Today is Saturday. It's been the first day here I've really taken for myself to rest, clean, and be productive with my own work... all other days have been pretty full, in a good way, making the most of everything, Kavkaz-style. This week in particular was busy, because of a few special events. Halloween was last Wednesday, although our celebration and costume contest was Thursday. (In the Caucasus, for some reason, Halloween is thought to be on November 1st, not October 31st. Fine with me, it gave me an extra day). For the classes leading up to Halloween, I assigned to the students a selection of scary stories and urban legends I had grown up with, which they were to retell and discuss in English. After classes, the students participated in a costume contest (the winners? Someone dressed as some kind of zombie/doctor, with a very real looking fake eyeball falling out of its socket.... and two guys...Islam and one of the three Narts... dressed as pretty good vampires) and a contest of "frighting food" (winner: biscuits made to look like bloody fingers.) At the end, I told the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, which I affirmed that all Americans should be familiar with. This prompted a lengthy discussion with one of the Narts about headless horsemen and Circassian giants.
After the Halloween events, some student-friends and I all went to the university's KVN performance. KVN is a kind of student comedy competition that is held throughout all of Russia. I've seen some comedy skits on Youtube, but never live. It takes a very high level of a foreign language to understand their humor though, so I probably only "got" about 60% of the jokes (those that were not in Adyghe). The funniest, or perhaps the easiest for me to understand, were those where Caucasians make fun of their own stereotypes... where an awkward young girl is courted by an even more awkward young man in a cherkeska, leading (of course) to a bride kidnapping and something to do with a goat. The winners of the contest got free... water bottles.
The students were definitely interested in the gruesome side of Halloween.
A few days before that, Tuesday actually, I had predicted to be a rather boring, uneventful day. I was wrong. The one class I had was canceled, because of a concert with Aslan Gotov, an Adyghe pianist who now lives in Canada. Not only was Gotov himself awesome...but also performing were TAMARA NEKHAI AND ASLAN TLEBZU. If you know me, or if you know Adygeya...these are really important people in the North Caucasian music scene. Much moreso than Bishtov or Dzybov I'd say. Aslan Tlebzu is the accordion player in the classic song "Chernye Glaza", and is famous for several Lezginkas... and I actually got the chance to go up and talk to him!! Unfortunately, I was so star-struck that my Russian just kind of fell apart. Let alone my pre-elementary level Adyghe. He seemed pretty nice, though. Tamara Nekhai sings ancient Adyghe and Kabardian folk songs... and sang the most beautiful one of all at this very concert.
Leave it to Tamara Nekhai's voice to make the harsh Adyghe language sound absolutely beautiful.
On a side note... Aslan Tlebzu is SHORT.
While this day and Halloween might not be typical days... even the typical days here are pretty full and busy. On a typical day, I would wake up (usually not too early), go for a run around the stadium, shower and eat breakfast, get ready for class, go to a faculty meeting, have two classes, then go for a few hours to dance rehearsal with the students I've already become good friends with: Elmira, Roza, Bella, Leila, Rustem, Kazbek, Timur, and two Narts.
...It is worth the digression to comment about how much more interesting the names here are from the rest of Russia, especially the men. They are not all named Sasha or Misha or Dima here. I have three (or now four?) students with the name Nart, two who are in the same class, and one whose last name is Bogus.
Nart Bogus.
The name "Nart" basically means "giant". According to Adyghe legends, the Narts were heroes who lived in the mountains thousands of years ago. The most famous Nart was Sousruko, who was born out of a stone and grew taller every hour. The only even more awesome name among my students is Djambulat Kavkazovitch... whose name literally means "Djambulat, son of Caucasus." He looks like his name, too.
Anyways, the dance rehearsals are always a fun way to end the day at the university. Their dancing is beautiful (it is a slower dance from ancient Kabardian royalty, called the k'afe) and mine is making progress. At the end, they play something random, like a Chechen lezginka or techno or rap, and everybody breaks into whatever moves they feel like.
In the evenings, I meet with Timur, who came straight from an aul in Karachai-Cherkessia. His English is very poor, because the school in the aul did not really have the same kind of English classes the other students had. I can't really give students private tutoring for free (I absolutely would not have the time for that), so we agreed that in return he would teach me Kabardian language.
Although we probably make this too time consuming for weeknights, it's been enjoyable and definitely worth it. Timur has become a close friend, ready to help me in a lot of ways... and Kabardin language... well... it is certainly... something.
Try to pronounce the number fourteen, for example: пщ1ык1упл1.
If you're not a Cyrillic-reader.... I honestly don't even know how to transliterate that. You just have to hear it.
Kabardian is actually the least complicated dialect of Adyghe. The Adyghe dialect that most of the locals here speak has 60 consonants... Kabardian has only 48.
