[Music] so first off welcome everybody I'm amazed but not surprised that on a Friday evening at 7:00 p.m. we have almost a full house to listen professor biters speak I'm not surprised because I know how strong his fan base is this is the third time that ed is presenting as part of the CHS s deans lecture series and every time we have a full house my name is Paquita Evans I'm the Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Western and again I want to wish you welcome I'm gonna make very few remarks to introduce Professor Vita talk a little bit about the series and why we have this series in City Hall and then Edie will go on to his presentation I asked you to please hold questions until the end we should have 10 or 15 minutes for questions at the end we will bring the microphone to the audience so that you can ask you a question and it can be clearly heard and be part of the of the recorded part of the program so again you know thank you this is part of the fall CHS s deans lecture series this series is co-sponsored by the City of Bellingham and I want to thank the city and the staff present here today who helped us make these series a success quarter after quarter and year after year I also want to thank Susannah Glatz who she's either back there or still outside holding holding the fort our administrative assistant who has worked endlessly to make sure that everything ran according to plan so some of you may be regulars at the series and for some of you this may be the first time that you are that you're attending this series was initiated with a desire to be give back to our Bellingham community our intention is to showcase the different ways in which the study of the humanities and the social sciences and particularly the scholarly work and the research that is undertaken by the faculty in our college and the faculty a Western can help us better understand the world we live in it's past and present and helped us find solutions to some of the challenges and problems our world in our society face today today's lecture is a perfect example of this it is my great pleasure and my great privilege to introduce you to dr. adore vide dr. Vader has been a professor at Western Washington University in the department of modern classical languages and the now Department of linguistics since 1987 he teaches courses in introductory linguistics morphological theory historical linguistics Russian language and there is more folklore and culture and Eurasia nomadic peoples he's a living dictionary in her living encyclopedia and I can attest to that because I've known it since I first arrived at Western in 2002 and he never ceases to amaze me his research focuses on the language of northern the languages sorry of northern Asia and includes a regional field work with get a severely endangered language is spoken today only by a few dozen elders in the remote ENSA river basing and that's gonna be the focus of his talk today from 2005 to 2015 he was affiliated with a linguistics department of Max Planck Institute for evolutionary anthropology in Leipzig Germany where he proposed evidence the cat is related to the Nana Nadeem languages of North America the first widely accepted linguistic link between an old world in a new world language family this research has brought dr. writers work to the attention of national news outlets such as the New York Times as well as such well recognized scientific publications as nature he is also one of the very few faculty members at Western that has received both the Western Washington University's excellence of teaching award which he received in 1992 and the Paul Jay autumn distinguished research award in 2011 I can think of only one other faculty member at Western who has received both awards and I think that is testimony to what I know many of you know because many of you are colleagues and many of you are students current or former students of dr. writer of his excellence not just in his research but in his teaching as well and plus he's an all wonderful human being and with that I will let ed take the stage for those of you who just arrived there will be time for questions at the end Thank You ed Thank You spasiba [Applause] the largest forest in the world stretches across most of northern Asian it's called the Siberian taiga it's estimated that one out of every four trees on earth is located there it's a ton lungs of the planet even more so than the Amazon and inside of this enormous forest are some of the world's largest rivers right in the centre is the NS a river that flows for thousands of miles from the interior of inner Asia to the Arctic and along the middle reaches of the NSA are some of the most beautiful and unspoiled and unpopulated areas of the entire world the people who call this area their native home are called the cat people cat means person human being jegging in this language means that the people the tribe the group of people they are unusual in Asia they're the last hunter-gatherers and they know mirai's douaa thout any settlement until they were forced in the Stalin era to live in Russian style villages and this area where they live is probably overall as large as France and Germany combined this entire area of the middle ENSA probably has less than half the population of Bellingham this is an area that has no infrastructure per se there are no roads there are no railroads there is industry and railroads in southern Siberia there are new cities exploiting oil and natural gas in Western Siberia there's gold diamond uranium manganese mines in in Eastern but Central Siberia pretty much is similar to how it must have been 300 400 500 years ago still with a very small population and the cats are part of that population as the last hunter-gatherers of this area that kept people also speak a unique language that is very different from all other languages of northern Asia not related to any of the others and because that location where they reside has so isolated there was no scientific study of cat people until 1906 there was a brief expedition by anthropologists that took some notes on the cat cat lifestyle and then nothing again until 1927 1928 when a German Hans von diesen came from the Berlin Museum spent almost a year among the cats that was just when Josef Stalin was taking control fully in the Soviet Union and no other foreigner visited the cats for the rest of the 20th century so Hanson Dyson was the first and he was the last to study the cats and he most of these black-and-white pictures are either from a nutrient expedition or from the Hans von diesen expedition the color pictures are from mine that was in 2008 the cat people as DNA began to be studied it was found that cat people have a lot of very ancient North Asian DNA and they have distant DNA connections with all of the peoples at the native Americas but this is very very distant in the past we have are talking 20 or more thousand years they kept people according to the Russians who lived in the area they seemed and looked and their lifestyle was so different from the rest of the Asians their North Asians that local Russians called them sobieski indeed see Siberian Indians and in 1709 a Dutch Orientalist who had found out some information about the cat's he'd never actually traveled there even put out the hypothesis that they were somehow actually related to native american peoples maybe the cats were cousins who never went over into the americas so cat people of a commanded a lot of interest even though they were so so isolated and today the population who have