Vowels Proto-Northwest Caucasian, just like its descendants, had a very small vowel inventory, most commonly reconstructed as consisting of 2 vowels: and . Some degree of allophony might have existed, especially near labialized and palatalized (or both) consonants. Some scholars assume that the rich consonantal distinctions appeared from a formerly rich vowel inventory, so ** would result in *, ** in * (or possibly ), and so on. However, this view is doubted due to the tendency of vowel systems to get richer over time, and the opposite being much more rare.
Consonants There was a primary four-way distinction of almost all
obstruents in Proto-Northwest Caucasian. The following variations have been proposed: •
Geminate /Cː/,
plain /C/,
ejective /Cʼ/ and
voiced /C̬/; •
Unaspirated /C˭/,
aspirated /Cʰ/,
ejective /Cʼ/ and
voiced /C̬/; •
Fortis /C͈/,
lenis /C͉/,
ejective /Cʼ/ and
voiced /C̬/. The only living descendants to have kept the 4-way distinction are the
Shapsug and
Bzhedug dialects. They both feature an
unaspirated /C˭/,
aspirated /Cʰ/,
ejective /Cʼ/ and
voiced /C̬/ distinction, where all the remaining languages have merged them to plain /C/,
ejective /Cʼ/ and
voiced /C̬/. Additionally, there also were distinctions in
labialization,
palatalization and
pharyngealization (and, depending on the analysis,
aspiration), with combinations of those also possible, such as in case of .
Starostin & Nikolayev (1994) The table of consonants below is adapted from , who developed a unique phonetic orthography for the Caucasian languages. The following differences compared to
IPA notation for consonants can be observed: For
airstream mechanism,
phonation, and
secondary articulation: Voiceless consonants that are
unmarked are
aspirated . Consonants in parentheses are considered to have unreliable reconstruction; labialization in parentheses marks a transfer of labialization onto an adjacent vowel. The exact meaning of consonants with a question mark in parentheses is not explained; it is unclear if it is used to indicate presumptive value or for dubiousness. Pairs of consonants separated by a slash have known distribution, while those separated by a tilde have unknown distribution. Consonants preceding a hyphen occur in initial position. ==Grammar==