Paleo-Siberian languages

▪ linguistics

Introduction

Paleo-Siberian also spelled  Paleosiberian , also called  Paleo-Asiatic languages  or  Hyperborean languages 

      languages spoken in Asian Russia (Siberia) that belong to four genetically unrelated groups—Yeniseian (Yeniseian languages), Luorawetlan (Luorawetlan languages), Yukaghir (Yukaghir language), and Nivkh (Nivkh language).

The languages of the group

Yeniseian, Luorawetlan, and Nivkh

 The Yeniseian group is spoken in the Turukhansk region along the Yenisey River. Its only living members are Ket (Ket language) (formerly called Yenisey-Ostyak), which is spoken by about 500 persons, and Yug, with no more than 5 speakers. Kott (Kot; also called Assan or Asan), Arin, and Pumpokol, now extinct members of this group, were spoken chiefly to the south of the present-day locus of Ket and Yug.

      The Luorawetlan family consists of (1) Chukchi, spoken by no more than 11,000 people in the northeasternmost parts of Siberia, west of the small enclaves of Siberian Yupik (Eskimo), (2) Koryak, also called Nymylan, with approximately 3,500 speakers, spoken on northern Kamchatka and northward to the Anadyr River basin, (3) the strongly divergent but probably related Itelmen (or Kamchadal), with a bare remnant of 500 speakers on the central west coast of Kamchatka, (4) Aliutor, perhaps a Koryak dialect, with about 2,000 speakers, and (5) Kerek, with about 10 speakers.

Yukaghir

      Yukaghir (regional name Odul) is spoken by about 200 persons (less than 20 percent of the ethnic group) who are divided about equally into two enclaves: Tundra Yukaghir (also called Northern Yukaghir) in the Sakha republic (Yakutia), near the estuary of the Indigirka River; and Kolyma, or Forest, Yukaghir (also called Southern Yukaghir) along the bend of the Kolyma River. Extinct earlier dialects or languages related to Yukaghir are Omok and Chuvan (Chuvantsy); these were spoken south and southwest of the current Yukaghir area. Nivkh has about 1,000 speakers, roughly half of whom live in the estuary of the Amur River and the other half on Sakhalin Island.

Lack of a genetic relationship

      These four groups are not related to each other. They have been subsumed under the names Paleo-Siberian, Paleo-Asiatic, or, more rarely, Hyperborean ever since the Baltic German zoologist and explorer Leopold von Schrenck surmised, in the middle of the 19th century, that they constituted the remnants of a formerly more widely dispersed language family that had been encroached upon by invading groups of Uralic and Altaic speakers. Schrenck's hypothesis is quite correct to the extent that as recently as the 17th century Yeniseian, Luorawetlan, and Yukaghir languages were spoken over much wider territories than they are today. For example, it is known that Samoyed languages (Samoyedic languages) (of the Uralic family) at one time in the past absorbed the languages of now-extinct Yeniseian tribes, that Yukaghir was spoken as far west as the Taymyr Peninsula in the 17th century, and that the former domains of Chukchi and Koryak extended much farther to the west. Little is known about the prehistory of Nivkh, but it may be assumed that this language was also originally centred farther to the west, perhaps in Manchuria. As far as can be determined with the help of the methods of comparative linguistics, however, the four present-day Paleo-Siberian groups never formed a single family of languages in the accepted sense of that term. In fact, they may represent only a fragment of a possibly greater diversity of language families in prehistoric Siberia. Many of the languages spoken in the area during earlier periods may have been swallowed up by the more recent as well as more culturally vigorous intruders in Siberia that are now the neighbours of the Paleo-Siberian enclaves; this includes primarily the Sakha (whose domains stretch as far as the Chukchi and Yukaghir areas) and also various Tungus tribes (one or another of which borders on each of the Paleo-Siberian languages).

