Edward Vajda - Tlingit and the Dene-Yeniseian Hypothesis

i am chuck smythe director of the culture and history department shi has started construction of its arts campus in downtown juneau which will expand opportunities for education and art if you are interested in making a donation to the arts campus please visit see alaskaheritage.org campus the title of today's lecture is singing and a dinayunician hypothesis as you watch the lecture we invite you to submit questions in the chat box in youtube professor vida has graciously agreed to answer questions at the end of his presentation edward vida has been on the faculty of western washington university's department of modern and classical languages in bellingham washington since 1987. he teaches courses in introductory linguistics morphology history linguistics historical linguistics i mean russian language culture and folklore and inner and northern eurasia's indigenous peoples his research focuses on the languages of northern asia and includes the original field work with ket a language spoken by fewer than 50 people in the remote yennesse river basin from 2005 to 2015 he was affiliated with the max planck institute for evolutionary anthropology where he where in august 2006 he proposed evidence of a genealogical connection between eunecian the language family to which ket belongs and the nadine family of north america the first widely accepted linguistic link between an old world and a new world language family he received his university's excellent of teaching award in 1992 and the paul j balls camp distinguished research award in 2011. professor vita hypothesis with special attention on what it might contribute to understanding klinket prehistory and i thank see alaska heritage institute for inviting me to participate in their series my name is edward vida i'm a professor at western washington university in washington state and i teach russian language culture linguistics and also north asian peoples and my specialty in my research is studying the cat language of siberia severely endangered language and the reason why i'm in a series talking about alaska languages is because of the dna yenisayan hypothesis that i've been working on for the past 20 years which states that cat the sole surviving member of that once widespread yenisei and language family in siberia is genealogically related to a family that is widespread in north america and contains the athabascan or dna languages the extinct iac and also clink it and uh the first results of this hypothesis were published in a book edited by my friends jim carrey and ben potter without whom it uh it would be very difficult to say that there even is a dna and a saiyan hypothesis so i thank them uh the idea that the language in central siberia could be related to languages in north america actually was broached already in 1923 by alfredo trombetti who saw a few look-alike words like the cat were jang the people and the dna word dna which has various forms in different languages in the dna at the baskin subgroup of nadine i think this uh audience probably is more [Music] knowledgeable about alaskan languages than siberian languages and so before i get into the linguistic evidence for the hypothesis i just want to introduce you to the cats in siberia a little bit more closely so the cats speak a unique language which is not recognized as related to any of the other languages of north asia has a very complex prefixing verb whereas most of the other languages have suffixing word types and cat people are the last hunter-gatherers of inner eurasia so they were different in their lifestyle than all of the surrounding peoples and they only settled down when the soviet government forced them to do so in the 1930s and 40s so they are are different from the surrounding peoples in all of those ways and today there are according to the 2010 census there are about four 1 400 cats that includes many people who's either mother or father belong to a different siberian nationality or russian the fluent native speakers of cat however are probably just a few dozen and they're all um elders they're all over 65 years old if not over 70 years old and they all speak russian fluently as well so when we study the cats their history their traditional life ways are inextricably linked to the yannisan river one of the largest rivers in north asia and in the world in fact and that is the river gives the name to the language family that cap belongs to cat ancestors seasonally uh established their campsites on the water during the summers and during the winter they went inland and each family had a different uh trail that they uh hunted big game on and after the winter ended they returned to the water side and this is the place where they had interaction with other tribes other other languages but probably the induction of spouses from psalmiatic peoples like the cell coup over many many centuries is responsible for some of the changes that we see when we study the cat language we have influence of suffixing languages on what originally were a prefixing language so cat has changed quite a bit over the past a couple thousand years just because of language contact even though cat language doesn't like to borrow words so uh all other forest peoples for thousands of miles around the cat are either reindeer pastoralists or in the south they're on horse pastoralists turks and the cats are the only ones that didn't have herds of domesticated animals that they used for food the only kept domestic in fact was the dog and so if you look at the map of siberia most of the peoples of north asian almost all the people in fact except for the cats in this area are relative newcomers who moved up after the domestication of the reindeer in the last 2000 years and the cats are the only hunter-gatherer group that survived linguistically in all of this area found themselves surrounded by the remainder people and there are some other survivals of pre-render people on the pacific rim uh all of these sometimes are called paleo siberians because of their hunter-gatherer lifestyle but the peoples on the pacific rim are not linguistically related to the cats at all the you can inuit straddle bearing straight and are in both north america and extreme northeast asia peoples like the if they have any relation to north american peoples and languages it's a very old one that hasn't been demonstrated but there is no relation between those peoples linguistically and the cats okay the cat people were recognized as different uh superficially different because of their hunting lifestyle and also even because of their physical appearance to some degree already uh three three hundred years ago um local russians called them the sibirsky and gypsy siberian indians and uh dutch orientalists uh in 1709 uh adrian ryland even suggested that they might somehow be related to peoples of north america um and the cat dna does reflect descent from ancient north asians it suggests that the cat people were in north asia and siberia for a very long period of time and all of their neighbors are newcomers relative newcomers to this area but um any human genetic affinity between cats and the first peoples of the americas is very ancient it's more than 20 000 years old and it can't be connected with a demonstrable language connection between the cats and anyone in north america the cat people uh speak a language in a few villages uh that you see in this uh this oval here that is uh the remnant of a once quite widespread family that was spoken farther south uh travelers in the 1700s and 1800s recorded uh other languages related to cat you pompocal aaron codd and so forth like that and they were recorded by people who are taking fur tax from the native people so we know where their distribution was um they kept uh and their relatives the other same relatives must have lived much farther south along the nsa and angara river drainages oral history tells about uh ancestors fleeing north along the nsa to