The Yeniseian languages (sometimes known as
Yeniseic or Yenisei-Ostyak; occasionally spelled
with -ss-) are a family of languages that
were spoken in the Yenisei River region of
central Siberia. The only surviving language
of the group is Ket.
== Family division ==
0. Proto-Yeniseian (before 500 BC; split around
1 AD)
1. Northern Yeniseian (split around 700 AD)
1.1. Ket (200 speakers)
1.2. Yugh (1 speakers)
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 200 speakers, and Yugh (also
known as Sym Ket), which is now extinct. The
other known members of this family, Arin,
Assan, Pumpokol, and Kott, have been extinct
for over two centuries. 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, who have traditionally been considered
the ancestors of the Huns, but these suggestions
are difficult to substantiate due to the paucity
of data. One sentence of the language of the
Jie, a Xiongnu tribe who founded the Later
Zhao state, appears consistent with being
a Yeniseian language.A proposal connecting
Yeniseian to Na-Dené, one of the major language
families of indigenous peoples in North America,
has been met with a cautious welcome.
== 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,
the development of former affricates to stops,
and the use of postpositions or grammatical
enclitics as clausal subordinators. Yeniseic
nominal enclitics closely approximate the
case systems of geographically contiguous
families. Despite these similarities, Yeniseian
appears to stand out among the languages of
Siberia in several typological respects, such
as the presence of tone, the prefixing verb
inflection, and highly complex morphophonology.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.
=== Phonology ===
=== Morphology ===
==== Personal pronouns ====
=== Vocabulary ===
==== Numerals ====
The following table exemplifies the basic
Yeniseian numerals as well as the various
attempts at reconstructing the proto-forms:
==== A few etymologies ====
The following table exemplifies a few basic
vocabulary items as well as the various attempts
at reconstructing the proto-forms:
== 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 for a genealogical
relation between the Yeneisian languages of
Siberia and the Na–Dené languages of North
America. At the time of publication (2010),
Vajda's proposals had been favorably reviewed
by several specialists of Na-Dené and Yeniseian
languages—although at times with caution—including
Michael Krauss, Jeff Leer, James Kari, and
Heinrich Werner, as well as a number of other
respected linguists, such as Bernard Comrie,
Johanna Nichols, Victor Golla, Michael Fortescue,
Eric Hamp, and Bill Poser (Kari and Potter
2010:12). One significant exception is the
critical review of the volume of collected
papers by Lyle Campbell and a response by
Vajda published in late 2011 that clearly
indicate the proposal is not completely settled
at the present time. Two other reviews and
notices of the volume appeared in 2011 by
Keren Rice and Jared Diamond.
=== Karasuk ===
The Karasuk hypothesis, linking Yeniseian
to Burushaski, has been proposed by several
scholars, notably by A.P. Dulson and V.N.
Toporov. 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.
=== Sino-Tibetan ===
As noted by Tailleur and Werner, 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 and Karl
Bouda. In more-recent studies at the beginning
of the 21st century, historical linguist Edward
Vajda (who also proposes the Dené–Yenisean
relationship) had spent a year studying the
Ket people's Yeniseian, where his findings
helped with the substantiation of this conjecture
into the origins of Ket people, and DNA claims
showing genetic and linguistic affinities
with such ethnic groups living in relatively
close-proximity to the region of Tibet (vis-a-vis
Sino-Tibetan and Tibeto-Burman)[1]; he further
suggests that the tonal system of the Ket
language is closer to that of spoken Cantonese
or Vietnamese than the other native languages
found in Siberia [2].
=== 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 and O.G. Tailleur,
the late Sergei A. Starostin and Sergei L.
Nikolayev have sought to confirm these connections.
Others who have developed the hypothesis,
often expanded to Dené–Caucasian, include
J.D. Bengtson, V. Blažek, J.H. Greenberg
(with M. Ruhlen), and M. Ruhlen. George Starostin
continues his father's work in Yeniseian,
Sino-Caucasian and other fields.
== Notes ==
== References ==
== Bibliography ==
== 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 (in Russian)
Multimedia Database of Ket Language, Moscow
State (Lomonosov) University
Ket language vocabulary with loanwords (from
the World Loanword Database)