The Paleo-Siberian languages and other language families

      Many attempts have been made to show that the four Paleo-Siberian families are related either to each other or to adjacent (or more distant) language families. Thus, Ket has been compared with the Sino-Tibetan (Sino-Tibetan languages) family (which includes Chinese and Tibeto-Burman languages) and with some of the languages of the Caucasus, and Yukaghir has been compared with Uralic (Uralic languages). Some of these comparisons (e.g., the comparisons of Ket with Caucasian languages) are fanciful experiments or completely unfounded. Even more sober efforts to demonstrate ties with other languages are seriously hampered by many millennia of separation from possible related languages. The systematic reconstruction of protolanguages, often assumed as a standard for relationship among the better-established language families, is not available. Of attempts to find relatives for the four Paleo-Siberian families, only a Uralo-Yukaghir relationship has been positively received. The remaining Paleo-Siberian families, including Luorawetlan as a family in its own right, must continue to be regarded as isolates, unrelated to any known language. Although numerous resemblances in grammatical or phonological traits may be observed between Paleo-Siberian and adjacent languages (such as between Chukchi and Yupik, between Samoyed and Yukaghir, or between Nivkh and Korean or Japanese), these are not indexes of genetic affinity but are often the result of the diffusion of linguistic traits over large geographic areas. They may, however, provide clues to the linguistic prehistory of Siberia.

      The cultures of the Paleo-Siberian groups are similar in that they are all Arctic or subarctic. Each particular group, however, has its own characteristic cultural profile. These characteristics may on occasion very closely resemble the cultural profile of a non-Paleo-Siberian group; e.g., Ket culture resembles Selkup culture (the Selkup language is classified as Uralic) more closely than it resembles that of any Paleo-Siberian group, evidently because Selkup- and Ket-speaking groups are located in contiguous areas.

Linguistic features

Phonological features

      Typical phonological features of the Paleo-Siberian languages are postvelar consonants (i.e., sounds that are formed farther back in the mouth than /k/ and usually represented as q), vowel harmony of various kinds (e.g., the alternation of e and i in the form for ‘my' in Nivkh ñe-řla ‘my harpoon' and ñi-řly ‘my sky'), consonant alternations (e.g., the alternation between b, v, and f in Nivkh bal ‘mountain,' ñ-val ‘my mountain,' c-fal ‘your mountain'), and rich consonant clusters in all but Yukaghir, but especially in Nivkh (e.g., South Sakhalin Nivkh tfyfř ‘hammer') and Itelmen (e.g., ktxam ‘bone').

Grammatical features

      The grammatical structures of the Paleo-Siberian groups differ considerably from each other. In a broad sense, Nivkh resembles Japanese (Japanese language) in its grammatical categories and processes (in word order, heavy inflection of verbs, and use of enclitics—an enclitic is a word that is associated with a preceding word), whereas Yukaghir shares certain grammatical categories with some Uralic languages—for instance, the use of distinct conjugations to focus on the roles of major sentence categories (e.g., subject, object, negation): Yukaghir tet mer-ai-mek ‘you shot' versus tet el-ai-yek ‘you did not shoot' versus tet ai ‘you shot' versus tet ileleŋ ai-me-ŋ ‘you shot at the deer.' A typical feature of Luorawetlan is its strong tendency toward complex compounding (also called incorporation) and circumfixation; for example, in Chukchi ga + mor-ïk + tor + orw-ïma ‘in our new sleigh,' the entire unit is surrounded by the circumfix ga-…-ïma ‘in' (compare ga + mor-ïk + orw-ïma ‘in our sleigh,' without tor ‘new,' and ga + tor + orw-ïma ‘in the new sleigh,' without mor-ïk ‘our'). A characteristic feature of the Ket verb is its succinct complexity, involving such categories as gender, animateness, and type of event; for instance, t-k-it-n-a ‘I carved it up,' which consists of t- ‘I,' the verbal complex -k-…-a ‘cut up (carve, split) into pieces once,' -it- (feminine object marker ‘her, it'), and -n- (past-completed tense).

      All the Paleo-Siberian languages are quite rich in devices that can be used for compounding words. In syntax, Luorawetlan favours ergative constructions in which markers indicate the agent or instrument of the action—e.g., Father + agent marker, bear (subject), shoot (main verb), ‘Father is shooting a bear.'