avoid the war-like people we don't know who they were ethnically and also the killikids are much later who probably work here in these turks and we know that turkic people took over much of this very extreme south siberian area um and the fact that they took that over already starting about 2000 years ago and we have substrate river names that show different dialectal variants of viennese languages shows that nsa in languages that were recorded must have begun diverging earlier than 2000 years ago how much earlier of course we can't really say we can only guess but it can't be too much older because the languages are very similar to one another there's never been any kind of any doubt as to what is the insane language and what is not so probably about 2 500 years ago there was a proto or comedy in a saiyan language and if you get beyond 3 000 years ago you're starting to stretch credulity because the languages seem like they're too similar to have begun diverging that long ago but we simply don't know probably the nsan languages are roughly comparable in time depth to the vast denay or at the baskin sub-branch of nadine which some often is suggested to be about 2500 years old the inaudible itself however is much older than that no matter how you do the estimate proto-nadine was maybe spoken 5000 years ago 4 500 years ago these are very educated guesses by jeff lear 5000 and also by michael kraus using just estimates of similarity degrees of similarity between the languages what is um undisputed is that the clinket language diverged first and much of klingkit prehistory is not known because of uh the fact that plinkett itself is really closely related dialects and so if uh dna in the same hypothesis were to be proven it might help shed light on some of the divergence between klingkit and the ancestor of the dna and extinct ayak language haida doesn't fit in a which really should be understood as uh athabascan yeah clink it um haida doesn't have the grammatical uh features that not dna languages have and it also even though it has a lot of shared uh vocabulary that probably those are probably borrowed however so i don't have much else to say about haida in this lecture none nothing in the dna in the same hypothesis seems to corroborate that haida could be related to these languages and in fact just uh ignoring dna and isaiah and looking at haida and adenae it looks like the relationship um historically would be an aerial rather than a genealogical relationship between the languages unless the relationship is extremely old that can't really be proven anyway um uh the homeland question of nadine peoples is not really settled but in jeff in jeff lear's lecture overview of the dna languages in the place of plinket in nadine which was given uh last week in this series and if you haven't seen this lecture you definitely need to watch it it's fantastic and if you see have seen it you should watch it again it's worth it it looks like the homelands of the different branches of the nadine family can best be um suggested to be in this area of south in southern alaska maybe adjacent interior areas of the yukon territory that's probably the best estimate that can be given okay now uh if did danae insane is a genuine language link um uh it suggests that there was a common connection um in real space and time between the ancestors of the cats and the ancestors of the klingkit iac peoples um the first hypothesis just looking at the nadine peoples and what can be discerned about their prehistory would be that the nadine peoples descend from a language that was already present in beringia and present in alaska already 15 000 years ago and so uh if that were the case then the relationship with uh yeah could only be over 20 000 years ago earlier than the viringian standstill that's too long ago for the comparative method to be able to discern the grammatical homologies and possibly also the lexical cognates that are needed to demonstrate a language relationship um but if this hypothesis is true uh then it's just no surprise that we would have the homeland of not in nay peoples originally in this area could be in any area of north america but there's a second possibility as well and that second possibility is that the the ancient nadine ancestors the first peoples uh who had been in beringia and had gone into north america there's now evidence from human genetics that there was a migration of new peoples from siberia in the mid holocene about 5 000 years ago and this group of people must have merged with first peoples of the americas group that had been there already 10 000 years or more um and that was the founding population uh a little bit from asia the rest from ancient north america from the ice age and so uh this um connection can be taken back from these mid-policy newcomers there's archaeological evidence that suggests doesn't prove that these people came from deep in siberia and there were cultures and then later the culture that uh spread from the area near lake baikal and eventually to bering strait and across into alaska and the starting point of these cultures is not very far from where we know from uh from place names river subs substrate river names that the nsa and peoples uh spread from this is a red area here okay so that opens up a hypothesis too that uh the language ancestral to nadine was only even was only brought into alaska about five thousand years ago and then it's it diversified in alaska starting after 5000 years ago and that's what our a lot of chronology guesstimates seem to say anyway and if this were the case the very first entry of not in a language with the siberians who mixed with first peoples somewhere in alaska probably along the yukon river they must have moved down up the yukon river southward and that evidence of that movement or their erstwhile location in central alaska would presumably have all been covered up by the much later spread of janae peoples into alaska that was described in in jeff lear's lecture last week so this hypothesis perhaps is a less uh um less of strong than the first one in terms of of human genetics in terms of the known location of the branches of the nadine family but it's the only one that really could logically work with the dna in a saiyan hypothesis if if you want to try to use the uh the comparative method in order to reconstruct the language connection so that's my hypothesis and that the origin of proto-identity language is connected with these mid-holocene newcomers to alaska even though the nadine peoples themselves have ancestry from the first peoples who had been there ten thousand years earlier um so if this is correct then proto janae in a saiyan might be less than seven thousand years old that would be the age of uh the coalescence age that we can show uh in the dna between the mid holocene ancestors from siberia in the nadine population and the cats and other um siberian peoples so um that would dovetail with uh what is often assumed not always about the age of protonation a and um if protonating is much older than 5 000 years as some people have suggested it's hard to explain how the founding population could have 5 000 years ago been a mix of the people from siberian and first peoples if if the clinket iac athabascan languages have already spread out all huge geographic zone um how could uh their ancestors all have the share dna with people who only came in from siberia about five thousand years ago so my hypothesis is that if dna insane is a true language link it is a mid holocene language link that is potentially amenable to recovery to proof by the traditional comparative method and that the nadine family probably is less than 5 000 years old with clink diverging first and sometime after four thousand years old mike krauss said about thirty three hundred years ago um iac splits from photogenay and then proto-dna would have uh diversified really in the last um 25 or so hundred years and that would make the dna language sub-branch equal in time to