West Carpathian

West Carpathian language
Kārpāthirēta
Pronunciation	[/ˈkaːr.paː.ɦi.ˈreː.tɑ/]
Created by	Raistas
Setting	parallel Earth
Ethnicity	Carpathian people
Native speakers	45 000 (2012 census)
Language family	Oronaic West Carpathian language
Early forms	Proto-Oronaic Proto-Alpathian (?) Proto-Carpathian

West Carpathian (native name - kārpāthirēta, also äthikārpāthirēta) is one of the three recognized Carpathian languages spoken by the Carpathian people in Slovakia and in three small mountainous regions of Southern Poland. It has approximately 45 000 native speakers according to 2012 census in Slovakia (including speakers of dialects).

West Carpathian was influenced by West Slavic languages, Polish and Slovak in particular, and also by Hungarian to a lesser extend. Typologically it is between fusional and agglutinative languages and is different from surrounding Indo-European languages. It has a complex inflection system for nouns, adjectives, pronouns, numerals and verbs, depending on their roles in the sentence.

History

Ancient history

Proto-Carpathian is believed to have formed near Polish-Slovak border near 2500 BCE, after its split from hypothetical Proto-Alpathian or directly from Proto-Oronaic itself with an intermediate stage as a proto-dialect. According to most linguists, the language comes from Polish lowlands in the basin of Vistula river. Current models assume two or more hypothetical Pre-Proto-Carpathian dialects evolving over the first millennium BCE. This data is supported by Ancient Roman geographers and writers, such as Ptolemy and Marinus of Tyre, who mentioned the Estri tribe, which inhabited modern day Lower Austria, and the city of Esterixus, located somewhere in modern Bezirk Lienz. There are very few language examples, which is not enough to determine, whether Estrian was an early Carpathian language. Some scholars agree that it could possibly be an ancient Alpian language or even Proto-Alpian, while those, who support Proto-Alpathian existence, claim it to be an intermediate language between Alpian and Carpathian.

Medieval period

The first attestation of West Carpathian was on the XVth century map of Eastern Europe. The words are "Kárpathiáte" (modern spelling - kārpāttāt, which means "Carpathians' land"). More written records were found also in the form of personal names and short notes. In the late XVIIth century the Bible was translated by Josef Kauffman. However, only the first few pages remain to these days, while the rest of the book is lost and it is not known, if this was a complete translation, since there were no copies of the book. Other attempts to translate any texts into West Carpathian were abandoned. All liturgical ceremonies were held in Latin

Standardization

The first comprehensive writing system for West Carpathian was created by Jan Meyer in the 1878, which was based on Czech orthograpy. He also wrote some linguistic works about West Carpathian, using his writing system to write words and sentences in Carpathian. His written language was based on westernmost dialects and he wanted to represent one sound with one letter, exept for a few digraphs, like "ch" for [x] or [h], "th" for [θ] and "dh" for [ð̞]. In the early XXth century Jan Meyer's work was revised and new writing systems were proposed, in one of which long vowels were represented with a macron above a vowel letter instead of acute.

Modern period

Up until Jan Meyer written Carpathian was used solely in religious texts, but after his works the language slowly started appearing in newspapers and literature. In 1961 Bohuslav Raudi (native name Eiki) created a new standard writing for both West and East Carpathian, based on previuos systems. He attemted to unify different dialects into a Carpathian language and his writing system became standard written West Carpathian. He also retained the "th" digraph as it was in Jan Meyer's system, despite [θ] sound was no longer present in any Carpathian dialect; and changed "dh" into plain "d", as "d" only appeared in this digraph and proper names due to absent of [d] sound. His daughters Anna and Maria Raudi created a complete West Carpathian-Slovak dictionary in 1989 together with other scholars as well as workbooks for everyone to learn their language. They also wrote dozens of articles about various Carpathian dialects.

Phonology

Vowels

There are six vowels, five of which contrast in length. They are pronounced more or less the same in every dialect of West Carpathian (except for Prešov dialects, which lack /æ/. The quality of long vowels mostly overlaps with the quality of short vowels, except long ones are pronounced as more tense, while short vowels are slightly centralized. The only exception is ā which is fronted noticeably comparing to its short counterpart. This feature of the standard language is not widespread among all the dialects, but only in Šilli. Vowel length itself is hard to notice for a non-native speaker, mostly due to abundance of long vowels.