at least some cat parentage is about 1400 but no one under the age of 70 speaks cat fluently at all and so there are fewer than three dozen speakers of the language all elderly one of the best speakers you see here you'll meet her again the cat people are inexorably connected with this ENS a river that is in the middle of the taiga and most of them live in Russian style villages on the River or on the tributaries that go into the river they're a lifestyle as recorded by finding and by Newton about a century ago started with Riverside living in the summertime and in the wintertime the cats broke up into family groups moved inland and each cat family group wandered in a particular part of the upland forest for their game with and and that's how they survived in very very cold up to 50 below zero on a regular basis in this area until the ice started breaking on the rivers again and then they made their way back to the river sides and exchanged marriage partners so larger groups of cat people would would congregate at this time and so this was the lifestyle the cats had no domesticated animals they had no reindeer at all historically so there were many many dogs in Siberia in the cat villages maybe three times as many as people when I when I visited there some were nice and some not so nice all of the other people for thousands of miles around were reindeer breeding tribes who had completely different languages as differences you could imagine and they hunted also like the cats but they had this extra extra insurance of domestic reindeer that they could eat if they hunting didn't go well the cats didn't have that so cat lifestyles precarious the thing that allowed the cats to survive even though the reindeer people were moving up was their affinity with the NSA River Ranger people in the last 2000 or so years took over all of Western Siberia the people related to the fins and the Sami our or people related to the Manchu and Tunguska people to event people took over all of eastern Siberia and only this area by the river of the NSA maintained original hunting-gathering people's some hunting-gathering people's also remained in the Pacific Rim because that area right next to the ocean was ideal for salmon fishing for sea mammal hunting but the peoples who lived on the Pacific Rim of what Russia were not related to the cat's in DNA or in language at all they're from a completely different origin or completely different origins so some of times the people who are not reindeer breeders of cattle breeders are called paleo Asiatic or paleo Siberians thinking that they were there earlier and that's probably true that's almost certainly true in the case of the cats the reason the cats didn't get assimilated by the reindeer breeders is that they lived on the margin of the NSA river that was very swampy that had tremendous clouds of mosquitoes in july it was not possible to have herd of reindeer there because the reindeer would suffocate from breathing so many mosquitoes in and you could not be outside in three weeks of July with exposed skin for fear of actually losing enough blood to to cost your life so this is a very difficult area to live in even in the summertime when it's not 50 below zero that cats had a solution sometimes they put bear grease on themselves in order not to be bitten by mosquitoes but that's only after you killed the bear the other solution was going down the tributaries of the USA in these unique houseboats that only the cats in Siberia had and then they got into the main yen sa put down an anchor and for the three weeks of the mosquito flying month they fished and the fish in the NSA and the tributary they say are some of the most delicious and nutritious in the world so the cats had a very good life that way and then after the mosquito season height was passed they would go back up the tributaries and start their lifestyle again going up land and then eventually back to the water and so the reindeer people lived in the Iraqi uplands mostly on the western side almost on the the eastern side of the NSA or farther into Western Siberia the cats survived in that margin swampy margin near the near the western side of the NSA Russians didn't get to this area until about five four hundred years ago and the the Russians are sent over his mercenaries the Cossacks in order to fight with Tatars who were menacing the frontier and the Russians discovered sable for huge amounts of sable for another fur in Western Siberia and it was a gold rush the black gold that brought this I the Russians into Siberia permanently were the furs that they could get rich by either hunting or getting native peoples to hunt them for themselves and the Cossacks are people who ran away from the Russian landlords and lived alike steppe nomads on the no-man's land between the Russian state ruled by Moscow and the Tatar Mongol States that had survived since the time of King his Han conquests the Tatars eventually were all conquered by the Russians the last Tatars were conquered by your MOC that opened up Siberia for Russian penetration and the Cossacks went quickly across Siberia from one tributary to the other in less than a hundred years they were already on the Pacific and they had to pay for tax to the Czar and they extorted furs from the native peoples they took hostages from all the reindeer tribes and made the Ranger tribes bring furs twice a year in order for the hostages to have good treatment and the cats ran away from the Russians they hid from the Russians and on Russians probably didn't even know they were there except when they were going down the river they could see the firelight in the distance that maybe was some encampment and the cats tried to avoid the Russians as much as possible nevertheless the the people that lived south of the cats the relatives who spoke related language to the cats they succumbed to Russian exploitation Russian fur tax Russian diseases accidentally brought in from Europe and all of them became extinct only the northernmost group of cats that were in the most isolated area was the ones that survived into the 20th century and yet the the cat and its extinct relatives form an actual family and we have important information about the extinct languages from early linguists and adventurers who took notes on these peoples that eventually succumbed to the Russian presence in Siberia the area where the cats lived was so isolated that at the beginning of the 20th century about 800 miles to the east of it some kind of comet fragment exploded over the taiga on the on the mountain Tunisia and it leveled an enormous area probably larger than what is Whatcom counter at least Westermarck Cook County all of the trees almost were knocked down by this huge blast and it was so isolated that only one person was killed the cat people actually heard the explosion it was a bright sunny day when it occurred but that gives you an idea of how isolated this area was our even in the 20th century and the area only 20 years later people could get to it to actually take photographs of what had happened another piece of trivia the young revolutionary Joseph Stalin Joseph Joe Garvey Lee yeah hadn't started calling himself Stalin at this time in the three years before the Revolution that overturn overthrew these are he was considered very dangerous revolutionary he'd been exiled to westernmost Siberia but he had escaped so he was exiled to the most impenetrable Park the northern yen sa by the Arctic Circle near were some of the cat tribes nomads iced and he spent that time there until the Tsar