the genocian languages which seem to have diverged also about two and a half thousand years ago certainly not less than three thousand years ago i should point out that this also means that there is a long period to almost 2000 years perhaps where we have in a saying developing without any real way to recover the development from comparing the the existing menacing languages unless we use nadine as external comparanda so my hypothesis is that the language link if it exists is really a mid-holocene link and that the comparative method should be able to be used in order to demonstrate if there is enough evidence that remains after that period of time and so i'm going to now go over grammatical evidence possible for dna and a saying that includes finite verb structure and a kind of nominal form gerund infinitive action nominal you can call it but you will that is made from the finite verb template in both language families and then i'll look at uh nouns i'll look at possessed down constructions and other word types like directionals and certain types of demonstratives that seem to be made from a homologous or partly homologous structure and finally i'll mention the kin noun suffix that seems to be cognated in unisa and in at least the dna branch of nadine after i do that i'll go ahead and look at some advances i just made in the last few months in reconstruction of proto-yenisaian that provides potentially new lexical and phonological evidence for uh dna in saying and when i compare this results to not in a i'll pay particular attention to things they might help answer in the prehistory of clinking it's good to point out that some of the earliest uh potential evidence that there was a nod in a language family that clink it was related to uh athabasca and dna languages came from the incredibly complex mostly prefixing verb structure that's shared by all of these languages and in this structure in all of these languages you have lexical morphemes in a particular slot and then you have conjugation markers that have to do tense mood in aspect first and second person subject agreement markers and then you have a complex of morphemes some of which had to do with expression of aspect result resultant state and others had to do with the expression of whether a a verb was transitive or intransitive valence markers and they work together partly together in all of these languages in a complex that not in a specialists call classifiers but uh it's important to understand that the classifier elements come from different sources and it's an amalgam or partial amalgam of at least three different types of morphemes when we get to the very end of the verb we have what probably was originally the verb root but it has mixed together partly with ten smooth aspect suffixes to make what uh not the name specialists call the verb stem uh so we have tense mood marking on before the verb root and and after merging with the verb root and so this is a highly characteristic structure it's uh now known that it comes from a common proto-nadine template in both dna yak and klinket languages and there's nothing else like that in north america and there is no analog to the classifier elements in haida and in fact high to verb is night and day different than this in most ways and so um uh nadine is definitely in terms of his grammatical structure an isolated family inside of north america when we go to cat language one of the things that attracted me already 30 years ago to the idea that maybe there might be some connection between cat and languages like clink it and and the dna languages is that the kept verb has this uncanny resemblance superficial resemblance to nadine languages there's a series of um of morphine positions or or template swaps and they're roughly in the same order uh where you have originally the third person uh agreement farther to the left and then you have conjugation markers and then you have aspects uh suffixes up on those conjugation markers and then you have the first and second person markers and then you have what we call the base which is the verb root that has partly mixed with uh what were probably aspect suffixes and so you have a very similar uh layout of the verb to what we have in anatomy languages but that could be a typological coincidence it's only really potential evidence for a descent from a common origin if you can show that these slots have markers affixes that are actually um actually morpheme cognates to uh nadine in fact it is possible to show that this last um slot in cat is something that was added um already in proto-unisaying but it must have been added much later than uh proto-dna in the same because it has no analog in that not dna languages and so um a few years ago i published an article where i compare the or the historical development of the nsa and verb with the historical development of the nodulae verb and i come to a hypothesis where [Music] most of the core grammatical and lexical elements in the first four or five uh earliest four or five uh morphine positions in both families can be shown not only to be homologous in their arrangement by and large but also having um interacting cognate affixes and also lexical items and so the conjugation markers the aspect suffixes may be the subject agreement but there's problems with that and also lexical verb words quite a number of them uh can you can make a pretty good argument that they um appear to be cognate if you trace their histories back okay you can't do that with cat verb and anything else in north asia i don't even think you could make an incorrect comparison the cat verb is so so different than everything else that's around it so my hypothesis and this very speculative is that this kind of polysynthetic verb almost unique in the world that we have um in unisa and as well as in nadine both of them could have come from a homologous structure in a shared proto language that originally had a light verb with its own prefixes and suffixes and a heavy verb with its prefixes and suffixes and they merged they conglomerated together and as a result of that you have the aspect on both sides of the main verb root and you also have subject agreement in different positions although although there could be other reasons for explaining that and in this explanation that i go into all of the elements that are not in a classifiers have a plausible cognate in unisaian but in the nsa and these elements did not coalesce together as a little engine that that does violence raising or valence lowering in most cases but you can make an argument that there are the classified elements are are cognate and i think unless you make a really good case that classifier elements are have cognates in another language family uh even if they're not classifiers doing the same thing you're not going to be able to prove that not dna is related to any other language family in the world and i think i think that this evidence that i've proposed already is um is compelling enough to to at least be plausible some of it at least so uh it's not just in the finite verb that we find these very intricate homologies that is not just arrangement but cognate affixes and roots as well in combinations across both language families but there is also a d verbal form that is made by taking the verb root and adding a sibilant suffix of some form and a nasal originally nasal a similar prefix and originally nasal suffix to simple verb roots and we find this in yeah and we also find it in but especially uh well preserved in iac and so these are in action nominals that are are nominal forms of the verb you use possessive morphology to say who is the actants in that action and you do that as well in um iac language and so we appear to have a cognate action nominal prefix cut sometimes cognate verb roots and then cognate uh action nominal suffix across both language families and none of the classifier elements or other grammatical elements from the uh from the finite verb uh in either genocide or in