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The Yeniseian language family (sometimes known as Yenisei-Ostyak) is spoken in central Siberia.
Family division
- Arin †
- Assan †
- Ket (100-500 speakers)
- Kott †
- Pumpokol †
- Yugh (†) (2 or 3 non-fluent speakers in 1991)
Only two languages of this family survived into the 20th century, Ket, with around 1,000 speakers and Yugh, which is now possibly extinct. The other known members of this family, Arin, Assan, Pumpokol, and Kott, have been extinct for over a century. It appears from Chinese sources that a Yeniseian group was among the peoples that made up the tribal confederation known as the Xiongnu, who have traditionally been considered the ancestors of the Huns.
Genealogical relations
Attempts have been made by Russian scholars to establish a relationship with Burushaski or the Sino-Tibetan languages, and Yeniseian frequently forms part of the Dene-Caucasian hypothesis or variants thereof. The genetic relations between Yeniseian languages and Na-Dene also were proposed by the american linguist Vajda, a specialist about Haida, although he does not agree with the further proposed relations with Caucasian languages. A recent genetic study[1] found no evidence for a close genetic relationship between the Ket people and several Na-Dene populations, but as there is no intrinsic connection between languages and genes, this does not necessarily contradict the hypothesis, which suggest the two families separated six to eight thousand years ago. In another proposed link, George van Driem[2] at the University of Leiden put forward new evidence, mostly morphological, that the Yeniseian family may be related to Burushaski spoken in northern Pakistan in a family he calls Karasuk. For example, second-person singular prefixes on intransitive verbs are [gu-, gó-] in Burushaski and [ku-, gu-] in Ket. Van Driem postulates that the Burusho people were part of the migration out of Central Asia that resulted in the Indo-European conquest of India. Note that despite the Yeniseian language family having been called Yenisei-Ostyak in the past, the languages are entirely unrelated to Khanty, an Uralic language which has likewise been known as Ostyak.
Family features
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, to an extreme found elsewhere in Eurasia only in Burushaski and, to a lesser extent, in Basque and the Languages of the Caucasus. (All of these languages are ergative as well.)
External links
- Lecture notes on the Ket people Written by Edward Vajda, a proponent of the Yeniseian-Na Dene connection.
- Article on Yeniseian languages (Russian)
References
- Bengtson, John D.: Some Yenisseian Isoglosses. Mother tongue IV, 1998.
- Vajda, Edward J.: The Kets and Their Language. Mother Tongue IV, 1998.
- Vajda, Edward J. 2000. Ket Prosodic Phonology. Munich: Lincom Europa Languages of the World vol. 15.
- Vajda, Edward J.: Ket. Lincom Europa, München 2004. (englisch)
- Vajda, Edward J. (Ed.): Languages and Prehistory of Central Siberia. Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 262. John Benjamin Publishing Company. 2004. (Darstellung des Jenisseischen und seiner Sprecher mit Nachbarsprachen aus linguistischer, historischer und archäologischer Sicht)
- Vajda, Edward J.: The Origin of Phonemic Tone in Yeniseic. In CLS 37, 2002. (Parasession on Arctic languages: 305-320).
- Werner, Heinrich: Reconstructing Proto-Yenisseian. Mother Tongue IV, 1998.
- Werner, Heinrich: Zur jenissejisch-indianischen Urverwandtschaft. Harassowitz, Wiesbaden 2004.
