Beginner's Chechen with Online Audio

BEGINNER’S

CHECHEN

WITH ONLINE AUDIO

Kheda Garchakhanova

& John Lechner

Hippocrene Books

New York

Audio files available at

www.hippocrenebooks.com

Text and audio copyright © 2024 Kheda Garchakhanova and John Lechner

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher.

For information, address:

HIPPOCRENE BOOKS, INC.

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New York, NY 10016

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Cataloging-in-Publication data available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-0-7818-1447-8

For our parents

Acknowledgements

This book would not have been possible without our first teachers of Chechen; they know who they are. Milana Mizayeva and Sarah Slye read and edited this text with expert insight, while Valentina Michelotti provided crucial structure for the book at the beginning. Malika Shaykhidova, a Chechen language teacher residing in Chechen Republic helped us with dialectal dialogues. Aida Vidan, who has written excellent Croatian and Serbian courses in this series, inspired us to write. Finally, we are incredibly grateful to our editor, Priti Gress, for taking a chance on this project.

CONTENTS

Introduction

About this Course

More on Chechen

Some Features of Chechen Grammar

Pronunciation

The Chechen Alphabet

Dipthongs

Difficult Consonants

Lesson 1: Arrival

Dialogue I: At the Grozny Airport

New Words

Dialogue II: Meeting a Friend

New Words

Grammar: Noun Classes; Chechen Pronouns; The Question Particle -й and Question Words

Culture: Chechen Greetings

Exercises

Lesson 2: At Home

Dialogue I: At Hwava’s Home

New Words

Dialogue II: At the Table

New Words

Grammar: Absolutive Case; Present Progressive Tense; The Allative Case and a Locative Form; Saying I have, You have, etc.; The Negative Form of д.у "to be"

Culture: As a Guest in a Chechen Home

Exercises

Lesson 3: Going to University

Dialogue I: At Hwava’s House

New Words

Dialogue II: On the Phone

New Words

Grammar: Genitive Case; Personal Pronouns: Adding the Ergative and Dative; The Present Tense

Extra Vocabulary: Adverbs

Culture: Months of the Year

Exercises

Lesson 4: At the University

Dialogue I: At the University

Dialogue II: At the Library

New Words

Grammar: Ergative and Dative Case; Future Tenses; More on Irregular Verbs

Days of the Week

Cardinal Numbers 1 to 20

Ordinal Numbers 1st to 20th

Telling Time

Culture: Borrowing of Russian Words

New Words: School Related

Exercises

Lesson 5: In the University Hallways

Dialogue I: Meeting Another Student

Dialogue II: In the Classroom

New Words

Family Members

Adjectives Describing People

Grammar: Past Tenses; Imperatives: Making Commands; Nouns: Instrumental Case

Exercises

Lesson 6: At the Market

Dialogue I: At the Market

Dialogue II: At the Stall

New Words

Grammar: The Substantive Case; The Comparative Case; Chechen Cases: Declensions; Chechen cases: Pronouns; Modal Verbs; Preverbs; Chechen Numbers 21 to 10,000

Culture: Expressions

Exercises

Lesson 7: At the Store

Dialogue I: At the Store

Dialogue II: At the Bookstore

New Words

Grammar: Present Perfect Tense; Verbs: The Real Conditional Mood; Declining Question Words; Forming Nouns from Verbs and Adjectives; Syntax: Saying Why, While,; Subordinate Clauses; Saying we two, you too, etc.; Declining Adjectives with Nouns; Free Adjectives; Some Particular Adjectives; Prepositions: Saying about,

Exercises

Lesson 8: Renting an Apartment

Dialogue I: Renting an Apartment 1

Dialogue II: Renting an Apartment 2

New Words

Grammar: Other Uses of the Present Perfect Tense; Plural Verbs; Word Building with Verbs; Postpositions; Syntax: Where Clauses

Exercises

Lesson 9: At the Wedding

Dialogue I: At the Wedding

Dialogue II: Old Man speaking about Chechen Nation

New Words

Grammar: Iterative Aspects of Verbs; Word-building: Causative Verbs; Possessive Pronouns; Reflexive Pronouns; the Present Gerund; Declining Demonstrative Pronouns