nadine are actually put into this action nominal formula so it's a very intricate shared formula with uh with cognates acting together in strings across both language families so i think that's fairly compelling evidence that it could be from common origin okay when we get to the nominal morphology dna languages iac languages have pronominal prefixes that denote possession and also sometimes suffixes the prefixes are obligatory on some nouns and on nouns where they are optional uh we tend to have a suffix in in in yen languages um we don't have obligatory uh possessed nouns at least in modern cat as it was recorded but we also have these prefixes that express possession we do not have a suffix that we can reconstruct for proto in a saiyan for possession so that's a difference but in um some uh of the most basic vocabulary usually in alien and possessed nouns we have this nasal element that can be reconstructed back to proto-dna um and that nasal element can be shown to be a cognate of an a lateral element an l that's in iac because nasal turned to lateral l in um in history of iac in many positions so this has never been explained this uh this little element that's in between the possessive uh prefix and the uh and the noun root when we compare with janessa and we might possibly have an explanation because there's this nasal connector between the possessive prefixes in uh sometimes in uh in a saiyan and the possessed nouns and we also have it in other word forms as we will see in a moment and in post-positional forms and case forms both language families have post positions and not prepositions um one of my speculative hypotheses is that the difficulty in showing a cognitive between the first and second pronouns in unisa and not dna may have something to do with interaction with this nasal possessive connector that was originally in in many of the words that these uh that these pronouns show up in um and if that is the case it might eventually be possible to show how how a nsa and nadine first and second person pronouns could have come from a common origin but the fact that it's not firmly shown yet and those pronoun forms are heavily embedded in the structures that i showed you earlier that i'm claiming to be cognate that's should give you pause before you would accept danae is seeing hypothesis i think that we have to have a better evidence of of cognates in the core pronoun system than i can provide now the possessive uh structure with the prefix then nasal element and then um and then the noun also shows up in post-positional constructions and when we compare cat especially with iac um the cat has a element which is generic um possessive for the third person and then we have lana element which is this possessive connector that shows up in some forms and not in other forms for reasons not understood yet in iac we have lots of these qualifiers that go between the noun and the uh and the post position or sometimes they're also incorporated into verbs and some of these qualifiers you can show descend from uh nouns to grammaticalize nouns but other ones they have such diverse uses that it's really difficult to say what where they came from but if you look at yana sayin it really does look like it's possible that some of this vestigial possessive morphology could have been the source of some of these uh these more diverse qualifiers with the yenisei and the the which becomes an l e x so this is also speculative but uh but there are a lot of things that could turn out in these words to actually be cognates working together okay and when we get to directionals which are words that express relationship usually to water up land down to the water we find really interesting parallels that involve not just semantics but also morphological form and also morphological arrangement uh between genocide and atene yenisein has these two core directional uh formants uh one meaning going down lamb going to the river the other meaning going upland the one that means going down to the river also means going towards the fire or going into open space whereas the one that means going up into the forest also means going away from the fire or going away from open space in this situation we also find in dna languages at least in some dna languages we find this very interesting semantic polysemi and in both language families we have possessive prefixes then possibly the nasal element then the directional um root which might be cognate both of these possibly will turn out to be cognate in both language families and then we have um we have grammatical elements that are added after those roots to express the type of direction so directional adverbs also show a possibility that we would have a dissent from a common homologous uh structure of word finally there are certain kinds of demonstratives and interrogatives in uh yeah that also seem to be based on ancient root a nasal connector and then a noun that sometimes becomes grammaticalized and we can show i will show in later in the lecture that this word for path is cognate in both language families um the nasal connector i believe is cognate also although i can't explain uh why we have an l why it turned into an l in uh in certain words maybe it's some sort of dissimilation with his prefix i can't yet show that the very core uh demonstrative roots are cognate across the two language families and that's a problem for the hypothesis because one would expect that at least some of them are if the rest of these structures are cognates so that's another of the many problems that should give you pause before you accept the neonate hypothesis as demonstrated because it's not demonstrated fully yet finally there's a kin noun suffix in um yes saiyan and in dna languages okay and so there are kin roots kinship roots that are cognate across both language families and then there's the suffix as well um that moves us into the discussion of lexical cognates and in uh 19 in 2010 uh in the dna and saying connection i had about 100 proposed cognates some of them turned out to not be correct and others are still doubtful one of the problems for other linguists to independently try to verify the evidence or the supposed evidence that i've published for dna and saying at least 10 years ago was the absence of a truly comprehensive uh source of the cat vocabulary that linguists could could look up and not just have to rely on what i've put on in my publications and that is solved today because in 2015 a a group of linguists which i participated in uh was able to compile a a virtually complete dictionary of what is known about ket cat cat vocabulary in all of the cat dialects and so now at least that's available to other linguists but if you look at the modern cat word forms it is not easy to use casual inspection in order to try to compare with nadine languages the language family if it exists is just too old and can't itself has changed just too much so you have to also rely on really good reconstructions and in the last 10 years i've worked very hard to try to reconstruct uh the innocent languages building on the magnificent work that sergey starston a moscow linguist had done uh several decades ago and what i've tried to do is make a compendium that's parallel to jeff lear's comparative athabascan lexicon and so far it's about 800 pages long i've made a lot of advances in understanding the origin of vienna saying words and how kept words are related to extinct in the same languages every time i work on it i change things it's not going to be ready for publication for some years but out of this work has come in just the last half a year um a new proposed reconstruction of the proto-insane consonant inventory that makes it easier to compare it or more realistic to compare it with protonating and some findings were already evident in 2010 that bilabial plosives became uh guttural um it was pronounced back in the throat in the language ancestral pronoun and that there is a palatal series in both language families