	Front		Back
	Short	Long	Short	Long
Close	i [i]	ī [iː]	u [u]	ū [uː]
Mid	e [e]	ē [eː]	o [o]	ō [oː]
Open	ä [æ]		a [ɑ]	ā [aː]

• The mid vowels are phonetically mid [e̞, o̞].
• The unrounded open vowel transcribed in IPA with /ɑ/ has been described as open central [ɑ̈].

West Carpathian still preserves a complete vowel harmony for ä/a, which means these sounds can not be in the same native word. As for other vowels, only residual harmony is present, which is completely different from Proto-Carpathian, in which every vowel had a contrasting counterpart. West Carpathian has a rich system of diphthongs. There are seven phonemic and eleven non-phonemic diphthongs (eighteen in total); like simple vowels, diphthongs do not have significant allophony, but they have a great variety in pronunciation in different dialects. They are treated as long vowels.

Phonemic diphthongs i u e o ä a i ie iä u ui uo ua e eä o oa

Non-phonemic diphthongs i u e o i (iu)* e ei eu eo o oi ou oe ä äi äe a ai au ao

• iu appears only in words from Prešov dialects.

Phonemic diphthongs contrast with long vowels while inflecting nouns, pronouns, adjectives and verbs. Non-phonemic diphthongs historically are sequences of two vowels and with an exeption of äi and ai do not contrast with anything.

Consonants

The consonant system is different from such neighbouring languages, as West Carpathian lacks voiced/voiceless contrast, typical for Slavic languages and Hungarian. Instead it has an opposition of plain vs geminated consonants, which take part in a consonant gradation similar to some Uralic languages, for instance: koatta-koatak ("branch"-"branches"). Almost all consonants (except for ť, h, v, j and r) have phonemic geminated forms. These are independent phonemes, but can occur only medially. Also a rather unique feature, found only in West Carpathian, is a phonemic dental approximant, which sounds between English /l/ and /ð/.

	Labial	Dental	Alveolar	Postalveolar/Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Nasal	m	n		ň [ɲ]	n (ŋ)
Plosive	p	t [t̪]		ť [c]	k
Affricate			c [t͡s]	č [t͡ʃ~t͡ɕ]
Fricative	f		s	š [ʃ~ɕ]		h [h~ɦ]
Approximant	v [w]	d [ð̞]		j
Trill			r
Lateral Approximant			l	ľ [ʎ]

Consonant clusters are not allowed word-intially in native words, and only two consonants are allowed together medially and finally, except for a very small ammount of words, like in tarste "a big bag". However, this rule is omitted in recent loanwords, like transporta "transport vehicle" or elektronika "electronics".

Palatalization is a Carpathian feature shared by its neighbouring languages. All palatal consonants, except for ť, which contrasts with j, can be either plain or geminated, for example vaľľa-vaľā ("freedom" in nominative and accusative cases respectively). Unlike other palatal consonants ť is a strong grade (and thus is often released as [cː] instead of plain [c]) Its weak grade is j - keťi-keja "ball of thread" in nominative and accusative cases.

Morphology

Like all the Carpathian languages, West Carpathian is transitional between agglutinative and fusional languages, since it combine features from both types like an extensive use of suffix agglutination as well as case and personal endings, that "fuse" with a word stem. Despite showing incorporation, when a verb and a direct object of a sentence form a compound word, like in suoikuisiskātē "It is a good idea to go skiing", West Carpathian is not a polysynthetic language.

The morphosyntactic alignment is nominative–accusative, like in surrounding languages, however historically the language morphology treated an agent of a transitive verb differently from a subject of an intransitive one. Nowadays this is considered an archaic feature and can rarely be used in folklore, while transitivity is usually marked on verbs instead of nouns.

Nouns

Main article: West Carpathian nouns

Nouns may be declined by case and number. Standard West Carpathian has eleven cases and two numbers (singular and plural). There is no gender category in any of the Carpathian languages. The case marker must be added not only to the main noun, but also to its modifiers; e.g. tarha kōdu "big house" - tarhautu kōdoutu "in a big house", literally "big-in house-in". Possession can only be marked via a possessive suffix; there are no separate possessive pronouns like English "my" or "yours". Pronouns gain suffixes just as nouns do.

