#chuvash diaspora

[gwendolynlerman]

Languages of the world

Chuvash (чӑвашла)

Basic facts

Number of native speakers: 1.2 million

Official language: Chuvashia (Russia)

Language of diaspora: Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Moldova, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, United States, Uzbekistan

Script: Cyrillic, 37 letters

Grammatical cases: 6

Linguistic typology: agglutinative, SOV

Language family: Turkic, Oghur

Number of dialects: 2 dialects

History

1769 - first grammar

1856 - first scientific fieldwork description

1871 - new Chuvash written language

1873 - modern Cyrillic alphabet

1938 - significant alphabet changes

Writing system and pronunciation

These are the letters that make up the alphabet: а ӑ б в г д е ё ӗ ж з и й к л м н о п р с ҫ т у ӳ ф х ц ч ш щ ъ ы ь э ю я.

Chuvash has been historically written with the Old Turkic alphabet, the Arabic script, and the Latin alphabet.

The last non-reduced vowel of the word is stressed; if there is none, the first vowel is stressed instead.

Grammar

Nouns have no gender, two numbers (singular and plural), and six main cases (nominative, genitive, dative-accusative, locative, ablative, and instrumental). Other cases include abessive, causative, terminative-antessive, distributive, and semblative.

Modifying elements precede the modified. There are no native prefixes or prepositions.

Verbs are conjugated for tense, mood (indicative, imperative, optative, conditional), aspect, person, and number.

Chuvash has vowel harmony, which means that words either incorporate back/hard or front/soft vowels.

Dialects

There are two dialects: Upper (viryal), which has -o- and -u-, and Lower (anatri), which uses -u- instead of -o-. The literary language is based on Lower Chuvash.

[else-self]

For anyone interested in reading some poetry or poetics. Duration press has their catalog available online and as downloadable PDFs. It's a great resource of diverse writers and writing styles and translations.

The following is a complete list of publications released on durationpress.com since 1999. The first set is composed of titles released since 2015. The second set features titles released from 1999-2009.

2015-

Anne-Marie Albiach, A Discursive Space (interviews with Jean Daive) (tr. Norma Cole)

George Albon, Transit Rock

Will Alexander, Exobiology as Goddess

Will Alexander, Vertical Rainbow Climber

Richard Anders, The Footsteps of One Who Has Not Stepped Forth (tr. Andrew Joron)

ANGLE Magazine (edited by Brian Lucas)

Roman Antopolsky, Haunted House

Apex of the M (edited by Lew Daly, Alan Gilbert, Kristin Prevallet, Pam Rehm)

Gennady Aygi, An Anthology of Chuvash Poetry

Gennadi Aygi, Degree of Stability (tr. Peter France)

Rachel Tzvia Back, The Buffalo Poems

Josely Vianna Baptista, On the Shining Screen of the Eyelids (tr. Chris Daniels)

Melissa Benham, at sea

Coral Bracho, Of Their Ornate Eyes of Crystalline Sand (tr. Forrest Gander)

Michel Bulteau, Crystals to Aden (tr. Pierre Joris)

Mary Burger, Nature’s Maw Gives and Gives

Norma Cole, Coleman Hawkins Ornette Coleman

Norma Cole, Metamorphopsia

Norma Cole, My Bird Book

Pura López Colomé, Aurora (tr. Forrest Gander)

Stacy Doris, Paramour

Jean-Michel Espitallier, Butchers Fantasy (tr. Sherry Brennan & Jean-Michel Espitallier)

Factorial Magazine (edited by Sawako Nakayasu)

The Germ: A Journal of Poetic Research

John High, The Desire Notebooks

Emmanuel Hocquard, Late Additions (tr. Connell McGrath and Rosmarie Waldrop)

Emmanuel Hocquard and Ray DiPalma, Personæ and Thoughts on Personæ (tr. Ray DiPalma)

Pierre Joris, Permanent Diaspora

Rachel Levitsky, Dearly 3 4 6

Andrei Molotiu, The Kingdom

Pascalle Monnier, Bayart: Spring (tr. Cole Swensen)

Laura Moriarty, Nude Memoir

Gale Nelson, Spectral Angel

Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Black Chant

Mary Oppen, Poems & Transformations

Lauri Otonkoski, 20 Poems (tr. Anselm Hollo)

Roberto Piva, Manifestoes (tr. Chris Daniels)

Roberto Piva, open your eyes and say ah! (tr. Chris Daniels)

Roberto Piva, Paranoia (tr. Chris Daniels)

Pam Rehm, To Give it Up

Sebastian Reichmann, Sweeper at His Door (tr. James Brook)

Claude Royet-Journoud, The Right Wall of the Heart Effaced (tr. Keith Waldrop)

Lutz Seiler, Poems (tr. Andrew Duncan)

Ryoko Sekiguchi, Tracing (tr. Stacy Doris)

Aaron Shurin, Reverie: A Requiem

Gustaf Sobin, Telegrams

Juliana Spahr, LIVE

Brian Strang, Dark Adapt

Hiroya Takagai, Rush Mats (tr. Eric Selland)

Habib Tengour, Empedocles’s Sandal (tr. Pierre Joris)

Lourdes Vazquez, Park Slope

The Violence of the White Page: Contemporary French Poetry (edited by Stacy Doris, Charles Bernstein, and Phillip Foss)

Keith Waldrop, The Silhouette of the Bridge (Memory Stand-Ins)

Keith Waldrop, Spit-Curls

Peter Waterhouse, Where Are We Now? (tr. Rosmarie Waldrop)

Tyrone Williams, c.c.