that also parallels in um in cognates but my most recent reconstruction of unisa and also suggests that proto-insane had retroflex consonants and that suggests that maybe retroflex consonants found in the dna languages is not an innovation but maybe was um already in proto-proto-nodunai even though they haven't yet been or haven't been reconstructed for them so if you compare uh proto protein say and to proto to non-denate words you'll find that it turns into a globalized vealer and if you compare proto-indusin per you'll find that it correlates um systematically with clink and um and sometimes [Music] reconstructed for um for danae also maybe it's just a placeholder but but we do have a uh correlation there the uh palatal com correlation uh jeff ler brilliantly reconstructed palatal series that helped him demonstrate the genealogical relationship between klinket and dinee iak and it turns out that that palatal series also explains why certain cat words have a particular cognate to proto-dna whereas other ket words have cognate to the palatals instead of to the africans so that worked out really nicely already 10 years ago but um i have some evidence that a retroflex series could have been in the ancestor of not and if we look at the cognate some not in a cognates uh with the retroflex some not in so proto-dna cognates with the retroflex series go back to real velars that have rounded dealers but other ones seem to go back to retroflex and so it might be the case that the retroflex was present in proto-nadine that's very speculative and in fact any time that an outsider like myself uh trying to demonstrate a language connection with nadine tries to change what is known about or what has been demonstrated by real specialists in a it's you have to have more evidence than i have now but i have a little evidence and so i i'm putting that out as a speculative possibility that the retroflex series in a that we see in proto-dna languages may have in fact been original uh in uh protonation protonogyny um the most success in reconstruction that i've had in the last half a year with uh proto-yannosain is i have a new understanding of where the tones came from in uh in the cat language there are four of uh syllabic tones in monosyllabic words abrupt a type of fish in canushi fish swoon and long rising and falling and the falling tone short falling in cat and in the closely related uk language it has pharyngealization so already uh ten years ago i i knew that the long rising falling tone in cat and you simply come from the illusion of a of a usualer or a a velar uh consonant in between what was originally two separate syllables that's very clear just inside of vienna saying and the rhizopharyngealized tone uh in uh you know saying the falling tone also seems to be connected with some kind of african development that was reduced and already 10 years ago it was possible to show a number of cognates that suggested that the dna languages or not in a language sometimes have an element that could have plausibly become that fricative element that showed that turned into the falling tone there's this interesting word for a cradle hook where we have or a holding hook where we have a a route that's shared across both language families that has to do with the hook shape or bent back 180 degrees and it exists separately from this word and then we have a suffix that is a instrumental noun suffix um and we have that cognate in both language families also and it appears in other combinations as well so already 10 years ago pretty obvious where the rising falling tone came from and the falling tone but these other two tones which are more than fifty percent of all the tones in modern ket the high even and the laryngealized i just couldn't really understand how they could have come about and so i assumed that they were in proto-insane as well well it turns out that new research comparing how the circumfix over top of vowels recorded in cot over 150 years ago a better understanding of that pattern has allowed me to make a really new and maybe revolutionary reconstruction of the proliant saint vowel system and so here i have both monophthongs and diphthongs with a glide and with the uh with with the front glide and with the uh the back guide as well and what we find is that syllables in that correlate with proto-unisa and monophthongs don't have the circumfix in in [Music] cot and syllables that correlate with what can be reconstructed as diphthongs are the ones that inc have this have this circumstance which probably is just a symbol for a long vowel that probably wasn't toned and that means that there was no tone in proto-insane at all just like there was no tone presumably in proto-naginate either so if you compare cat and cot the monophthongs make simple vowels in cot without the circumfix and in cat they make uh simple vowels also but i but which became a glitterized or the abrupt godliness tone later because that became the default tone in modern cat all almost all uh borrowed words to get this tone automatically and if you have uh protein say in diphthong with yaff glide yeah it has certain correlations with cop vowels it always has the circumfix and other correlations with the nsa and if you have a uh protein same diphthong with your off-guard what it has different vowel correlations between cot and also the circumfix again because it came from a diphthong and so this new reconstruction explains uh where did the cat high even tone come from the the the alpha glide is important there and where did the abrupt laryngealized tone come from the off glide was important there but also where do mid back high unrounded and mid unrounded vowels come from which are only in cat and not in in caught now we are able to make really good uh correspondence between nearly all the examples of vowels and cot as well as in cat uh and also the uh the rise of tone and particular tones so this is this is probably pretty solid okay now when we take this new reconstruction of vienna saying and probably almost every word that i used in my 2010 uh attempt to compare against saying the reconstructions now are going to be a little bit different maybe a lot different so if we compare this new reconstruction vienna saying syllables uh to nadine the yenisein syllables without diphthongs with the original monophthongs they uh pair up really nicely in the cognates with what people call reduced vowels in the nadine languages okay and if we look at the off glide uh in the nsa in syllables and we pair it with nadine we get something really interesting and that is that sometimes it if it didn't if the syllable ended in a nasal it this merged with the nasal creating certain kinds of patterns but if the syllable end in a obstruent we actually get globalized obstacles okay and that's something i sort of thought about in 2010 but it's it's better shown now if you have a syllable that has obstrint in both onset and coda you get a double glottalization pattern at least in the cognates that i'm able to show between the two families um and so this pattern is the same created by the afghan in uh not in the nsa in uh clinket as well as in uh dna languages and so presumably if this is all correct this happened before there really was proto-nadine that's why i say pre-proton autonomy when we look at the um cognates with the off glide in proto-genocide what we find is that there's a difference between klingkit and denis ayak in klinket the off glide is implicated with the rise of the glottalized fricatives and in not dna in the dna languages it's implicated with just the creation of more glottalized plosives and affricates again and so we're starting to get just the beginnings of real systematic sound correspondences with this new understanding of proto-insane or proto-dna insane vocalism that explains things like the origin of glottalization the difference between the uh the glottalized implosives and africans on the one hand and the glottalized fricatives in klingkid on the other hand