Adjectives

Adjectives are inflected in exactly the same way as nouns, and they must always agree in number and case with the noun they modify. All adjective can possibly have a comparative and superlative forms. The comparative is formed by adding a -ij-/-av- suffix to the stem, while superlative is formed with a suffix -m- added to a superlative form. For example, kuokku "long" - kūkkava "longer" - kūkkauma "the longest".

Verbs

Main article: West Carpathian verbs

Verbs gain personal endings for a person that is a subject of a sentence while personal pronouns, like "I" or "he/she", are used only for emphasis in West Carpathian, thats why they are often called emphatic pronouns. There are ten different infinitive forms, unlike in English or most of the Indo-European languges that have just a single simple infinitive. The dictionary or a simple form is the "i"-infintive, which is similar to English "to" preposition as in "to do". There are four persons, first ("I, we"), second ("you (singular), you (plural)"), third ("s/he, they") and an indefinite form (sometimes called impersonal) similar to English "it is said/they say". There are three tenses: imperfective, perfective and aorist, which is similar to English Present Simple, Present Perfect and Past Simple tenses. The future tense is inferred from the context.

Dialects

West Carpathian dialects are divided into four groups: Ränci, Orava, Šilli and Prešov. These groups are distinguished from each other in vowels and some consonants, diphthongs and rhythm of speech, while grammar and vocabulary are more or less the same. Linguistically Ränci and Orava dialects are closer to each other, than each one to the standard language, so they are often grouped together. In recent times they even developed their own orthography, based on the standard, but with minor changes. Despite this, the new orthography is not widely used. Prešov dialects share more similarities to some Jīri dialects of East Carpathian than to any other dialect of West Carpathian and belongs to the latter mostly due to political reasons. Nevertheless, all the dialects are mutually intelligible with one another to some degree.

Ränci Orava dialects

These dialects are usually grouped together into the Northwestern group (standard: äthihultuvō kuovpa, northwestern: ätihudduvu kuoffa). It is spoken in Žilina Region of Slovakia and Podkarpackie Voivodeship in Poland. Their typical features are lack of palatalization (Orava dialects have č and š, but they are retroflex [t͡ʂ] and [ʂ] like in Polish), a distinct phoneme y [ɪ], retention of old velar nasal [ŋ] and labiodental fricative [f] in both strong and weak grades. Ränci dialects have dd [ð̞ː] - a strong grade of d [ð̞], while in Orava both changed into vv [ʋː] and v [ʋ] respectively. Ränci also has a long counterpart for ä [æ] which is written with a macron above - ǟ, while in Orava it changed into iä, like in the standard. However in Orava ā also becomes ua, which did not happen anywhere else in West Carpathian. For example, tiä ("that over there") and hā ("this (thing)") is tǟ and hā in Ränci and tiä and hua in Orava. Also their most notable feature is the pronunciation of 'th' as a plosive [t̪], like in word for "west" äthi which is pronounced äti [ˈæ.t̪i]. It is thought that an interdental fricative [θ], similar to English th in think was preserved in those dialects until the middle of the XXth century and some speakers (mostly older than 60) may still pronounce it this way.

The Äzeränci language was spoken near the modern border between Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. It is often considered a part of West Carpathian. The language became extinct in the middle of the XVIIth century and very little is known about it. Its vocabulary may be fairly distinct from modern standard West Carpathian, containing more loanwords from German and Slovak as well as many archaisms.

Šilli dialects

The standard language was based on these dialects, so they are very close to it. They are also the most widely spoken and with the spread of the standard, they slowly substitute other dialects. A common feature of some Šilli dialects is merging of diphthongs iä and eä, so they are pronounced the same, but still give different vowels, while declining, for instance, tiä ("that over there") and teä ("plane, flat land") are both teä, but their plural forms are teäk and täik respectively.

