Chechen Dictionary & Phrasebook (Hippocrene Dictionary and Phrasebook)

Rating:
Summary: Chechen
Review: Good and rare book. Thourough for the space it has for grammar , but that space is very limited. Good cultural information too. Basically a good beginning, especially for people needing basic political/humitarian vocabulary. My only complaint is that the chechen words are written in latin script, not cyrillic, which makes for confusion knowing that the Chechens have been using cyrillic script since the 30's. I think it'd be easier to learn the cyrillic script than learn the words and later have to transliterate to cyrillic.

Rating:
Summary: Good little starter book
Review: There are some academic and scholarly dictionaries and works on Chechen out there, but they are quite pricey compared to this book. For the money this is a fine little book, and will give you a start on the grammar and vocabulary of Chechen. As it is meant to be a dictionary and phrase book the treatment of the grammar is necessarily limited, but it was still informative and did provide some basic information on its structure that I didn't know before. The author also discusses a little of the history of the area, and the history buffs among you probably know that Joseph Stalin was Georgian--which didn't keep him from purging and deporting tens of thousands of Georgians to Siberia.

Chechen belongs to one of the four subfamilies of Caucasian languages, known as the Nakh subfamily, whose center of distribution is the Caucasus mountains of central and northern Georgia and the smaller countries just to the north such as Ingushetia and Chechnya, although the inhabitants of Alania speak a language belonging to the Indo-Iranian family. The Caucasian language group is unrelated to Russian and the other Indo-European languages to the north, the Ural-Altaic languages to the east, and the Semitic and Indo-Iranian languages to the south, forming its own unique family. Despite the diversity of the group, the 40 or so languages that belong to this interesting family show a number of common features, such as ejective consonants, an agglutinative word morphology, verb subject and object prefixes, postpositions, and an ergative-absolutive case system.

I had read previously that the Caucasian languages often had a very large number of cases--perhaps over 30, so I was surprised to find that Chechen only had eight. That makes it more complex than Russian or Latin, which have six cases, but the same as Greek, which has 8, and simpler than Ural-Altaic languages like Finnish or Estonian, which have 14 and 15, respectively. I had read previously that the Caucasian languages often had a very large number of cases--in some cases over 30, so I was surprised to find that Chechen only had eight. That makes it more complex than Russian or Latin, which have six cases, but the same as Greek, which has 8, and simpler than Ural-Altaic languages like Finnish or Estonian, which have 14 and 15, respectively. The eight cases are:

Nominative--subject of intransitive verb, direct object of transitive verb. Citation form, predicate nominal

Genitive--possession; adnominal

Dative--indirect object; object of postposition

Ergative--subject of transitive verb;

Allative--indirect object; other oblique objects

Instrumental--instrument, means, accompaniment

Lative--oblique objects

Comparison--standard of comparison

The Chechen verb, in contrast to most languages, has almost no inflection for person or number, although it has ablaut. "Ablaut" refers to a vowel change inside a word, as in English drive/drove/driven or sit/sat or find/found, which signify verb tense changes. If I remember correctly, changes like drive/drove, or swim/swam, are also known as the Aorist case, which in English, German, and other German languages is basically the past tense of a strong verb. Most verbs are regular, although there are a few irregular ones.

Another interesting aspect of Chechen verbs is what is known as the simulfactive and iterative aspect. A simulfactive ending on a verb denotes a one-time action, as opposed to an interative verb ending, which denotes multiple or repeated action. There are over 80 of these verbs, and there are hundreds more compound verbs which use one of these as an auxiliary to create more verbs.

As you can see, Chechen is a fascinating language, and one which is starting to become of interest to scholars. The author, Nicholas Awde, has done a service by putting together this nice little book. I knew Awde's name from a previous book I liked on teaching yourself Arabic, so I presume it's the same writer. If so, I give Awde credit for bringing out another fine book on a little-known member from this fascinating family of languages.

Rating:
Summary: Essential reading!
Review: This is not only a practical tool for the Chechen language but also a fascinating insight into the Chechen people themselves. There's a great easy to use pronunciation system which means you can make yourself understood instantly and a lot of (understandable) stuff on war and reconstruction. There are also background sections dotted about which fill you in on things like transport (not in the best of shape), traditional cuisine and beliefs. I think this deserves five stars not only because it's currently the only book of its kind but also as a great potted introduction to a long-neglected nation. I'd say this was essential reading, particularly at the moment.