Die Päkhy-Sprache is the title of a treatise on the Ubykh language

Ubykh language

Ubykh or Ubyx is an extinct language of the Northwestern Caucasian group, spoken by the Ubykh people...

, written by Gyula Mészáros

Gyula Mészáros

Gyula Mészáros was a Hungarian ethnographer, Orientalist and Turkologist....

 and published in 1934 by the University of Chicago

University of Chicago

The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...

 Press.

It was the first major descriptive work written of Ubykh. Since at that time the phonological

Ubykh phonology

Ubykh, a North-West Caucasian language, has the largest consonant inventory of all documented languages that do not use clicks, and also has the most disproportional ratio of phonemic consonants to vowels. It also possesses consonants in at least eight, perhaps nine, basic places of articulation...

 complexities of the language were not fully understood, the transcription

Transcription (linguistics)

Transcription in the linguistic sense is the systematic representation of language in written form. The source can either be utterances or preexisting text in another writing system, although some linguists only consider the former as transcription.Transcription should not be confused with...

 system used in the book is somewhat lacking, only distinguishing about 80% of Ubykh's 80-odd phoneme

Phoneme

In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....

s. Nevertheless, Mészáros's account of the grammar

Grammar

In linguistics, grammar is the set of structural rules that govern the composition of clauses, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology, syntax, and phonology, often complemented by phonetics, semantics,...

 was quite accurate, and the quality and scope of the 402-page book drew much attention to this obscure language, paving the way for the further documentation of Ubykh by Georges Dumézil

Georges Dumézil

Georges Dumézil was a French comparative philologist best known for his analysis of sovereignty and power in Proto-Indo-European religion and society...

, Hans Vogt

Hans Vogt

Hans Vogt was a Norwegian linguist specialized in the Caucasian languages, especially Georgian. He also did significant early work on the Kalispel language....

 and Tevfik Esenç

Tevfik Esenç

Tevfik Esenç was a Circassian exile in Turkey and the last known fully competent speaker of the Ubykh language.Esenç was raised by his Ubykh-speaking grandparents for a time in the village of Hacı Osman in Turkey, and he served a term as the muhtar of that village, before receiving a post in the...

.