okay so when we take a look at individual cognates or potential cognates and i have about 130 of them so far and i'm sure if this is all correct there's going to be more and i need more because there's so many sound correspondences that need to be demonstrated that 100 is not enough 130 is probably not enough either but if we look at the cognate cell it's very interesting a lot of things get explained for instance producing a saying i'm everything's speculative that's why this this mark that means something like is here but uh this reconstruction uh explains the vowels in yennessain kat and kat it explains the rise of this tone in captain cot and in a languages it also explains the rise of the glottalized onset according to the rules that i have and so before i couldn't really say these were cognates even though they sort of looked alike because sometimes yes was cognate with nadine d sometimes the nsa indeed was cognate or seemed to be cognate with with uh glottalized uh t and that didn't make any sense and now it's starting to make sense so when we look at um at cognates where the uh where the glide elements seem to have instead merged with the uh [Music] sonoran coda uh we get different patterns and then we have vienna saying tea could be cognate with uh protein tea and so forth like that and then we have the same thing going on but with different vowels as the core of the diphthong so we're starting to get systematic sound correspondences here between the two families and then we have a situation where uh proto nsa and t corresponds to protonation a t that's gladlyz okay and uh this can be explained by those patterns that i i showed earlier there's problems though for instance i can't explain why there's a globalized fricative in this particular word instead of explosive because the rules should should have produced to close it so there's lots of problems that still have to be solved even if what i'm showing you is correct it's on the right track here's one that works hundred percent an ancient word for dish and proto-yen is saying that sir became a sir uh before uh the high vowels and so in proto-nadine uh presumably the world would still be there the word explains the tone in cat it also explains this high unrounded vowel in cat and in proto-nadine if you have this even though this is my reconstruction highly speculative you'll have the explanation for why proto-dna has glottalized plosives but uh proto but clink it has glottalized uh fricatives it comes from this uh this back a glide element perhaps and sometimes uh some incongruities in the nasal coda correspondences across both unisa and not janae and what appears to be cognates can be explained by interaction perhaps by interaction of the of the uh the glide element uh with the nasal okay and so uh so that's uh something that might explain quite a few things that seem to be in congruities in both language families and then let's go to a cognate that's proposed not by me first by by merit ruling uh over 20 years ago this birch bark that was a look-alike word i think this really is a cognate and if you reconstruct it this way it explains the tone in the nsa and it explains the vowel it explains why the onset is globalized and uh that can't be couldn't be explained before because sometimes the ungladolized in in a saiyan is cognate with the glob ungodlized in a and sometimes the ungladolized indian assailant is cognate with gladolized in not in a and this this new hypothesis helps demonstrate that so to summarize what does this glide hypothesis actually explain it explains in the nsa and the origin of phonemic tones origin of back unrounded vowels it explains the distribution of these circumfixes in castrend's documentation and it also explains what seemed to be a lot of irregularities in the cockpit correspondences so i think this is pretty firm um discovery and if you compare with nadine it's a speculative suggestion for the rise of globalized abstract phonemes and also for the split in plinkett between gladly's plosives um that came from the glide and gladly fricatives that came from the work line and so in janae and is saying the most important thing is that we have an explanation for why uh sometimes in a saiyan uh voiced corresponds to nadine uh glottalized sometimes to unglitalized and uh and so forth like that so the con the uh optional correspondences are much much better uh with an explanation for where these scatilization glycolyse phonemes come from and then there's a host of possible things could be explained in the vowels and the coda correspondences between the two families so i'm trying to move towards conclusion here and every language family that's been demonstrated and accepted has at least hundred cognate vocabulary i think the name is going to need more than that if it's going to be demonstrated and it has interlocking sound correspondences that are found in those cognates as well as a shared core of inherited grammatical morphemes and structural homologies yenisein has some of all of this but not enough and so i urge that it my conclusion is it's unproven but it's an increasingly promising hypothesis and the two choices of if there's a connection between the cats and the nagini peoples it could be 20 some thousand years or more ago i don't think that's recoverable from the uh from the um comparative method so the only possibility that we know would be that the language family is a mid-holocene family somehow connected with that new infusion of people from siberia into alaska about five thousand years ago and so stepping back it's interesting to look at how nadine language family was actually demonstrated you have um you have grammatical homologies that seem to strike the uh the linguist first and only after many decades of of reconstruction and work on sound correspondences by some of the best historical linguists in the world did you actually have a success in demonstrating the family using the comparative method and the nsan if it's related to nadine is in an order of magnitude older a few thousand years older there's going to be less evidence and so obviously you have to have really really good evidence that fully follows the comparative method for that to be um to be uh understand to be acceptable and i'm i'm i'm not there yet i i'm working on it so i want to apologize to my soviet and russian colleagues who've done so much especially in the nsa and descriptive linguistics and without them and without their prior work i couldn't have made any progress at all in this hypothesis and i also want to mention that there are other older hypotheses that insane is related to other old world language families and isolates but the um no one has been able to show that there's grammatical homologies between unisa and other old world families and so presumably the comparative method is not going to be able to be used to prove these relationships and if they exist they must be older than mid-policy and so that is why i didn't talk about them in this lecture and i should mention that it's even hard for russian people to get to the cat areas here we have the cats in one of the most isolated parts of the entire world area larger than france and germany that has maybe fewer than 30 000 people living in it entirely there's no roads or railroads within a thousand miles the russians only got there in about 400 years ago hunting for sable and most of the interior siberia is still part of the world's largest forest for me to get there i had to go days get there and back i had to go days on the innocent river on steamship and to ride helicopter in order to get to these villages and to work with some of the last native speakers of cat which is an enormous privilege because these speakers know more when they were child children then i would probably know after a lifetime of study but unfortunately only a few elders still speak cat and the children maybe understand a few words but don't speak it at all these villages are very isolated you can only get to