ISM collapsed and then sailed up the NSA to the trans-siberian railroad in off into history to become the most powerful man in the 20th century so here is a map that summarizes what I've shown you here's the middle huge River through the taiga the NSA and it's tributaries are mostly on the eastern side hilly drier that's where Ranger tribes succeeded the cats live on the margin mostly on the eastern side where it's very swampy and very mosquito infested then people's related to the fins and the Sami live in farther into Western Siberia and their reindeer people here's where the Tunguska explosion actually occurred so it's not that far from where they kept people live today and this is where it kept people live still today most of all than almost all the native speakers if not all the native speakers live in this area today but history caught up with central siberia history caught up with the cats the Soviet revolution first lenin and then stalin brought tremendous changes to all of the peoples in even the most remote areas of northern asia and joseph stalin in the 1930s decided to collectivise all of the nomadic people's make them live in Russian style villages prevent them from nomads izing around and so the cats were rounded up and forced to live in Russian style villages the cat children were taken away from their parents and forced to go to Russian style school to learn about Lenin and Stalin and communism but all in Russian and so beginning in the 1930s and especially in 1940s and 50s children didn't learn native cat they learn native Russian and children just like in America and in Canada were punished for speaking their own native language in these boarding schools so that was the beginning of the end of not only the cat language but of most of the languages of northern Asia which are almost all severely endangered today the cat area was so isolated that Joseph Stalin really didn't get around to building concentration camps there they were mostly in European or in southern Siberia or in certain strategic parts of the Pacific or the Arctic where there were a lot of natural resources that were able to be exploited by slave labor but the cats were not in one of those areas the NSA was used as a dumping ground for some unwanted groups of people but by and large there was not any big influx of people into this area even during the Soviet times when the people were being pushed into all sorts of very remote areas of the rest of northern Asia one of the people that had been exiled to the gulag by Stalin and then in internal exile was a doctor on the NSA River was a man named uremic renovage and he became one of the early scholars of the cat language and he wrote a book in 1968 that earned him his dissertation doctoral degree called the verb of the cat language and this verb is amazing nothing like any other Asia every verb according to him was irregular and so it was of real is a really interesting difficult book to get through and so here's some examples so you have three verbs that have very similar meanings depending on how long you stay when you go down to the riverside which is a very important part of the cat lifestyle one of them has this unusual consonant in a particular way to mark the subject the other one marks the subject twice and has other consonants that are not in in the first verb and the third one has a yeah a different way of marking the subject using two different prefixes and then some other consonants that are inexplicable you don't understand why they're there so there was mystery upon mystery almost every verb form it was some kind of a mystery in 1968 that was very hard to crack the second person who became a great scholar of the cat language was also in exile the entire people of Volga Germans were exiled from the Volga River where they had a republic in the 1930s to Siberia and they were just dumped on the banks of the yen si in the fall and they had to dig holes in the ground to survive the winter half of them died the first winter when I went in 2008 there was still some women in there in 80s who remembered being exiled by Stalin to this area who were still Germans and they they were they were overjoyed to find someone who was from outside the country that they met this man and raised a son was a famous scholar and he was not repressed he was allowed to study at Tom's pedagogical university and in 1955 he started making expeditions to the cat areas and for every year until he died in 1973 he made expeditions and he wrote a big grammar of the cat but he himself didn't solve the verb either he only added more forms that were and were unexplicable so there were these books about cat language but they didn't answer even the most basic things about the language one thing that turns on did was that he mapped out all the little river names all through Central Siberia and southern Siberia and the people who live there the Ranger people and the horse people who lived in these areas who spoke completely unrelated languages they had adopted the river names from the cat people who lived on those rivers in the summertime and so the cat words and the related unison words for area about a third of the size of the United States is covered with the NSA in language river names and the zone showed that and the collection of folklore showed that the cat people had beliefs had traditions that there are people had come from far to the south they were chased by someone called t-stat who no one knows what it is Killick kids that chased them more to the north and Killick kids are the kyrgyz turks who were there over 1500 years ago in this area so we're starting to get a little bit of understanding of Khepri history of where kept people lived before the Russian fur tax collectors got to this area and the student of doors on who had been exiled as a Volga German when he was just six years old he wound up also carrying on this tradition hi new governor Guinea - cat's paw th-the a denier in Russian and spent his whole life until the Soviet Union collapsed he emigrated to Germany but he discovered something that nobody else had discovered in the 1970s that the cat language seemed to have tones you could have the same word with the same consonants and vowels and it meant something different if you rose the tone or lowered the tone like Chinese no other language in northern Asia had such a feature so other linguists didn't agree with him but so few linguists had visited the cats no one from North America had ever visited the cat link the linguist at any rate that day was not clear during 1980s when things started loosening up the Russian ization of the minority started to loosen up and the Russian government allowed textbooks to be written and Henri Verner was the one who authored these textbooks in collaboration with native speakers of cat here's one of the cat textbooks and they started to try to teach cat language in that cat schools that same one where the cat language was killed by the Russian ization program I showed you earlier but it was already too late not only did the kids not hardly know any kept their parents didn't know it and even sometimes their grandparents no cat and the area was very economically depressed and there wasn't a community to support this and so the cat language lessons really didn't there much get off the ground it was learning like a second language cat a little bit and so they did not produce any new generation of native speakers at all so how did I get into all of this I got my degree from University of Washington in studying Slavic linguistics Russian linguistics and I started my research on Russian language but there were so many fantastic Russian linguists and Russian language had been so well described there wasn't much for someone like me to do and in the library of Western Washington when I got here in 1987 1988 1989 I got very interested in all the books on Mongolia on inner Asia on northern Asia and one time when I was in the library I thought I heard someone call my name and nobody calls me that except my family so I probably heard something you know somewhere in library but I went to investigate and I ran into this shelf of books on Central Siberia that cat books the ones I showed you and I got very interested in what is this language and what is this that how language has every verb irregular no one can decide if there's tones in this language I was thinking this is more interesting than some Russian suffix that everyone has studied for a hundred years so gradually I retooled myself to get interested in Siberia and three unresolved questions really caught my interest in the early 1990s does the cat really have tones could that be and what are they how do they work and how this verb system work it's not possible that every verb in a language could be irregular children couldn't possibly learn it there has to be a system and finally if no language in northern Asia is related to cat could there be a language somewhere else that's related to cat that was a really interesting question as well there had been numerous attempts to link cat with languages all across the world Basque Sumerian languages of the Caucasus a language in northern India called borovsky Chinese and then finally one Native American language family called Madan a that contains klinken and Navajo and about thirty other languages one linguist in the early 20th century Italian linguist fado trombetti had noticed that to the Navajo word an Athabascan word for people was the name and the cat word for people is ding and he thought that was evidence that they were related and that was his entire evidence so nobody believed that but it was intriguing so when I started studying cat I had already studied Navajo language and I'd stayed klinken some as well I really started noticing parallels that I thought must be a coincidence but I kept noticing more and more so I got very interested in that and finally the first question we'll leave that I was able to get from western thank you Western I was able to actually go to first Germany I met Heinrich verenor the author of the language textbooks and the discoverer of the tones and I also met a native speaker of God I think I was the first english-speaking linguist to meet a native speaker ever of cat who was visiting him in Germany he was doing some research she's a speaker of central ket and we all did a lot of work together got to be friends then I went on further and I spent the winter in Siberia now is the first linguist to be able to work in Tomsk in and residues owns a lot a library that had immense amount of cat language material I was not able to go up to where the cat people lived even though it was close it was only 1500 miles away but I couldn't get there is no way to get there at that time I was 40 degrees every day below zero and in this city it was difficult living situation for me but a wonderful exposure to the scholars hood and also the material that they had collected in the last 30 years and Siberia is a Siberia's a place where everyone is really tough and everyone is rugged and everyone is healthy because everyone else is already dead but I was not so rugged and it was really difficult for me to make a survival of this winter one time when I was asleep the heat failed in the the building arise living and I woke up this horrible earache and it was because my ear was literally freezing the ear that wasn't on the pillow and I had to completely get in you know close and I wound up sleeping on the floor of the love the the library the cat library in the Institute for a few days until they the heat got fixed but I survived and that was the most important thing and really I found out that Siberia was not only cold well first of all you might think Oh global warming might be really good for Siberia but it's not it's really bad not just for Siberia but for the whole world because diseases are gradually moving north that couldn't survive before and there are ticks that live in southern most Siberia and they never made it up to the cat areas because it was too cold and two years ago they did and those ticks that have encephalitis and also there are bark beetles and other things and the melting of the permafrost causes some forests to die because of waterlogged soil during the springtime so there are all sorts of problems even for Siberians in Siberia for even a few degrees warmer but Siberia I found out was not only cold it was cool and I decided I wanted to go back and so I decided I needed to get into shape and so I created my own personal Eurasian fitness program three things eat in moderation because if you get used to eating a lot and not to be able to do that all the time and get accustomed to majorly sharp changes in temperature and so I gradually got used to taking cool showers cold showers freezing icy showers going from really hot to really cold and actually enjoying it and getting really used to that and since I've done that I've never got a cold again and I tell people if you take a cold shower every morning you'll be very healthy and you won't get out to colds a year like you do and they tell me I would rather have the cold then finally I devised the intense exercise program so you know you have to do sometimes intensive movements and you've got to be in shape it can't knock your immune system off and so I took the Royal Canadian Air Force system of exercise and I do it every day do my own version of it every day and it works out good so the next time I went said bear I was totally prepared for everything and so after that first professional leave after all of this work I did in Siberia trying to meet every single living person who had ever studied the cats and I did practically I wrote a book about all of the previous research that had been done on this family and on these people I had masked an entire library of just about everything that was available and it's I have the best cat library in my house in my first floor of my house today so that's how I started my study of cat and I'd only met one cat person so far when I did that but my research got unto the attention of Bernard Comrie who was also interested in northern Asian he invited me to his linguistics department in Max Planck Institute evolution anthropology in Leipzig Germany where he was there I met him in 1998 there but I got invited again during my second professional leave and so I was able to go from Max Planck again to southern Siberia and native cat people went from southern Siberia to Tomsk it took me very little time to get from from Germany to southern Siberia took them a month and a half to get from the cat village to to where I was in southern Siberia but we spent a month and a half intensive Lee working on cat language and I learned how to speak it thanks to them during this period of time and while I was there I had to also teach linguistic courses in in the University and they gave me free room and board and allowed me to use the Fabri tori there and that's why I'm dressed in this ridiculous way here when you do fieldwork you're usually not having a tie on okay so so this was wonderful I got a huge amount