Exercises

Lesson 10: Going to the Mountains

Dialogue I: Going to the Mountains

Dialogue II: At the Mountains

New Words

Grammar: Past Continuous Tense; Unreal Conditional Mood; -за Construction; аьлла Construction; Declining Definite and Negative Pronouns

Exercises

Lesson 11: A Tour of Grozny

Dialogue I: A Tour of Grozny

Dialogue II: Grozny—At the Mosque

New Words

Grammar: Participles; Word-building: Nouns

Exercises

Lesson 12: Excerpts from Chechen Literature

Poetry

New Words

Newspaper Article Excerpt

New Words

Grammar: Verb Conjugation Review

Exercises

Key to Exercises

Chechen-English Glossary

English-Chechen Glossary

Audio Track List

Audio files available at

www.hippocrenebooks.com

Долор

INTRODUCTION

About this Course:

This course is designed for speakers of English to learn the basics of the Chechen language. Historically, the only Chechen language learning manuals available to students were in Russian; resources in English on the language were limited to phrasebooks, grammar sketches, and dictionaries. This course endeavors to fill that gap. To do so we have made a few assumptions based on the Chechen learners we have met over the years.

The most important assumption is that students have a very basic knowledge of the Cyrillic alphabet. Chechen is written in Cyrillic, but the pronunciation of spoken Chechen differs from the literary standard. Luckily, these differences, with time, are easy to recognize. For the dialogues in the first few lessons, we provide both literary standard Chechen and a transliterated spoken version based on a Latin alphabet created by the linguist Johanna Nichols.

Second, most students interested in Chechen are either linguists or life-long language lovers. Chechen is typically not the first foreign language students learn. Thus, we sometimes provide examples from other commonly taught languages—German, Romance languages, or Russian—to help explain grammatical concepts. A basic command of Russian is helpful given the number of loanwords in the language.

That said, anyone can take this course! We have tried to keep all technical vocabulary to a minimum and aim to achieve two goals: speaking as quickly as possible and gaining an overall knowledge of how Chechen works.

More on Chechen:

The Chechen language is spoken by 1.4 million people, most of whom reside in the Chechen Republic of the Russian Federation. That said, there are many speakers outside of Chechnya proper; thousands of Chechens live throughout Russia and there are sizable populations of Chechens living in Europe. Chechens also continue to live in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, ever since Stalin deported the nation in 1944. In the Middle East, especially Jordan and Turkey, the descendants of Chechen refugees from Russia’s 19th-century conquest of the Caucasus still speak a distinct dialect.

Chechen—along with closely related Ingush, and more distantly related Bats—form the Nakh branch of the Northeast Caucasian language family (Nakh-Dagestani). Northeast Caucasian is one of three indigenous language families in the Caucasus. The other two are Northwest Caucasian (e.g. Kabardian, Adyghe, Abkhaz) and Kartvelian (Georgian, Mingrelian, Svan, and Laz). Most linguists agree that the Nakh-Dagestani and Kartvelian language families are unrelated to each other, and convincing evidence of a shared ancestry for Northeast and Northwest Caucasian has proven elusive.¹

Chechen has many dialects that fit broadly into two groups: lowland speech and highland speech. The literary standard is based on the lowland dialects in and around Grozny, the capital city of the Chechen Republic. Many Chechens consider the highland dialects—with less vowels in their phonetic inventory, and less Russian and Turkic loanwords—a purer form of the language.² In the Republic of Georgia’s Pankisi Gorge, less than 10,000 Kists speak a Chechen dialect that requires a few days of practice for lowland speakers to understand.³

Chechens and Ingush, though they speak mutually unintelligible languages, form a single speech community, Vainakh (lit. our people). Despite their differences, many Chechens and Ingush have a passive understanding of the other’s language.

The first script for Chechen came with the spread of Islam. Sufi sheikhs used the Arabic script for their manuscripts on philosophy and jurisprudence in the early 18th century.⁴ At the time, the various Chechen dialects were simply the language of the village. Arabic was the language of religion and Kumyk—a Turkic idiom—the language of inter-ethnic communication.⁵

With the arrival of the Russians to the Caucasus, Qedi Dosov and Baron von Uslar developed a Cyrillic script in 1862. The Soviets initially followed Tsarist-era policies of Russification. But in 1923 an abrupt change in policies brought a Latin-based script.⁶ The rise of a fellow Caucasian, Josef Stalin, however, saw a return of Russification policies and Chechen orthography switched back to Cyrillic in 1937.⁷

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, President Dzhokhar Dudaev, as part of his nationalist bid for an independent Chechnya, promoted a new Latin script. Independence and a Latin script were short-lived and Cyrillic was restored in 1999.