Xue Di, Circumstances (tr. Keith Waldrop, with Hil Anderson and Xue Di)

Heriberto Yepez, Babellebab

1999-2009

Heather Akerberg, Dwelling

George Albon, Momentary Songs

Michael Basinski, Mooon Bok: petition, invocation & homage

Claire Becker, Get You

Guy Bennett, Retinal Echo

Taylor Brady, Production Notes for Occupation: Location Scouting

Brandon Brown, Kidnapped

Mary Burger, The Boy Who Could Fly

Norma Cole, Mace Hill Remap

Catherine Daly, The Last Canto

Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Wells

Marcella Durand, The Body, Light, and Solar Poems

Patrick Durgin, And so on

Patrick Durgin, Sorter

Peter Ganick, …As Convenience

Susan Gevirtz, Domino: point of entry

Jesse Glass, Man’s Wows

Noah Eli Gordon, notes toward the spectacle

E. Tracy Grinnell, Of the Frame

Pierre Joris, The Fifth Season

Amy King, The Citizen’s Dilemma

Rachel Levitsky, Realism (a work in progress)

Bill Marsh, A Tomb for Anatole

Pattie McCarthy, alibi (that is : elsewhere)

Mark McMorris, Figures for a Hypothesis

Jorge Melícias, Disruption (translated by Brian Strang & Elisa Brasil)

K. Silem Mohammad, Hanging Out with Pablo and Jennifer

Sawako Nakayasu, Balconic

kathryn l. pringle, The Stills

Francis Raven, Economic Belief Structure

Pam Rehm, Pollux

Elena Rivera, Wale; or The Corse

Cynthia Sailers, A New Season

John Sakkis, Rude Girl

Eleni Sikelianos, poetics of the exclamation point

Eleni Sikelianos, To Speak While Dreaming

Rick Snyder, Forecast Memorial

Juliana Spahr, Nuclear

Suzanne Stein, Untitled (Poetry Event: June 2, 2007, Pegasus Books Downtown, Berkeley)—Audio of event

Brian Strang, machinations

Cole Swensen, It’s Alive She Says

Elizabeth Treadwell, LILYFOIL (or Boy & Girl Tramps of America)

Kevin Varrone, g-point almanac (9.22-10.19)

Keith Waldrop, The Garden of Effort

Rosmarie Waldrop, Lawn of Exlcuded Middle

Dana Ward, The Imaginary Lives of My Neighbors

Alli Warren, No Can Do

Code of Signals

Alcheringa

Towards a Foreign Likeness Bent: translation

[qforqazaq]

Hi! I am from Türkiye and I wanna go Kazakistan someday. We are all speaking Turkic languages, you know, and I'm ashamed that I'm speaking with you in English, not in the same language. But I wanna change that, I will learn all Turkic languages. My precedence is Kazakh. But I don't know how to do that...Do you know any way to learn these languages easily? Last months, I started to listening Dimash, Mad Men etc. And I saw that, we aren't speaking very differently. Please help me T_T 🇹🇷❤🇰🇿

Hi.

Sorry for the super late reply.It’s nice that you have this urge to learn languages related to your own.However, I’d suggest to pick one language to learn instead of trying to learn every single one of them. It might be counterproductive and confuse a hell lot.

Besides, different branches of Turkic languages are quite different from one another, and most of them are not really mutually intelligible.

For example, as a native Kazakh speaker, I can hardly understand vernacular Turkish, because to my ears it sounds very very different. Even in its written form, I barely understand 30%

One of the reasons might be that Turkish and Kazakh belong to the different branches of Turkic family.So Turkish is a part of Southwestern or Oghuz branch and Kazakh belongs to the Northwestern or Kypchak branch of Turkic. Moreover, because of geopolitical, cultural, historical factors these languages have developed in very different ways. Over time Turkish has acquired a significant part of its vocabulary from Arabic, French, Greek, and many other languages of Europe due to its proximity to the European continent.Kazakh, on the other hand, had a different situation.Over time, Kazakh “loaned” many Persian/Farsi words, Arabic was there in the mix too (although being not as pronounced), not mentioning some Russian input due to 250+ years of colonisation.

And you can apply similar analysis to any other Turkic language out there (or any other language in general, really). The point is the Turkic languages have spread out over such a ginormous territory so that nowadays, if you compare two Turkic languages from different branches, you’ll find it difficult to make it seem as intelligible as you might thought it would be. The differences can be as far as Sakha and Chuvash, which belong to Northeastern or Siberian branch of Common Turkic, and Oghur Turkic respectively, which isn’t even inside the Common Turkic group at all.Or it can be as different as Kazakh and Tatar, where the former is in the Kypchak-Nogai, and the latter is in Kychak-Bulgar subbranches of Kypchak. Yes, they are intelligible, but, as a Kazakh speaker, you’ve still got to listen hard to understand what’s going on in the Tatar speech, and you’ll probably understand around or slightly above 50% of it too.

In any case, you can study whatever Turkic language you want, all of them are unique in their own ways, and similar in profound others. Just make sure, you’ll stick to the one for the time being, and don’t stress out too much about it, I suppose.

If you want to learn Kazakh though, I might suggest a textbook in English that has audio materials available for free online. It’s called Colloquial Kazakh, and I’ve noticed many people have found it quite helpful. I might as well send it to you if you want.

For more practice, you can find Kazakh diaspora in Turkey too, and keep watching/listening to Kazakh shows/music that you can find on the internet. It does certainly help.