them with the helicopter once a week and so i have such gratitude for the all of the russian colleagues and alaskan and canadian colleagues who have helped me on both sides of this comparison but the greatest uh the greatest uh uh thank you i think i have for the um the native speakers who have taught me cat uh so much and very difficult to get to them seven airplanes three trains river travel four and a half hour helicopter ride but uh that is the only place where we can hear cat language spoken so i know i went over time a tiny bit i apologize but i want to say that to see alaska also as to all of my colleagues across the continents and especially to native speakers who have helped me so much thank you so much for your attention well thank you very much professor vaida um i've got a a question um from will but i think it might be from jeff and so i've asked tech ops and and and jeff lear if they would uh if jeff would open up that zoom link and then tech ops could open him into this session so he could ask his linguistic questions but the first question i can read is um would a coastal migration be possible for pre not an a rather than a route up the yukon there's no evid for pre-non-denae i see it is possible i suppose uh that there was a coastal migration there's so little that is firmly known about the very first beginnings of nadine peoples when we look at the uh the separate branches of nadine we find that uh it looks like it's the interior close to the coast that seems to be um that the staging ground for the iac coming to the coast and also for the dna peoples to be spreading out throughout the interior of the continent and even the klingkit come to the coast presumably from up area in the interior so uh so my my estimation is that we should look for the interior rather than the coast as as the source of migration but it's um that's another hypothesis okay it's possible yes okay will you want to start asking some of jeff's questions until jeff gets on board sure yeah this is will geiger i've been text receiving texts from jeff lear as the presentation has gone along so um one was a a comment noting that the clinket suh and oh there's jeff is not to be related to the athabascan iac set which kraus suggested but but this is to be firmly rejected according to jeff i see right i think what he was was looking at is this um template here i don't know if you can see it can you see it on the screen or i'm i'm i guess i'm not sharing the screen but the uh the template that this classifier element um uh dr lear feels that it is as from a separate source than the uh the conjugation marker whereas mike krauss thought earlier about 20 years ago that it was just a metaphysized uh conjugation marker um so for for this comparison that i've been doing seems to work better if uh if the mike krauss idea was followed but once again like i said earlier in my presentation when it comes to interpreting not in a data i think i think jeff flair is the best person in the world to do that and so anything that i suggest that might be different than what he's already concluded that that should be taken with a big grain of bearing sea salt so yes but that but the idea was not just for me it was also from mike mike krause in that in that one instance yes so jeff if you unmute yourself you could proceed with your questions uh unfortunately i don't know how to turn off the um hi hi jeff we see you we see you very well and hear you as well so yeah but i'm getting two streams yeah i'm okay so can you ask your question yeah yeah but i'm getting two streams one from the zoom session and one from the youtube session it's it's going like that in my head uh anyway so what was the topic here well um jeff you've had a series of questions but maybe why don't we go ahead and let will answer yeah okay yeah okay so a few other questions um where did you get the gloss of belly for the um i guess this is proto-yenese instead of base right because it could be reconstructed as base as well going back to that cown word belly base it means both of those in yeah there's there are some languages that have both of those meaning either of those meanings and so um perhaps base would be a better way to uh to have the semantics for the proto form and not deny but both of those uh those uh those meanings you can find in uh in various not in a daughter languages and you can have the word base is also the meaning base is also in genesee for instance it's the snow sled the base of the snow sled in both both families niensen and nadine has it has this exact same word that sometimes means underbelly as well so um so does that answer that question probably a lot of these are beyond my uh grasp i'm just relaying the yeah the questions here now the final thing that was sent to me jeff says nice presentation but i have a real problem wrapping my mind around the hypothesis that a um cv wn could change to a c glottalized v n or the like i in unisa and that seems to be what had what happened because you have uh you have that tone oh by the way i should say that in insane that tone is not always an actual glottal stop it's simply a little bit of a stricture or a catch in the pronunciation of the vowel in the second phase of the vowel um so um it apparently from if you just look at the nsa and only this uh this back labia wheeler off glide seems to have turned into simply a stricture or a catch in the throat so you might have something like um something like cown and it became cut and instead of the one you just had a catcher almost a pause before you got to the end of the syllable and you need to say that it's fairly good evidence that that must have happened especially if you look at the vowel qualities in both cat and you as well as caught when we get to comparing all that in a saying reconstruction to nadine then of course we're into a realm of speculation uh uh when when we do that and so there you have to be a lot more work done on it but i just wanted to show in this presentation that uh some of the advances that i've succeeded in making in proto-insane reconstruction at least can have a hypothetical or speculative uh um comparison with the nadine that's at least interesting whether it turns out to be right or wrong we'll see but at least it's an interesting perspective that uh genocide gives and i think that when you're investigating a language family that might exist but has not been fully proven it's interesting when you have these serendipitous abilities of one language family to be used as external comparanda to explain something in the other language family that you can't quite see uh if you just look internally there and with yana saying and nadine there's a lot of that there's a very great deal of that some of it might be illusionary i think a lot of it is actually accurate and that's not proof the language families are related but at least it's a uh at least it's an indication that uh we're on the right track when when we're comparing and investigating yes those so is there any another question yep there is there's a couple more okay are there any unescn elements present as loanwords in the tungusik yakagir chukatko kamchakin for eskimo aleut families or in any other of the russian far east or northwestern north america there aren't any firmly established uh examples of um the languages of the extreme northeast of asia having borrowed words from unisane and proto-insane and also it's very possible that the peoples that live in the extreme north asia today are peoples who only got into that location later and presumably after this migration of siberians 5000 years ago into alaska so if that's the case certainly it's the case with the tungusk peoples who probably came from manchuria in the last 2000 years you wouldn't expect to see any kind of a substrate or a borrowing situation between the saiyans and and those people see simply because they came later into eastern siberia now the congusted peoples also came into the nsa river basin from the uh from the east and