of language data from these fantastic native speakers well tell you more about and Max Planck even brought one of the native speakers to Germany and she worked intensively with not only me but some of my call who are interested in Siberia during 2006 so that was fantastic and as a result of this work multinational work that was also Germans and Russians and myself I was able to publish a grammar of cat with the description of the tones and also description of the verb that fairly well made sense at that time my colleague and friend Stefan Garak published a descriptive grammar also using the same system I'd worked out for the verb and but his grammar frankly is better than mine it's bigger and better so that's the best grammar so far I've kept the descriptive grammar by Stefan this is a littler one there but these were new descriptions that got people to see the language all across the world that hadn't had access to it from those earlier books and so in 2008 I presented preliminary evidence using what data I had gained and the comparative material from Noddin a languages Kalinka Dafa baskin including navajo that jana saying was indeed there's evidence that it's related to this one particular Native American language family not to any of the others just to this one and that was in February 2008 Noddin a family itself had not been entirely proven to be valid because some people thought Haida language was related to it now almost in all linguists agree that heíd is completely unrelated it's an isolate but clink it all linguists now agreed it is fully related so this is a language family an old language family no one knows exactly how old at this time because we can't gauge how old language family is by just linguistic data because language changes faster or slower we don't have a carbon dating for language that's one of the many things linguists just can't do so this language family was accepted one side when I put the DNA material out with the NSA and not all linguists accepted DNA and is saying but all linguists at least accepted Noddin a as a proven family at that time in this configuration so I started working with our geologists anthropologists folklorists and geneticists trying to figure out how this language connection could possibly have a parallel in the actual history of migrations in the actual DNA relationships between people that could be measured in modern populations and this is something I continued for the past ten years and Max Planck was able to sponsor an actual expedition where I could go not only to southern Siberia where I had been already several times but all the way up to the place where the kept people live and that happened in that same year 2008 and that was not on us about Akal I had to teach my summer school and the next day I got on the trip and I came back the day before I had to teach fall okay and so this was this crazy trip that was on something like six planes three trains including the trans-siberian railroad and finally a four and a half hour helicopter ride to actually get to where they kept people live and this is a railway station I met my colleague who also worked at Max Planck who had as a Russian who was born in Siberia and was studying cat he's studying that the syntax of the language I studied that the words and the phonology in the history of the language so he and I were the linguistic core of this expedition and he he helped rent the helicopter and so forth like that so this helicopter brought us to the cat areas but the helicopter only goes to those villages once a week for half an hour and so all the supplies that the village of 342 people need or maybe they don't need is stuffed in that helicopter along with passengers and so the helicopter was over full and it would not get off the ground and so that the pilot was taking things out the merchants were putting them back in there was almost a fistfight so the helicopter tried to take off still overload it and it took a hundred yards towards the the wall of spruce trees part of that tie guy I told you about and it just barely rose up in time to miss them so I was looking out the window and we miss the spruce trees by about three feet and so that was my first brush with death on that expedition and flying on the helicopter most of tons of square miles of Central Siberia look like this there's nothing there except for swamps and trees and mosquitoes you see the haze of mosquitoes in some of these photographs and the village where the largest surviving number of cat speakers was on a tributary on the western side of the NSA called villa GUI which means curved river and it took a long long time on this helicopter going past areas that had never shown any evidence of human habitation ever except for reindeer breeders moving through them maybe to get to actually where the cat village was and this is the helicopter taking off at the end of our expedition and that's the dust that the helicopter took off but when we were coming to the village it looked like this to is just on the other side and so yellow core Kellogg village is the curved river village has nothing to do with cereal and so this the only a small number of people are fluent in cat who live in this village and I stayed with someone I knew already here in this part of the village here's the boarding school where the cat was murdered by the Soviets and then here is where they tried to resurrect it in the 1980s and 90s with new textbooks already too late the kids all spoke Russian by that time so this is what the Siberia looks like and everywhere from 800 miles on any direction there's not a single road there's not a railroad within a thousand miles of this place the only way to get there is by river or by helicopter there's only one place in this entire area larger than France and Germany combined where a fixed-wing plane can land only one town that that is there that and we drove we flew up there and then got the helicopter from there the third and last person on the expedition was Union Union efficient Dyson who came for - well three reasons she was an expert photographer she took a lot of these beautiful photographs that we see here but the real personal reason she wanted to go is that she was the granddaughter of Hans von diesen the the first and the last foreigner to visit the cats in the 20th century in the night yeah 20th century that was her grandfather who wrote this book on shamanism from his stay among the cats and so she wanted to travel in his footsteps and go there and she was also a student of religion religious studies and she wanted to under Stanmore about cat shamanism that her grandfather had written so much about but but when we were in the cat villages we didn't find much about shamanism we found that the every cat family had preserved these these spirit images that were carved from the living piñon pine wood of trees growing in in this area of siberia people could eat the nuts of these trees and every family had them and they passed it on to the youngest son eldest son had to carve a new set for himself these guarded the family they protected you could curse people with them you could ask questions of the future with them there's stories and stories about the olives but this has survived even into the 21st century but shamanism did not survive the last practicing so the shaman was died in the 1970s and this is actually his son who is not a shaman who's who's showing the costume for my my friend Jaime governor who took this photograph speak people in 20th century in the Soviet period have to do closeted shamanism they couldn't be legally outside doing shamanism it was suppressed so shamanism gradually died out and the kept people most of them were okay that they didn't have shamans because they were sort of scared of the shamans the shamans could fly through the air and look down the smoke all of your teepee at night to see what was going on and that's a privacy issue so the cat people were okay they didn't have shamans they had doctors now but the word for shaman in cat has the roots in and that's the words Henken is the word root meaning heal by singing and it's in all that the UH nastain languages and all the nod innate languages to share this this word this root and no other languages do so that shamanism was very interesting the cat shamans we we didn't find much new because the Soviet ethnography had already discovered a lot of this but shamans originally had 21 years and every three years they got a new drum a bigger drum when they got more and more adept and so great shaman was very rare who practiced for 21 years they had the largest drums in Siberia and shaman costume had penned in that had who had sacred meaning animals like otters or loons that went between the water and the air were considered to be sacred and helping the shaman go from the living world to the spirit world in their quest of power and also in their quest of healing souls who had wandered off into the Otherworld dragonfly was the strongest kind of shaman that also eats mosquitos by the way dragonflies that was a powerful summer shaman pendant and only a shaman who was born in the summer months could wear that that particular pendant the Ioannina Finn Dyson was very interested in finding more about shamanism but there was no more shamanism and the grandson of the original shaman the son of this man who's who's showing the costume of his father had become a Christian and he refused to speak anything about shamanism so Unida had a little bit harder time finding out what she wanted to learn but from from the population about shamanism as a result of that she's probably thirty years too late but everyone liked her she took fantastic photographs now I should tell you that Yanina should have stuck to Siberia and mosquitoes because she was captured in her religious studies by Isis a few years ago spent almost a year in captivity and wrote a book about it and and so I had lost contact with her and I only found that out this this past year I haven't been in contact with her since so if you may have heard that name elsewhere has nothing to do with Siberia also we were trying on this expedition to to to look at the material culture of the cats and so we did that as much as possible but Nate so Russian scholars had already done that they described that sketch sky-god of the cats and the evil witch that lived in the north and swallowed people's souls who said them and also the shaman and culture hero who had driven her up north and led the cats north into their present home and burnt up the evil witch and from her burning blood cinders grew the mosquitoes of the taiga that story is only among the cats and among peoples of northwest North America it's not found anywhere else in the world so there were stories about that and stories about a good goddess in the south who lived in the mountains where the cats had come from she waved her feathered cape and the feathers became the ducks and geese who saved the cats from starvation in the early springtime by migration and her sacred insect was a dragonfly the most important thing we were doing of course was a language and most of the cat speakers were very elderly some of them are fantastic and very good health and so those last few dozen we tried to do field work with and here's main street cat village the these woman's be kept really well her daughter does not but understands that in the grandson only knows a few words and is not comfortable trying to speak them because the elders criticize so the young children at first I didn't think knew any cat at all but then it turns out that the boys knew all the body part terms and they were speaking them with the correct tones so there is a little ket with the youth but nobody would make a sentence from younger people the women who were grew up with native cat before the Russian ization they were very very old they're already in their 80s just a few of them left and she spoke fluent cat even though she was younger because she had lived her whole even though she went to the boarding school she'd lived her whole life with her mother who spoke only cat and they communicated every day and so she managed to to learn the language and she told me stories about hiding under the bed with other cat children and speaking at where the teachers couldn't hear this woman ran away from the boarding school when she was seven with another girl and the other girl froze to death she joined her family in the taiga and Noma dies drowned and avoided that entire experience she's very fluent in cat knew the hunting practices knew all the spirituality of the tribe and was invaluable expert consultant and we tried to go with the cat people and do they every day cat things in the forest and try I tried a little thing in my my sock where I would write things down when they were talking because I could understand a lot of the cat and I wouldn't over here new words when we were doing things like hunting or berry picking and so forth like that this woman was fluent in cat she had been blind since she was in her 30s but she was ill when I was there I wasn't able to work with her her daughter spoke cat but didn't feel comfortable doing so and so one of the things that we managed to do was to get two or three kept people together who didn't feel comfortable speaking on their own because they're not sure if they remembered it correctly but if they had somebody together with them who would confirm that they remembered it they would be very happy with that and so so with a lot of the people who we thought were semi speakers actually we were able to speak quite a bit and we got a huge amount of language data but there were all sorts of difficulties this whole thing was a roller coaster because every day we'd find new discoveries and then there would be some kind of terrible thing that would happen Yanina fell ill with some kind of illness and had 105 degree temperature so running around trying to get antibiotics we managed to succeed in doing so but you had to be careful where you went because some of the dogs would actually attack you if you came too close to their their fence and people had everyone has guns and lots of alcoholism in this area there was a lot of unsolved murders in this area and one time when I was going around a house and in the evening somebody else was coming around the other house that had a gun with them and we surprised each other and that person raised the gun and fired it right into my chest but it was unloaded so that was good and so you Nina gets well from the antibiotics but our main host is Valentina his name is ting D Langan ket she gets very ill and we're afraid it was appendicitis she was very very ill and then we was thinking to just stop the expedition take helicopter special helicopter very expensive to come it still take a day or two but she got better that went away and so what happened was we wound up taking her on the helicopter we paid for her to come on the helicopter to the river the main river where they had a hospital it turns out she's starting to get gall stones that was what that was all about but that I thought