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YENISEIC AND THE SIBERIAN LINGUISTIC AREA

STEFAN GEORG

It certainly strikes even casual observers that the Yeniseic languages Ket, Yugh and Kott are typologically quite odd when looked at against the background of (Northern and Central) Eurasian languages. In this ocean of relative typological uniformity – at first sight only, of course, and only if one is content with a bird’seye view – Yeniseic languages give the impres- sion of an island, which seems to have withstood large-scale trends, which might have swept the continent, possibly repeatedly, over the millennia. Thus, phonemic tone, one of the hallmarks of Ket and Yugh phonology, is completely absent in all neighbouring languages and families, the much- described polysynthetic and exclusively prefixing make-up of the Ket stands largely alone here, only to recur in at least roughly comparable fashions as far afield as the Caucasus region or the very East of . The Siberian mainstream favours exclusively suxing (not necessarily simple) agglutinative , more or less strict SOV syntax, , phonetically robust lexical, especially verbal, roots and, a feature which may only become salient after one has worked on a like Ket for a while, morphological transparency, paired with a great degree of morphological predictability. The latter may be a somewhat less than linguistically sophisticated term, but by this I mean a situation, which enables the user, say a linguist, to build a form, departing from a root, the known morphological inventory and maybe a handful of morphological and/or morphonological rules, and get it right without having seen the correct form before. In most of Eurasia, the only , which, in my experience, is a decent match for Yeniseic in this respect is Indo- European. This insularity of Yeniseic is of course the natural source of questions like “Where do those languages come from?”, “Have they been around in the region before the “mainstream” language families arrived, or are they late intruders from elsewhere, if so from where?”, and so on. Normally, genetic is able to provide answers to questions like these, or at least to point researchers into certain directions, but not so with Yeniseic. Any genetic relationship of Yeniseic with any near-by Siberian language group could very quickly – already by Castrén – be ruled out and scholars started looking in more distant nooks of Eurasia or, indeed, even elsewhere. Like  45&'"/Û(&03(

Basque in Europe, Ket and Yeniseic languages have been the target of numerous well- and not so well-argued attempts to link them genetically with a sizable number of other languages, isolates and families, among them the ideas of a historical connection with Sino-Tibetan, Northwest- and North-East Caucasian, , of course Sumerian and, again of course, Basque have been repeatedly proposed and sometimes vigorously defended as relatives of Yeniseic. I can and have to be brief on this here: it would take a book to do full justice to all these endeavours. Suce it to say for the moment that – as with Basque – all of these attempts have been unsuccessful to this day. Though future progress on this front may one day give the lie to my scep- ticism, for the time being the Yeniseic family – and thus eectively its sole surviving member, Ket – have to be regarded as genetically isolated for all scientifically meaningful purposes (such as language sampling for linguis- tic typology or for any investigation of Siberian/Eurasian ethnolinguistic history). Everything genetic linguistics has to say about them is that they do form a valid language family as such, and that this family can be investi- gated, and to a degree reconstructed, with the classical tools and means of historical-comparative linguistics. The following table shows some lex- ical commonalities occurring in most Yeniseic languages and the range of variance they display. Ket Yugh Kott Arin Assan Pumpokol black tmtme thuma t’uma tuma tuma snow tktk thik te:/t’e tik tyg squirrel saqsax aga sava aga tak pike qùd xùd huja quj huja kod’u water l r ul kul ul ul not bnbn mon bon mon/bon bejsem eye dsds tie tie te/ti dat wolf qòt xòt qut/ku:t xotu human kedked il-it k’it/qit hit/hyt kit sun  ega ega/eja öga/ega hixem

The internal classification of Yeniseic is still somewhat provisional, though the particular closeness of Ket and Yugh on the one hand, and that of Kott and Assan on the other hand, are clear enough. Arin seems to be closer to