Yeniseian languages


The Yeniseian languages are a family of languages that are spoken by the Yeniseian people in the Yenisei River region of central Siberia. As part of the proposed Dene–Yeniseian language family, the Yeniseian languages have been argued to be part of "the first demonstration of a genealogical link between Old World and New World language families that meets the standards of traditional comparative-historical linguistics". The only surviving language of the group today is Ket.
From hydronymic and genetic data, it is suggested that the Yeniseian languages were spoken in a much greater area in ancient times, including parts of northern China and Mongolia. It has been further proposed that the recorded distribution of Yeniseian languages from the 17th century onward represents a relatively recent northward migration, and that the Yeniseian urheimat lies to the south of Lake Baikal.
The Yeniseians have been connected to the Xiongnu confederation, whose ruling elite may have spoken a "southern Yeniseian" language similar to the now extinct Pumpokol language. The Jie, who ruled the Later Zhao state of northern China, are likewise believed to have spoken a Pumpokolic language based on linguistic and ethnogeographic data.
For those who argue the Xiongnu spoke a Yeniseian language, the Yeniseian languages are thought to have contributed many ubiquitous loanwords to Turkic and Mongolic vocabulary, such as Khan, Tarqan, and the word for 'god', Tengri. This conclusion has primarily been drawn from the analysis of preserved Xiongnu texts in the form of Chinese characters.

Classification

The classification of the Yeniseian languages has changed from time to time. A traditional classification is presented below:
  • Proto-Yeniseian
  • * Northern Yeniseian
  • ** Ket
  • ***Northern Ket
  • ***Central Ket
  • ***Southern Ket
  • ** Yugh
  • * Southern Yeniseian
  • ** Kott–Assan
  • *** Kott
  • *** Assan
  • *** Yastin
  • *** Yarin
  • ***Baikot
  • ** Arin–Pumpokol
  • *** Arin
  • *** Pumpokol
  • *** ? Jie
Georg 2007 and Hölzl 2018 use a slightly different classification, placing Pumpokol in both branches:
Proto-Yeniseic
  • * Northern
  • ** Yenisei-Ostyakic
  • ***Ket
  • ***Yugh
  • ** Pumpokol ?
  • * Pumpokol ?
  • * Southern
  • ** Assanic
  • ***Assan
  • ***Kott
  • ** Arin
  • ** Pumpokol ?A more recent classification, introduced in Fortescue and Vajda 2022 and used in Vajda 2024, is presented below:
  • Proto-Yeniseian
  • *Ketic
  • **Ket
  • ***Central Ket
  • ***Northern-Southern Ket
  • ****Northern Ket
  • ****Southern Ket
  • **Yugh
  • *Arinic
  • **Arin
  • **Xiongnu?
  • *Pumpokolic
  • **Pumpokol
  • **Jie?
  • *Kottic
  • **Kott
  • *** Various dialects
  • *** Yastin
  • *** Yarin
  • *** Baikot
  • **Assan
It has been suggested that the Xiongnu and Hunnic languages were Southern Yeniseian. Only two languages of this family survived into the 20th century: Ket, with around 150 speakers, and Yugh, now extinct. The other known members of this family—Arin, Assan, Pumpokol, and Kott—have been extinct for over 150 years. Other groups—the Baikot, Yarin, Yastin, Ashkyshtym, and Koibalkyshtym—are identifiable as Yeniseic speaking from tsarist fur-tax records compiled during the 17th century, but nothing remains of their languages except a few proper names.

Distribution

, the only extant Yeniseian language, is the northernmost known. Historical sources record a contemporaneous northern expansion of the Ket along the Yenisei during the Russian conquest of Siberia. Today, it is mainly spoken in Turukhansky District of Krasnoyarsk Krai in far northern Siberia, in villages such as Kellog and. Yugh, which only recently faced extinction, was spoken from Yeniseysk to Vorogovo, Yartsevo, and the upper Ket River.
The early modern distributions of Arin, Pumpokol, Kott, and Assan can be reconstructed. The Arin were north of Krasnoyarsk, whereas the more distantly related Pumpokol was spoken to the north and west of it, along the upper Ket. Kott and Assan, another pair of closely related languages, occupied the area south of Krasnoyarsk, and east to the Kan River. From toponyms it can be seen that Yeniseian populations probably lived in Buryatia, Zabaykalsky, and northern Mongolia. As an example, the toponym ši can be found in Zabaykalsky Krai, which is probably related to the Proto-Yeniseian word *sēs 'river' and likely derives from an undocumented Yeniseian language. Some toponyms that appear Yeniseian extend as far as Heilongjiang.
Václav Blažek argues, based on hydronymic data, that Yeniseians were once spread out as far as the west of the Ob and Irtysh river basins. He compares, for example, the word šet, found in more westerly river names, to Proto-Yeniseian *sēs 'river'.

Origins and history

According to a 2016 study, Yeniseian people and their language originated likely somewhere near the Altai Mountains or near Lake Baikal. According to this study, the Yeniseians are linked to Paleo-Eskimo groups. The Yeniseians have also been hypothesised to be representative of a back-migration from Beringia to central Siberia, and the Dene–Yeniseians a result of a radiation of populations out of the Bering land bridge. The spread of ancient Yeniseian languages may be associated with an ancestry component from the Baikal area, maximized among hunter-gatherers of the local Glazkovo culture. Affinity for this ancestry has been observed among Na-Dene speakers. Cisbaikal_LNBA ancestry is inferred to be rich in Ancient Paleo-Siberian ancestry, and also display affinity to Inner Northeast Asian groups.
In Siberia, Edward Vajda observed that Yeniseian hydronyms in the circumpolar region clearly overlay earlier systems, with the layering of morphemes onto Ugric, Samoyedic, Turkic, and Tungusic place names. It is therefore proposed that the homeland, or dispersal point, of the Yeniseian languages lies in the boreal region between Lake Baikal, northern Mongolia, and the Upper Yenisei basin, referred to by Vajda as a territory "abandoned" by the original Yeniseian speakers. On the other hand, Václav Blažek argues that based on hydronomic evidence, Yeneisian languages were originally spoken on the northern slopes of the Tianshan and Pamir Mountains before dispersing downstream via the Irtysh River.
The modern populations of Yeniseians in central and northern Siberia are thus not indigenous and represent a more recent migration northward. This was noted by Russian explorers during the conquest of Siberia: the Ket are recorded to have been expanding northwards along the Yenisei, from the river Yeloguy to the Kureyka, from the 17th century onward. Based on these records, the modern Ket-speaking area appears to represent the very northernmost reaches of Yeniseian migration.
File:Sixteen Kingdoms 326 AD.jpg|alt=|thumb|The Jie kings of the Later Zhao are likely to have spoke Yeniseian.
The origin of this northward migration from the Mongolian steppe has been connected to the fall of the Xiongnu confederation. It appears from Chinese sources that a Yeniseian group might have been a major part of the heterogeneous Xiongnu tribal confederation, who have traditionally been considered the ancestors of the Huns and other Northern Asian groups. However, these suggestions are difficult to substantiate due to the paucity of data.
Alexander Vovin argues that at least parts of the Xiongnu, possibly its core or ruling class, spoke a Yeniseian language. Positing a higher degree of similarity of Xiongnu to Yeniseian as compared to Turkic, he also praised Stefan Georg's demonstration of how the word Tengri originated from Proto-Yeniseian tɨŋVr.
It has been further suggested that the Yeniseian-speaking Xiongnu elite underwent a language shift to Oghur Turkic while migrating westward, eventually becoming the Huns. However, it has also been suggested that the core of the Hunnic language was a Yeniseian language.
Vajda et al. 2013 proposed that the ruling elite of the Huns spoke a Yeniseian language and influenced other languages in the region.
One sentence of the language of the Jie, a Xiongnu tribe who founded the Later Zhao state, appears consistent with being a Yeniseian language. Later studies suggest that Jie is closer to Pumpokol than to other Yeniseian languages such as Ket. This has been substantiated with geographical data by Vajda, who states that Yeniseian hydronyms found in northern Mongolia are exclusively Pumpokolic, in the process demonstrating both a linguistic and geographic proximity between Yeniseian and Jie.
The decline of the southern Yeniseian languages during and after the Russian conquest of Siberia has been attributed to language shifts of the Arin and Pumpokol to Khakas or Chulym Tatar, and the Kott and Assan to Khakas.

Family features

The Yeniseian languages share many contact-induced similarities with the South Siberian Turkic languages, Samoyedic languages, and Evenki. These include long-distance nasal harmony, the development of former affricates to stops, and the use of postpositions or grammatical enclitics as clausal subordinators. Yeniseic nominal enclitics closely approximate the case systems of geographically contiguous families. Despite these similarities, Yeniseian appears to stand out among the languages of Siberia in several typological respects, such as the presence of tone, the prefixing verb inflection, and highly complex morphophonology.
The Yeniseian languages have been described as having up to four tones or no tones at all. The 'tones' are concomitant with glottalization, vowel length, and breathy voice, not unlike the situation reconstructed for Old Chinese before the development of true tones in Chinese. The Yeniseian languages have highly elaborate verbal morphology.

Pronouns