Prešov dialects

These dialect are spoken to the east of Prešov city in Eastern Slovakia. Linguistically they are considered transitional between West and East Carpathian being very similar to the border dialects of the East Carpathian language. Their notable features are a presence of palatalization (s and c have palatalized counterparts ś [ɕ] and ć [t͡ɕ] like in Jīri dialects of East Carpathian, but not in the standard West Carpathian), presence of /y/ sound and its long counterpart usually described as close front compressed vowel [iᵝ] and [iᵝː] (written ÿ and iu), which sounds very similar to /i/ but is pronounced with lips slightly rounded. For example, sihku "fog" is siuhkÿ [ˈsiᵝːh.kiᵝ]. Standard "d" is pronounced the same as "l" /l/, and "th" is silent in most of the dialects, while the standard pronunciation is [h].

Comparison to other Oronaic languages

Carpathian languages

A small text is given below as an example to compare dialects of West Carpathian and other Carpathian languages.

• standard West Carpathian:

Thenkautu kūdik īvuki vallei ā poukei. Tompū muoltō ātāľu, kas oulläik pehkuvaiňu, āveteäiki plājā teicid kōduttāvamōn laupi. Ā ikki ahtōvo dauhavo kūdikuvāt pokulle. Kallomak eälläik pertūruki tainaumma tuaremma āhkunuo, muoltauriumivarvekuista. Kāvo roaviu.

• Ränci dialect:

Tynkaudus kūdik īffi valle ā pouke. Tompūng muoltō ātāliu, kas oulläik pyhkuaniu, ǟvetiäiki plājā tīcid kōduttāvamōn laupi. Ā ikki ahtou davau kūdikuat poudde. Kallomak ǟlläik pyrtūruki tainumma tuarymma ākkungo, muoltȳruimivarhuista. Kāvu roaviu.

• Prešov dialect:

Enkautu kūlek javok vaľat oa poukat. Tompū muoltō ātāliu, kā oulleik pehkovaińek, jāvećieik plājea tejecil kōluttāvamōn rēśa. Oa ikke ahluvō dauvō šuihēvat pokuhlat. Pÿlhik ealćieik pertuorok tainomma toaramma āhkunō, tēmma varvekuista muoltauriumÿ. Kāvō roauju.

• English translation:

During the wintertime mornings begin slowly and calmly. The darkness of the night recedes, when street lights are lit, that illuminate the way for those, leaving homes early. And only about eighth o'clock it begins dawning gently. A dim sunshine breaks through the mysterious patterns on the window, painted by the night frost. It's silence everywhere.

Alpian and Hirtian languages

Three sentences in West Carpathian, Vaand and Hirtya are given below to demonstrate the relationship between them. Every word, used in Carpathian sentences, have cognates in Alpian and Hirtian ones, which are used in respective sentences.

• West Carpathian:

Sammulki sōrauta kītinnä keahcui ňivrie. Kura voťe oskuvauki saiveutu jēkeunou ňiä. Emmasā kōduoľľu.

• Vaand:

Taammibi scharsech kiessein keetig jüüre-ge. Kuru bàyer ankoweng seiwe-fäus ikkevetz jää. Àmmend kaarsches.

• Hirtya (Southern dialect):

Тымбәвудьә хоортә’ сьии’си́ӈ нювәрсьи́элнэт (Tymbəwuđə hoortə’ śii’siŋ ńüwərśielnet). Квори вай’э əcӈо́огдьә сайца йиичәвъё йәйня (K^wori waj’e əsŋooɣđə sajca jiičəwjö jəjńä). Эмэньцьа квайәхцьә (Emeńća k^wajəhćə).

• English translation:

We saw a raven sitting on a spruce branch. Three boys are fishing in a lake with their uncle. My mother goes home.

Geographic distribution

West Carpathian is spoken by about 45 thousand people, most of whom are Slovakian citizens. There are also small Carpathian minorities in Poland (less than 7000 people). The majority of the Carpathian population in Slovakia, 78% as of 2012, speak West Carpathian as their first language, while in Poland this number is significantly smaller (19%, which is approximately 2000 speakers).

Official status

West Carpathian is a minority language in Slovakia and has a status of a regional language in Žilina and Prešov regions. In some municipalities of Pičča (Bytča in Slovak), Čacca (Čadca), Námestovo, Bardejov, Svidník, Medzilaborce and Snina districts it is co-official with Slovakian.