For the remainder of today's blog post, I decided to give a runthrough of the languages of the North Caucasus....as fast and as clear as possible.
First, there are at least four or five different major language FAMILIES here, two of which are really not related to anything at all. The local languages are all very complicated, with a lot of different consonant sounds that some might not even think sound human. There are some languages with hundreds of verb declensions and noun cases. There are some languages that are spoken in only two villages, and are not understood by another village a mile across the river.
At least everyone understands Russian.
So here is a breakdown of the Epic Mountain of Tongues, from what I know, along with some Youtube videos so you can hear what they sound like:
INDO-EUROPEAN languages: Ossetian, spoken in North and South Ossetia.
TURKIC languages: Karachai and Balkar, which are basically the same thing, spoken in Karachai-Cherkessia and Kabardino-Balkaria (basically, around Mt. Elbrus), Nogai and Kumyk, spoken in Dagestan.
NORTHWEST CAUCASIAN languages: Abkhaz, Abaza, and Circassian. Abkhaz is spoken in Abkhazia, Abaza is spoken by a minority ethnicity in Karachai-Cherkessia (a people, who according to Timur, have beautiful red-haired children). Circassian (Adyghe being the ethnonym) originally had twelve dialects from the twelve Adyghe tribes (each of the stars on the flag of Adyghe Republic)... now it is divided into West Circassian (Adyghe, spoken in Adygeya) and Kabardian (spoken in Karachai-Cherkessia and Kabardino-Balkaria). Except... some people in Adygeya still do not understand their nextdoor neighbors' dialects, and, according to Timur, the people in his region (Habez, Karachai-Cherkessia) speak the Zelenchuk dialect of Kabardian, which is different than what is spoken by people in Nalchik.
Oh, and everyone's dialect is agglutinative with a million consonants.
Tamara Nekhai's beautiful Adyghe (West Circassian) songs.
Magamed Dzybov in Adyghe, this song being "the most Caucasian song ever"
NORTHEAST CAUCASIAN languages: They are broken down into further categories.
The Nakh languages, Chechen and Ingush. Probably the most "easy" to understand, at least for me. Хьа хаза лаьмни йо1 ю со, Нохчийчоь...))
The Dagestani languages.
Dagestan is one republic with over 30 recognized, separate languages. Among them: Avar, Lezgin, Dargin, Tsakhur, Tabasaran, Rutul, Lak... and of course, their mutually-not-intelligible, village-separated sub-dialects. This isn't even counting the Chechen and Azeri minorities that live there, and the Turkic languages Kumyk and Nogai.
Chechen: Со ву нохчи лаьмни к1ант, So vu noxchi lamni k'ant, "I'm a Chechen mountain man"
Avar:
Dargin:
Tabasaran:
It is true that there is a problem with many younger people not using their native language and just speaking Russian, but it is still a good thing that all these people have Russian to use to communicate with everyone else.
Of all the languages that I mentioned, I honestly have at multiple songs in my iTunes library in each.
After the Halloween events, some student-friends and I all went to the university's KVN performance. KVN is a kind of student comedy competition that is held throughout all of Russia. I've seen some comedy skits on Youtube, but never live. It takes a very high level of a foreign language to understand their humor though, so I probably only "got" about 60% of the jokes (those that were not in Adyghe). The funniest, or perhaps the easiest for me to understand, were those where Caucasians make fun of their own stereotypes... where an awkward young girl is courted by an even more awkward young man in a cherkeska, leading (of course) to a bride kidnapping and something to do with a goat. The winners of the contest got free... water bottles.
The students were definitely interested in the gruesome side of Halloween.
A few days before that, Tuesday actually, I had predicted to be a rather boring, uneventful day. I was wrong. The one class I had was canceled, because of a concert with Aslan Gotov, an Adyghe pianist who now lives in Canada. Not only was Gotov himself awesome...but also performing were TAMARA NEKHAI AND ASLAN TLEBZU. If you know me, or if you know Adygeya...these are really important people in the North Caucasian music scene. Much moreso than Bishtov or Dzybov I'd say. Aslan Tlebzu is the accordion player in the classic song "Chernye Glaza", and is famous for several Lezginkas... and I actually got the chance to go up and talk to him!! Unfortunately, I was so star-struck that my Russian just kind of fell apart. Let alone my pre-elementary level Adyghe. He seemed pretty nice, though. Tamara Nekhai sings ancient Adyghe and Kabardian folk songs... and sang the most beautiful one of all at this very concert.
Leave it to Tamara Nekhai's voice to make the harsh Adyghe language sound absolutely beautiful.
On a side note... Aslan Tlebzu is SHORT.
While this day and Halloween might not be typical days... even the typical days here are pretty full and busy. On a typical day, I would wake up (usually not too early), go for a run around the stadium, shower and eat breakfast, get ready for class, go to a faculty meeting, have two classes, then go for a few hours to dance rehearsal with the students I've already become good friends with: Elmira, Roza, Bella, Leila, Rustem, Kazbek, Timur, and two Narts.
...It is worth the digression to comment about how much more interesting the names here are from the rest of Russia, especially the men. They are not all named Sasha or Misha or Dima here. I have three (or now four?) students with the name Nart, two who are in the same class, and one whose last name is Bogus.
Nart Bogus.
The name "Nart" basically means "giant". According to Adyghe legends, the Narts were heroes who lived in the mountains thousands of years ago. The most famous Nart was Sousruko, who was born out of a stone and grew taller every hour. The only even more awesome name among my students is Djambulat Kavkazovitch... whose name literally means "Djambulat, son of Caucasus." He looks like his name, too.
Anyways, the dance rehearsals are always a fun way to end the day at the university. Their dancing is beautiful (it is a slower dance from ancient Kabardian royalty, called the k'afe) and mine is making progress. At the end, they play something random, like a Chechen lezginka or techno or rap, and everybody breaks into whatever moves they feel like.
In the evenings, I meet with Timur, who came straight from an aul in Karachai-Cherkessia. His English is very poor, because the school in the aul did not really have the same kind of English classes the other students had. I can't really give students private tutoring for free (I absolutely would not have the time for that), so we agreed that in return he would teach me Kabardian language.
Although we probably make this too time consuming for weeknights, it's been enjoyable and definitely worth it. Timur has become a close friend, ready to help me in a lot of ways... and Kabardin language... well... it is certainly... something.
Try to pronounce the number fourteen, for example: пщ1ык1упл1.
If you're not a Cyrillic-reader.... I honestly don't even know how to transliterate that. You just have to hear it.
Kabardian is actually the least complicated dialect of Adyghe. The Adyghe dialect that most of the locals here speak has 60 consonants... Kabardian has only 48.
For the remainder of today's blog post, I decided to give a runthrough of the languages of the North Caucasus....as fast and as clear as possible.
First, there are at least four or five different major language FAMILIES here, two of which are really not related to anything at all. The local languages are all very complicated, with a lot of different consonant sounds that some might not even think sound human. There are some languages with hundreds of verb declensions and noun cases. There are some languages that are spoken in only two villages, and are not understood by another village a mile across the river.
At least everyone understands Russian.
So here is a breakdown of the Epic Mountain of Tongues, from what I know, along with some Youtube videos so you can hear what they sound like:
INDO-EUROPEAN languages: Ossetian, spoken in North and South Ossetia.
TURKIC languages: Karachai and Balkar, which are basically the same thing, spoken in Karachai-Cherkessia and Kabardino-Balkaria (basically, around Mt. Elbrus), Nogai and Kumyk, spoken in Dagestan.
NORTHWEST CAUCASIAN languages: Abkhaz, Abaza, and Circassian. Abkhaz is spoken in Abkhazia, Abaza is spoken by a minority ethnicity in Karachai-Cherkessia (a people, who according to Timur, have beautiful red-haired children). Circassian (Adyghe being the ethnonym) originally had twelve dialects from the twelve Adyghe tribes (each of the stars on the flag of Adyghe Republic)... now it is divided into West Circassian (Adyghe, spoken in Adygeya) and Kabardian (spoken in Karachai-Cherkessia and Kabardino-Balkaria). Except... some people in Adygeya still do not understand their nextdoor neighbors' dialects, and, according to Timur, the people in his region (Habez, Karachai-Cherkessia) speak the Zelenchuk dialect of Kabardian, which is different than what is spoken by people in Nalchik.
Oh, and everyone's dialect is agglutinative with a million consonants.
Tamara Nekhai's beautiful Adyghe (West Circassian) songs.
Magamed Dzybov in Adyghe, this song being "the most Caucasian song ever"
Kabardian. This is the language I am learning:
NORTHEAST CAUCASIAN languages: They are broken down into further categories.
The Nakh languages, Chechen and Ingush. Probably the most "easy" to understand, at least for me. Хьа хаза лаьмни йо1 ю со, Нохчийчоь...))
The Dagestani languages.
Dagestan is one republic with over 30 recognized, separate languages. Among them: Avar, Lezgin, Dargin, Tsakhur, Tabasaran, Rutul, Lak... and of course, their mutually-not-intelligible, village-separated sub-dialects. This isn't even counting the Chechen and Azeri minorities that live there, and the Turkic languages Kumyk and Nogai.
Chechen: Со ву нохчи лаьмни к1ант, So vu noxchi lamni k'ant, "I'm a Chechen mountain man"
Dargin:
It is true that there is a problem with many younger people not using their native language and just speaking Russian, but it is still a good thing that all these people have Russian to use to communicate with everyone else.
Of all the languages that I mentioned, I honestly have at multiple songs in my iTunes library in each.
