Yeniseian languages

The Yeniseian language family (sometimes known as Yeniseic or Yenisei-Ostyak;^[1] occasionally spelled with -ss-) is spoken in central Siberia.

Family division

0. Proto-Yeniseian (before 500 BC; split around 1 AD)

1. Northern Yeniseian (split around 700 AD)

1.1. Ket (100-500 speakers)

1.2. Yugh † (2 or 3 non-fluent speakers in 1991)

2. Southern Yeniseian †

2.1. Kott–Assan (split around 1200 AD)

2.1.1. Kott † (extinct by the mid-1800s)

2.1.2. Assan † (extinct by 1800)

2.2. Arin–Pumpokol (split around 550 AD)

2.2.1. Arin † (extinct by 1800)

2.2.2. Pumpokol † (extinct by 1750)

Only two languages of this family survived into the 20th century, Ket (also known as Imbat Ket), with around 1,000 speakers, and Yugh (also known as Sym Ket), which is now possibly extinct. The other known members of this family, Arin, Assan, Pumpokol, and Kott, have been extinct for over a century. Other groups – Buklin, Baikot, Yarin, Yastin, Ashkyshtym and Koibalkyshtym – are identifiable as Yeniseic-speaking from tsarist fur-tax records compiled during the 17th century, but nothing remains of their languages except a few proper names.

It appears from Chinese sources that a Yeniseian group might have been among the peoples that made up the tribal confederation known as the Xiongnu,^[2] who have traditionally been considered the ancestors of the Huns, but these suggestions are difficult to substantiate due to the paucity of data.^[3] One sentence of the language of the Jie, a Xiongnu tribe who founded the Later Zhao state, appears consistent with being a Yeniseian language.

In February 2008 a proposal relating Na-Dene (excluding Haida), one of the major language families of indigenous peoples in North America, to the Yeniseian languages of central Siberia was published and well received by a number of linguists at the Dene-Yeniseic Symposium held in Fairbanks, Alaska.^[4]

Family features

The Yeniseian languages share many contact-induced similarities with the South Siberian Turkic languages, Samoyedic languages, and Evenki. These include long-distance nasal harmony, deaffrication, and the use of postpositions or grammatical enclitics as clausal subordinators.^[5] Yeniseic nominal enclitics closely approximate the case systems of geographically contiguous families.

The Yeniseian languages have been described as having up to four tones or no tones at all. The 'tones' are concomitant with glottalization, vowel length, and breathy voice, not unlike the situation reconstructed for Old Chinese before the development of true tones in Chinese. The Yeniseian languages have highly elaborate verbal morphology.

Morphology

Personal pronouns

Vocabulary

Numerals

The following table exemplifies the basic Yeniseian numerals as well as the various attempts at reconstructing the proto-forms:^[6]

A few etymologies

The following table exemplifies a few basic vocabulary items as well as the various attempts at reconstructing the proto-forms:^[6]

Proposed relations to other language families

Until 2008, few linguists had accepted connections between Yeniseian and any other language family, though distant connections have been proposed with most of the ergative languages of Eurasia.

Dené–Yenisean

In 2008, Edward Vajda of Western Washington University presented evidence, backed by rigorous methodology, for a genealogical relation between the Yeneisian languages of Siberia and the Na–Dené languages of North America.^[7] Published in 2010, Vajda's paper has been favorably reviewed by several experts on Na–Dené and Yeniseian languages, including Michael Krauss, Jeff Leer, James Kari, and Heinrich Werner, as well as a number of other well-known linguists, including Bernard Comrie, Johanna Nichols, Victor Golla, Michael Fortescue, and Eric Hamp.^[8]

Karasuk

The Karasuk hypothesis, linking Yeniseian to Burushaski, has been proposed by several scholars, notably by A.P. Dulson^[9] and V.N. Toporov.^[10] George van Driem, the most prominent current advocate of the Karasuk hypothesis, postulates that the Burusho people were part of the migration out of Central Asia that resulted in the Indo-European conquest of the Indus Valley.^[11]

Sino-Tibetan

As noted by Tailleur^[12] and Werner,^[13] some of the earliest proposals of genetic relations of Yeniseian, by M.A. Castrén (1856), James Byrne (1892), and G.J. Ramstedt (1907), suggested that Yeniseian was a northern relative of the Sino-Tibetan languages. These ideas were followed much later by Kai Donner^[14] and Karl Bouda.^[15]

Dené–Caucasian

Bouda, in various publications in the 1930s through the 1950s, described a linguistic network that (besides Yeniseian and Sino-Tibetan) also included Caucasian, and Burushaski, some forms of which have gone by the name of Sino-Caucasian. The works of R. Bleichsteiner^[16] and O.G. Tailleur,^[17] the late Sergei A. Starostin^[18] and Sergei L. Nikolayev^[19] have sought to confirm these connections. Others who have developed the hypothesis, often expanded to Dené–Caucasian, include J.D. Bengtson,^[20] V. Blažek,^[21] J.H. Greenberg (with M. Ruhlen),^[22] and M. Ruhlen.^[23] George Starostin continues his father's work in Yeniseian, Sino-Caucasian and other fields.^[24]

External links

• Results from the February 2008 Dene–Yeniseic Symposium
• A Siberian Link With Na-Dene Languages by Edward Vajda, a proponent of the Yeniseian-Na-Dene connection.
• Lecture notes on the Ket people by Edward Vajda.
• Map of the Yeniseian family from the Santa Fe Institute.
• Comparison of Yeniseian and Na-Dene by Merritt Ruhlen.
• Yenisseian Etymology by S. A. Starostin.
• Sino-Caucasian [comparative phonology] by S. A. Starostin. 2005.
• Sino-Caucasian [comparative glossary] by S. A. Starostin. 2005.
• Article on Yeniseian languages (Russian)
• Multimedia Database of Ket Language, Moscow State (Lomonosov) University
• Ket language vocabulary with loanwords (from the World Loanword Database)

Footnotes

References