the expedition was already over by that period of time because that village where 600 people live you see a there there was one cat family there who had a native speaker the father is a native speaker and he had run away from the boarding school and hid under an uprooted tree for two days before going back into the forest with his his uncle and aunt he knew everything he knew all the names of plants all the names of animals all the names of fish and insects and I'd studied this for two years before going on the expedition and most of the cats and the Russians they didn't know it even in Russian let alone in cat these words he knew everything and I was able to get all that information probably the last person on earth so that was extremely successful portion of the of the expedition and then it was time for us to leave we left on the last boat on the last day of August going down for days on the all going up the river for days before we got to a town that actually had a road and railroad that connected us to the outside world so that was the end of the expedition and had to do everything backwards to get back to teach in time including giving a talk in Leipzig since that expedition we worked and put out almost a thousand page cat dictionary so all the modern cat words are available to all of the scholars but still I was interested in these questions where did the cat tones come from how did the verb structure develop and how convincing is this evidence for denying is saying how much how much of this evidence could I gain new that would make that hypothesis better and it's very hard to demonstrate a language family you can get a word list that looks alike but that could easily be coincidence you have to have the consonants and vowels match up in the different words you have to have them interlocking lis corresponding that's a lot harder to do unless the languages descent from a common origin then that is how they are structured you have to find those patterns finally you have to find how the whole grammatical system shared by the two languages come from a common system and only when you have all three of these things do you start convincing other linguists that there's something to this hypothesis I would say there's a fourth criterion and that is that if you really do have a true hypothesis the comparison between the separate language families should illuminate some new understanding of the evolution of the different grammatical and phonological patterns in each individual family that just naturally happens if the languages are action related but I think that the skeptics like my friend Lyle Campbell should get more credit than they are due because they keep linguists to the grindstone of really showing the real evidence in something that's not really a fully completely hard science where all linguists always agree on the same thing there's differences of opinion so the cat tones they really exist here are they there is high even boy and then there's the abrupt party boy and that's the same consonants at vowels but they mean completely different things so they form what are called minimal pairs and it's not understood where these tones come from but if you compare them with Noddin a languages you can understand this stone comes from a consonant in the middle that fell out and this one comes from what is called a kissing consonant a fricative that was at the end of the syllable that fell out caused the tone to fall these two more interesting the high even tone comes from when in the ancestral language you have a catch in your throat and that caused the the pronunciation to be higher and be more long and when you didn't have that catch in your throat and you didn't have the other features then you get the second tone the abrupt stone so you can actually see cognates between y'know sane languages in and not Danae languages that shows systemic sound correspondences between tones between vowels between consonants but it's very easy to do very bad historical linguistics it's very easy to make mistakes because in 2008 I thought these were also cognates that obeyed my rules it turns out I was wrong they were wrong their coincidences those have cognates some other way I didn't understand all of the sound rules 10 years ago and the verb also this crazy kept verb is a possible that had all these prefixes every language for mm Mars has only suffixes and Kent has all these prefixes I was able to show that there is a template every single one of the supposedly irregular verbs fits this template each of these slots do particular thing and I was able to show different conjugations using different slots and so it became possible to write a dictionary and we use this system in the dictionary that we published and then it turns out that those slots are also in Navajo and in clink it in nada nee languages they have the same types of prefixes the same system the same cognate morphemes pieces of words that that come from the same common origin and in nada nee languages there's these prefixes called classifiers that is inexplicable know their language in the Americas have it and by comparing with the NSA and you could see where those prefixes originated you could see where they caught those those cognate pieces of the word are still present in the NSA and even they do something else so it was able to show where both the unassigned verb and not the nay verb come from a common shared grammatical structure and that I published some of the data in this book on poly synthesis a poly synthetic word is a verb that is a whole sentence the meaning is a whole sentence and cat has it but many Native American languages have it but nada nein and the same have the same origin of the same kind of poly synthesis so I wrote some chapters in that and for the past 10 years and it's not published I'm trying to get the origin of every single cat word every single one where it comes from what it used to look like thousand a couple thousand years ago and that is a work in progress that's still going on and I published some of the latest two findings correcting some of my earlier mistakes showing some new things just a few years ago but the big question was not answered yet how could it be possible that a language of native North America spoken by America first peoples who had come there over 14,000 years ago could possibly be related to a language in Asia and the relationship could still be shown language has changed so quickly that after 8 or 9,000 years you really can't show that they're related there's not enough evidence left most linguists believe that's true something you can show earlier so what would be the parallel in archaeology in genetics and for this language connection it seemed like it was impossible it seemed like science fiction even though it looked good linguistically so for instance also it's even worse than it looked on paper because we also know that the people who came into the Americas 14,000 years ago I'd spent a lot of time in northern Asia not contacted with other people in Asia the so called der engine standstill so the kept people are related to all of them but it's at a distance deeper than 25,000 years that's two or three times as deep time as you could possibly hope to show the kinds of things that I show with tones and with verbs it's just not science fiction to think that could be that old that was a real problem and so what was known say five years ago is that all the first peoples have ancestors who came over 14 or so thousand years and we call those first peoples of the Americas then