there are some tungusic borrowings into modern cat dialects that maybe are less than a thousand years old uh but that's very late thing like i said those ranger peoples all are recent newcomers to north asia and they came into north asia probably thousands of years after this migration into alaska 5000 years ago which human genetics does show occurred but you don't really have archaeological evidence that it occurred and uh whether it's connected with the language or or not is speculative as well but if the data that i'm showing you comparing dna nadine and yonessan is correct it's hard or maybe impossible to believe it could be tens of thousands of years old so that only other alternative would be that mid-holocene connection but i think that if you look at the languages there today in asia um northern asia they they came there later than this um movement of peoples into alaska 5 000 years ago and so even if that movement was connected with nadine languages or dna saying you wouldn't have any loanword uh evidence of that migration in the languages that are there today okay thank you another one is are nearby language roots all not in a for example um are nearby language roots yeah that's that's what it says are nearby language roots okay well basically the haida language i can't find any similar i can't find any evidence that haida could possibly be related to yena saying okay and as far as concerns haida related to to um klinket and the not-nay languages which is an old hypothesis i think a lot of that has already been explained as aerial influence as borrowing one way or another the tsimshan languages also completely different both the nadine as well as the nyan saiyan and so haida shinshan and the other first people's languages farther to the south they don't seem to have any kind of genealogical connection with either nadine and certainly not with uh yenisei i haven't found any kind of connection there um well uh professor thank you so much for accepting this invitation and i might have understood about 40 uh of the lecture well that's my fault but no it was very very exciting and it's exactly what you know what i was looking for and hoping for but one of the things that's really clear for to me and that is you know our people really want you know we're very desirous of knowing about our ancient history and i think we're one of the few native american groups that have you know that have supported uh dna studies have been really aggressive about the science to uh to learn about uh about our our past our history and um it occurs to me you know right now there are a lot of questions that i know that our people are asking because um in uh previo when we had the lecture by dr rapan you know um and and also by um um jim dixon you know there there's clear evidence that indigenous people were here in southeast alaska you know more than more than 10 000 years ago oh yes and then so we we have we have the genetic evidence we have archaeological evidence and now we have linguistic evidence that says well the language that we're speaking you know uh doesn't go back 10 000 years ago to here in southeast alaska but we also have other kind of hypotheses that there were you know an ancient group here in southeast alaska when uh when and this is my hypothesis that it was the eagles who came the eagles who came as representatives of the nod in a language when they came to southeast alaska they found an ancient population we don't know what language that you know that ancient population was speaking but my sense is right now from just because we have all of these questions i'm hoping that uh later in the year that uh you know when things are safe for us to get together that we might be able to convene a symposium and bring in you know some of the earlier speakers that we have to to talk about the dna evidence so talk about the archaeological evidence to talk about you know the ice age period the opening up of the ice and when population was um settlements you know were possible in southeast alaska and then even uh bringing in our our oral traditions about our ancient occupations and history and and so i'm hoping you know that we'll be able to have something maybe later in this fall and and have you come back again but i think it'd be worthy you know that we uh orchestrate it as a as as a seminar you know for a longer period and uh and that we are able to meet face to face because i know if i have questions i know our people are going to have a lot more questions and and i and i also want to be supportive of our some of our younger people i see that we do have some of our younger people who pose some of the questions and i know uh they have keen interest in it and so maybe we will be able to also cultivate some of our people going into these kinds of sciences so i just i wanted to say that for i know a lot of our people out there have a lot of questions and uh i want to let folks know that we do we are going to plan a session where we could all get together and then present all of the different kinds of evidence and and then see what we come up with but uh thank you so much for a great presentation well thank you i'm sorry we couldn't get uh jeff online uh you know i i know that would have been a worthy discussion for you to do to have well thank you so much i really appreciate the invitation and and a nice welcome and i would very much uh be eager to participate in a seminar or in more broad discussions that could take place there in in south west or southeast alaska if there's an opportunity in in the future when the world situation changes for that and i'm very very excited to to continue collaboration so thank you very much we might be even able to invite you know some people that would be complicated but why not try very good we have one more question okay we will um and it's what about turkic influence on the influence on cat from surrounding siberian languages seems to be a little bit more from the uh from the samayatik peoples that they exchange marriage partners with but there is influence of there is evidence of some layers of turkic influence that probably goes back even to the proto the nsaan era maybe a couple thousand years ago uh there are layers of loanwords in cot from southern turkic languages they're south siberian turkic loanwords so they're loanwords after the breakup of turkic so turkic did have some effect uh earlier on in the nsa and development but the cats went so far north that they were very far north of where any turkic speakers were probably for the last several hundred if not longer years and so the turkic influences earlier and it's not as substantial as as the um as the interaction with the cell coupes amitik peoples in the northern areas where the cats live today well thank you very much again professor vader very informative and and that someone one of the commenters said a deep dive but fascinating and that's cheese thank you so much i really appreciate this connection and i would be eager to continue it oh great thank you all shi invites viewers to return for our next lecture by professor marie lucy tarpon entitled the simcianic language family its ancestry and distant relatives which will be broadcast on thursday february 4th at noon we have a link below the youtube video for a survey we hope you will take a moment to complete this will help us to continue improving our lecture series and also allow our funders to measure the impact of the program shi has started construction of its arts campus in downtown juneau which will expand opportunities for education and art if you are interested in making a donation to the arts campus please visit see alaskaheritage.org campus thank you and see you on thursday

Channel: Sealaska Heritage Institute

Views: 749

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: tlingit, haida, tsimshian, alaska native, sealaska heritage institute, sealaska

Id: WloHVuZghWE

Length: 80min 0sec (4800 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 02 2021