User:Aa5779/Gopari

Gopari (autonym: , rus. гопари, sg. гопарь (gopar) is an ethnic group in Russia.

Phonology
The Goparian possesses six principal vowels, like the Russian, however in place of ы ɨ most dialects have a reduced vowel ə. Unlike Russian, there is (in most dialects) an opposition between short and long vowels (excluding ə). Some dialects underwent a major loss of the reduced vowels which led to forming multiple consonant clusters, while other dialects having strong tendency towards open syllables: cf. ' vs. ' (lit. let‘s talk, functionally a common greeting formula). In some dialects vowels are diphtongised (e. g. ' instead of ', but the exact phonological status of this feature is not clear. There is no vowel harmony, but historical umlaut-like vowel alterations are not uncommon.

The consonant system has been seriously influenced by Russian, featuring oppositions between voiced and unvoiced, palatalized and unpalatalized consonants, a rich set of alveolar and postalveolar sibilants and affricates. However, in many dialects (especially in those having lost the reduced vowel) there are specific interdental and emetic consonant series.

Morphology
The Goparian is much more agglutinative than Russian (and Indo-European languages in general), with a compratively weak distinction between inflectional and derivational affixes, cf:  which is both a plural ending and a collective noun formative.

Nouns have 3 genders and 2 numbers (with some remnants of dual and paucal numbers). There are 5 to 10 cases (the exact number differs among various dialects; besides, scholars have no common opinion on the identification of some cases). The following cases are the most common: Nominative/Ergative (see below on morphosyntactic alignment in Gopari), Genitive/Absolutive, Dative, Instrumental, Locative. Among the less common or more dubious are: Vocative (expressed by shortening or dropping the final vowel, otherwise indistinguishable from Nominative), Partitive, Inessive (denoting a specific situation of being inside something as opposed to generic locative relations), Translative, Antessive.

Besides having several genders, Gopari also has the category of animacy, distinguishing between “animate” and “inanimate” words. This distinction is characteristic not only of nouns, but of predicates as well. In most cases (but not always) the “animate” words are marked with  prefix. This feature of Gopari has been the source of much debates among scholars. The point is that Slavic languages, and Russian in particular, do have a very similiar system of agreement classes (3 genders + animacy), so the question is whether the two systems are actually related and if they're, whether it's the case of Russian influence on Gopari, or vice versa.

The verbal conjugation is very different from Indo-European. Verbs do not have proper tense distinctions (at least, not synthetically expressed ones), but instead distinguish several aspects: imperfective, perfective, semelfactive, frequentative and probably others. There are also several moods: indicative, subjunctive, conditional and imperative. A peculiar feature of Gopari is that subjunctive mood is expressed by a non-finite form, a kind of a participle (cf. evidential forms in Baltic languages): e.g. ', '. Other kinds of participles and gerunds are attested but are rarely used in the modern language. Infinitive does exist, but its use is somewhat more restricted than e. g. in English. There is no passive voice, but transitive verbs usually can be converted into intransitive with the help of affix.

A unique feature of Gopari is that it utilizes both prefixes and suffixes to carry grammatical meanings; the only other language whether a similiar phenomenon is attested seems to be Hattic language.

The Gopari has a complex system of determinacy designators, details of which are not yet fully understood. ' but '
 * a prefix ': cf. ' “August (in general)”, but  “this August”;
 * proclitic articles '/'
 * a framing construct '. This construct is so pervasive in the language, that many speakers use it even when speaking Russian, thus making a very interesting case of code switching. Cf. ' (Who is this?) vs  (Who is the man? [we have just talked about])

It seems that ' formative is the same in the determinate prefix and in ' and historically should be a kind of deictic locative meaning “here” - the traces of such meaning can be seen in cases where  is used as an adverbial modifier: cf. ' “go!” vs ' “go out of here!”. The proclitic articles most likely demonstrate the same evolution, as English ones, as ' is assumed to be an archaic Goparian word for one and ' is a stressless form of demonstrative pronoun that. To complicate the matter further,  may be used substantivated in the meaning of English formal it:  -- What is it?

History and Origin
The Gopari people are first mentioned in XIV century Russian chronicle: ...

The origin of Gopari is still a great mystery. It is a common belief among Russians to consider Gopari Finno-Ugric. This probably stemms from the fact that most other indigenous ethnic minorities in European Russia are indeed Finno-Ugric or Turkic. Adding to the confusion may be also the similarity between гопари and лопари (lopari) which is an old Russian ethnonym for Sami. Paul Ariste strived to prove that Gopari do in fact belong to Uralic family, if not properly Finno-Ugric. This view has never gained any serious popularity, and recent studies seems to refute it completely.

Nowadays scholars are mostly unanimous that Gopari must be a relic of pre-Indo-European population of Europe, however much controversy still exists as to which of known ancient language groups Goparian does belong. Based on some morphological properties, A. Kammenhuber conjectured that Goparian must be related to Hattic, however, Igor Djakonov found this highly dubious

The most profound study of the origin of gopari and Goparian has been made by Bulgarian linguist Vladimir I. Georgiev who claimed that Goparian must belong to Tyrsenian languages. This hypothesis is mostly held by modern scholars, though evidence is still too scarce to assert it definitely.