about five thousand years ago there's a second migration from Asia from Siberia these people are called the paleo Eskimos even though that's a disfavored term not used anymore for modern peoples but it's because it was assumed that they since they populated the Arctic were the ancestors of the modern you pick and into it and maybe Aleut peoples and so there was nobody who came over in that intervening 10,000 years that might fit Denis honest and and so it looked like Nanae and saying although it looked very promising logistical it was impossible then fortunately for me a Russian linguist Pavel Engel on top went to the cat areas where I showed you he got DNA samples of the cats his laboratory were on a full genome of the cat DNA and he found something really surprising that no one expected that the cat a component of the cat DNA is closely related to those paleo Eskimos who came into the Americas 5,000 years ago not 14,000 not 25,000 but the problem was that the if they are the ancestors of the Inuit no you pick the Inuit and you pick the so-called Eskimo languages are so radically different than cat nobody believes they could possibly be related so the DNA was in the wrong group of native peoples okay and so I got the crazy idea when I read this research that maybe there was some of that migration 5,000 years ago went into the Noddin a speakers maybe then not in the language was brought in and maybe not any speakers have some of this that hasn't been discovered yet so I wrote to Pavel flag on top Pavel Ganta the very same day wrote me the same thing and we we asked each other to work together at the same time not knowing we were asking each other so we became very close working it's very easy to show how the ancestors of those people who came in 5,000 years ago came from Central Siberia not far from where the cat people and then the place names show where they used to live that was known but what was not known is how what did those people have to do the nod in a novel started studying it and he has new techniques to find minority components in populations and that result came out in June the 5th in the journal Nature which I participated in and pavol showed that the that DNA that came in from Siberia Central Siberia 5,000 years ago it came into the founding population of the Noddin a people so they're not Danai people some of it went into the Arctic some of it became part of the founding population of the Noddin a people so all nod na speakers the Navajos who came south the ones who stayed in Alaska the ones who are in Canada they they all have that DNA and no other first peoples have it just them the one that's closed that's connected with the cats and so I got together in the last couple years to write a book jointly with an expert on you pick and Inuit people to try to show how to radically different language families might have been brought in 5,000 years ago by this so-called paleo as the paleo Eskimo migration that's in in publication right now not out yet but what has come about as a result of this new multidisciplinary research is that the DNA that's in all the non Danai speakers you can coalesce and predict exactly how old it was before it started breaking up it's about four thousand six hundred to four thousand one hundred years old that's a plausible age depth for that language family and then the people came over five thousand years ago it's plausible that they could have brought that and the Noddin a people have dual ancestry some from Siberia some from first peoples much older and the connection of the DNA from Siberia that coalescence age of that is six thousand seven hundred to five thousand nine hundred years so it's right in the exact kind of time depth that we could have the kind of evidence that I've shown for Danae and is saying so this doesn't add any proof that DNA in the same logistic hypothesis correct it only shows that it's not impossible only linguistic evidence can show language families are related but at least it's no longer science fiction and so what we find is that possibly Noddin a if it's truly related to cat and the you begin to value sometimes God s collude families these families came in five thousand years ago all of the other Native American families must have came in their ancestors 14 or more thousand years ago after being in the Bur engine stencil for even longer and probably will unless we have a new striking thing discovered we won't find evidence that they were relatable linguistically to peoples in the old world not only did the two language families separate however Noddin a language from Siberia Siberian language from the mid Holocene comes in to Native American Native America is famous for having languages that have different kinds of verbs for whether something is rigid or long or round or living or nonliving so to say something is lying down in modern Navajo you have 14 ways to say it depending on what what it's shaped like that's called class of a Kotori verbs this is very common all across the Americas not in nadie it's also there but the branches of nadie innovated it differently radically differently from borrowing from neighboring languages and the core the verbs that mean to stand and to lie or to be rigid those are cognate with cat but this system was developed under accommodation of borrowing from Native American languages and back in Siberia we have the crazy prefix verb that's unrelated to anything in the Siberia but the native cats had married people for centuries from these other tribes and gradually the verb started to be pronounced like it had suffixes and a comma dated itself to the surrounding languages as well and so seeing the common origin in DNA and a sane and then seeing the relationship with the unrelated neighboring languages through the last several thousand years explains a huge amount of things that otherwise couldn't be explained in both language families so last two slides I have something to confess to you I collude with Russians and I have done so for nearly four decades and planned to continue in the future the Russians have been wonderful shared freely some of these Russians studiers of cat are really heroes and really difficult situations without their work and without their help there's no way I could have made any impact or got to the cat areas and so I'm deeply grateful to them and I should also say that we're not for these political differences were it not for this cold war on the ice curtain that separated Alaska from North Asia for nearly a century Russians would have studied native languages of the Americas which they almost never did Americans would have studied North Asian languages which they hardly ever did and probably someone would have come up with stun a and a sayin connection much much earlier I think I have to think that my brilliant colleagues in Russia Germany and Alaska would have come up with these things if they had had access to all of these data's earlier but the real thanks to have to go to the native consultants the experts this elderly last generation of speakers of a language that's getting ready to become extinct they're the ones for it without them we would have no science in Russia or America of cat language studies they're the real names and the people who should be remembered in in connection with this language family and it's their language that United these two continents and so with that I will end the discussion and it's eight o'clock and if you have questions I guess we can get to them at afterwards thank you very much keep them up [Music] [Applause]