Vocabulary

      In addition to the stock of native words inherited from its ancestral language, each Paleo-Siberian language also has numerous loanwords, some of which are recent and from adjacent or recently adjacent languages and others of which are ancient and from languages with which it no longer has contact. Some of the loanwords from ancient times are consequently more difficult to identify and trace to their origins. In general, Manchu-Tungus (Manchu-Tungus languages) (or Tungus), a subfamily of the Altaic language family, is the source of most loanwords, but the Turkic languages (including Sakha) have also served as the sources of loans, and Ket has borrowed some words from Selkup. There are also more complicated loan relationships, such as those that are found in the reindeer terminology of Nivkh, which is borrowed from a Manchu-Tungus language but seemingly not from any of those with which Nivkh is now in contact. South Sakhalin Nivkh also contains a considerable number of loanwords from Ainu (a language of northern Japan) and, during the first half of the 20th century, was hospitable to potential loans from Japanese; the Japanese loanwords never became acculturated because the Japanese hegemony over South Sakhalin ceased after 1945. Chukchi has some Yupik (Yupik language) loanwords.

      The most viable source of technical and of all the other modern vocabulary has been the Russian language, the influence of which began with the first contact and continues to be strong. Each Paleo-Siberian language adjusts the Russian loanwords according to the dictates of its phonology and grammar, but the more recently borrowed words tend to retain their original Russian form or one closely resembling it.

Writing

      The Yukaghir had not a system of true writing, but rather a pictographic (pictography) tradition (incisions on fresh birch bark) used by men for route maps and by young women as an aid in the public expression of feelings on the themes of love and separation. Limited use of such a system among Koryak speakers has also been reported.

      Since the 1920s and '30s each Paleo-Siberian language has had a literary language and a script now based on the Cyrillic alphabet (and formerly based on the Latin script). Because at one time these native languages were used in part in elementary education, primers and arithmetic books for the lowest grades were available. Some natives continue their education and acquire a good knowledge of Russian culture. This situation has led to the rise of bilingualism, but it also has contributed to the growth of modern literatures in the native languages, based on Russian models, especially among the Koryak and the Chukchi.

      The native traditions and folklore of the Paleo-Siberian peoples have been collected since the 19th century, mainly by Russians and Westerners. Work in these fields is still continuing and is attracting a slowly emerging corps of trained native specialists. Such trained natives also are beginning to collaborate in the compilation of dictionaries.

Robert Austerlitz Daniel M. Abondolo

Additional Reading

Dean Worth, “Paleosiberian,” in Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Current Trends in Linguistics, vol. 1 (1963), pp. 345–373, provides good coverage of Soviet work after World War II. Roman Jakobson, Gerta Hüttl-Worth, and John Fred Beebe, Paleosiberian Peoples and Languages: A Bibliographical Guide (1957, reprinted 1981), is very useful, with an informative appendix. Still a good source on Paleo-Siberian languages is V.V. Vinogradov (ed.), IAzyki narodov SSSR, vol. 5, Mongol'skie, tunguso-man'chzhurskie i paleoaziatskie iazyki, ed. by P.Ia. Skorik et al. (1968). More recent studies, also in Russian, are the articles in N.I. Konrad et al. (eds.), IAzyki Azii i Afriki, vol. 3, IAzyki drevnei Perednei Azii (nesemitskie) (1979), in which Nivkh and Ket in particular are presented in more detail; a reconstruction of proto-Yeniseic by S.A. Starostin, “Praeniseiskaia rekonstruktsiia i vneshnie sviazi eniseĭskikh iazykov,” in V.V. Ivanov, V.N. Toporov, and B.A. Uspenskii (eds.), Ketskii sbornik, vol. 3, Antropologiia, etnografiia, mifologiia, lingvistika (1982), pp. 144–237; and A.N. Zhukova, IAzyk palanskikh koriakov (1980), a grammar of a southern Koryak dialect with texts, Russian translations, and dictionary appendices.Robert Austerlitz Daniel M. Abondolo

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