Evolution
In the scheme of Northwest Caucasian evolution, despite its parallels with Adyghe and Abkhaz, Ubykh forms a separate third branch of the family. It has fossilised palatal class markers where all other Northwest Caucasian languages preserve traces of an original labial class: the Ubykh word for heart, /ɡʲə/, corresponds to the reflex /ɡʷə/ in Abkhaz, Abaza, Adyghe and Kabardian. Ubykh also possesses groups of pharyngealised consonants. All other NWC languages possess true pharyngeal consonants, but Ubykh is the only language to use pharyngealisation as a feature of secondary articulation.
With regard to the other languages of the family, Ubykh is closer to Adyghe and Kabardian, but shares many features with Abkhaz due to geographic influence; many Ubykh speakers were bilingual in Ubykh and Adyghe.
Read more about this topic: Ubykh Language
Famous quotes containing the word evolution:
“By contrast with history, evolution is an unconscious process. Another, and perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say that evolution is a natural process, history a human one.... Insofar as we treat man as a part of nature—for instance in a biological survey of evolution—we are precisely not treating him as a historical being. As a historically developing being, he is set over against nature, both as a knower and as a doer.”
—Owen Barfield (b. 1898)
“Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection determined the evolution of cultures in the same manner as it did that of species.”
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