Some Features of Chechen Grammar:

Chechen has several unique phonetic (how it sounds) and grammatical features that can make it difficult to learn. It is worthwhile, therefore, to give some context to the grammar and phonology that you will find in this book. Of course, if you would prefer to learn it as you go, feel free to skip this section!

Sounds: Chechen has a few sounds that can be difficult for speakers of English. Perhaps the most difficult, at first, will be the unaspirated or ejective consonants (t’, k’, p’, q’, etc.). For example: prepare to make the sound t. Right before pronouncing it, close your glottis (throat), then eject the sound. If you’ve heard languages like Georgian, Navajo, or Amharic, then you should already be familiar. If not, no worries. The accompanying audio will provide plenty of practice.

Sentence Structure: Chechen sentence structure, or syntax, centers on the verb. The most important aspect of the Chechen verb is whether it is transitive or intransitive. You may remember from middle school English classes that a transitive verb takes a direct object. Thus:

An intransitive verb does not take a direct object:

Noun Cases: Chechen has eight cases. A noun’s case is a way of indicating its relationship to other parts of the sentence. Chechen cases include the Absolutive (Nominative), Genitive, Dative, Ergative, Instrumental, Substantive, Comparative, and Allative/Locative (which we will treat as one case). In addition, there are several more cases that behave more like postpositions (a preposition comes before the noun, a postposition after). Many of these cases function similarly to their counterparts in other languages, so we will focus on the two most important for our current purposes: Chechen’s Absolutive and Ergative cases.

English is an Indo-European language, related to languages as diverse as Russian, Spanish, Hindi, Greek, and Armenian. Many of these languages retain a case system, which would be familiar to anyone who has studied Ancient Greek, Latin, Russian, or German.

English cases were lost centuries ago, so now English speakers can only tell whether a noun is the subject, direct object, or indirect object by its place within the sentence (word order). In other Indo-European languages, word order is freer because the case of the noun tells us whether it is a subject (Nominative), direct object (Accusative), indirect object (Dative), belongs to something (often Genitive), in a location (Locative or Prepositional), or with or by means of something (Instrumental).

In these languages, the Nominative case is often unmarked, i.e., it does not take an ending (we will use ‘0’ to describe ‘unmarkedness’ here). Let’s look at the above example, but in Russian:

And intransitive:

What did we notice? The case ending for the dog (sobaka) lets us know when it is the subject (Nominative: sobaka) or the direct object (Accusative: sobaku).

Chechen has a case system, but it differs from Russian in how it marks subject and object. Rather than mark the object with a different case—i.e., sobaka vs. sobaku—Chechen marks the subject in a different case, leaving the object alone. Linguists call this phenomenon ergativity, and believe it or not, it is quite a common feature in the languages of the world. Let’s look first at the intransitive in Chechen:

But:

Instead of the dog taking a case ending, it stays in the Absolutive, and the subject (the boy) takes a new case ending, the Ergative case. Sometimes Chechen textbooks will use the term Nominative for the Absolutive case. The term nominative comes from classical grammars, and is fitting for describing many languages, but awkward for Chechen. Many linguists, therefore, prefer to describe the default case of the noun—i.e., the form that is unmarked—as the Absolutive case, which we will do going forward.

Noun classes: You probably noticed above that the word walks changed from d.oedu to v.oedu when the subject switched from dog to boy. This is the other important feature of Chechen: noun classes. Chechen has six noun classes. Only the first two—considered the human class—function similarly to Indo-European gender. Here are all six below. They are frequently listed using the present tense form of to be.

About 30 percent of Chechen verbs agree with noun class.⁸ Since boy is masculine and singular, the boy walks becomes "k’ant v.oedu. Dog belongs to the fourth class of nouns; the dog walks therefore is zhwala d.oedu." Now let’s look at these two sentences: