principle.

Of the words containing three-consonant onsets above, all but /pst’u/ “wife” and /t’k’mel/ “dust” are native to Batsbi, the other ones being loanwords from Georgian.

Batsbi is an SOV language with ergative-absolutive alignment which makes extensive use of bound morphological derivation and inflection. It has both grammatical gender (i.e. noun classes) and several grammatical cases.

Batsbi pronouns encode three persons, two numbers, and clusivity for first person plural (“you and us” vs. “us but not you”). Demonstratives work as third person pronouns.

It is noteworthy that for singular first person ('I') and second person ('you') almost always differ systematically by a single consonant, first person having /s/ and second person /ħ/, whereas the plural forms regularly have /txo/ for first person exclusive, and /ʃu/ for second person. Case endings are regular for all pronouns, shown below.^[7]

In Batsbi, the distal demonstrative ('that yonder') also serves as a third person pronoun ('s/he', 'it', 'they'). As such, the language does not encode gender in its pronouns. However, gender may still be indexed on verbs and adjectives.

Adnominal demonstratives code no gender in Batsbi.

As in other Nakh languages, Batsbi has several noun classes (grammatical genders) that are indexed through class prefixes on some vowel-initial verbs, adjectives, numerals, and a few other words.^[7] That is, nouns themselves show no morphologically marks for gender. Gender indexing is highly complex in the language, with subject gender agreement on intransitive verbs (absolutive), but object agreement on transitive verbs. The table below shows gender agreement on verbs for three of the noun classes:

Holisky and Gagua (1994) analyse Batsbi as having five noun classes,^[6] whereas Alice Harris posits that Batsbi has eight genders in total, based on the behaviour of words that fail to conform to the patterns of the five major classes.^[7] The breakdown below follows Harris:

According to Holisky and Gagua (1994), the class with the largest number of nouns is the D-class (e.g. da “it is”), followed by the J-class (e.g. ja “it is”). Class D markers are also used when the noun class is unknown (as in open interrogatives, see 1a) and in clauses with mixed genders (1d).

Additionally, some nouns referring to humans have no inherent gender, so that class agreement is contextual. These includes the words for “teacher” (უჩიტელ učitʼel), “friend” (ნაყბისტ naq’bist’), “enemy” (მასთხოვ mastxov), “neighbor” (მეზობელ mezobel) and others.^[6]

Gender is lexicalized in a few words such as vašu (ვაშუ “brother”) vs. jašu (ჲაშუ “sister”),in that -ašu could be translated as “sibling”.

Only eight vowel-initial adjectives agree in gender with the noun they modify:^[6]

Batsbi nouns are inflected for two numbers, singular and plural, and nine cases. Number inflection occurs via suffixation and/or root changes, and is chiefly unpredictable. Harris (ms) identifies nine suffixes for plural marking in the nominative case; note that vowel changes (i.e. ablaut) may also affect the root of the plural form.

Batsbi makes use of nine noun cases total. In the majority of nouns, the ergative and instrumental cases have a common form.

Verds in Batsbi encode not only tense, and aspect, but also gender, person, mood, and other categories. Person suffixes also encode whether the subject of the verb is ergative or absolutive. Person suffixes for are shown in the table below. Note that Batsbi verbs also agree with the object through a prefix denoting a noun class, not shown in the table that follows.

Batsbi has explicit inflections for agentivity of a verb; it makes a distinction between:

as woʒe (I fell down through no fault of my own)

so woʒe (I fell down and it was my own fault)

In Batsbi, a number of spatial and time relations are expressed via postpositions. In many cases, the nouns that precede the postposition occur in the dative case, although there are exceptions.

Note that some of the directions or states which in English and Indo-European languages are expressed via prepositions, are in Batsbi expressed via locative cases.

The neutral word order in Batsbi is SOV.

Like most of its relatives, Bats' numerals are vigesimal, using 20 as a common base. This is mainly evident in the construction of higher decads, so:

40 (šauztʼqʼ) is formed from 2  ×  20

200 (icʼatʼqʼ) formed from is 10  ×  20^[6]

When modifying nominals, the numeral precedes the noun it modifies.

In Bats, as in its closest relatives Chechen and Ingush, the number four (Dʕivʔ) begins with a noun-class marker, represented by D (by default, or another capital letter for the other classes). This marker will agree in class with the class of the nominal which the number modifies, even if that nominal is not overtly expressed and is only apparent through pragmatic or discursive context, as in Vʕivʔev (four (males)). This is seen in the word 'four' itself as well as its derivatives.

• Имнайшвили, Давид Силибистрович (1977). Историко-сравнительный анализ фонетики нахских языков. Тбилиси: Мецниереба.
• Микеладзе, М.; Гигашвили, К. (2012). Цоватушинско-грузинско-русско-английский словарь (PDF). Тбилиси. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2019-11-06.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)

Bats language test of Wikipedia at Wikimedia Incubator

• The Red Book of Peoples of the Russian Empire: The Bats
• Languages of the World report Archived 2006-02-22 at the Wayback Machine
• Bats basic lexicon at the Global Lexicostatistical Database