Linguistic Link Between Old and New Worlds Now Being Recognized

From The Ottawa Citizen

Words for 'canoe' point to long-lost family ties
Canwest News Service July 8, 2010

An obscure language in Siberia has similarities to languages in North America, which might reshape history, writes Randy Boswell.

A new book by leading linguists has bolstered a controversial theory that the language of Canada's Dene Nation is rooted in an ancient Asian tongue spoken today by only a few hundred people in Western Siberia.

The landmark discovery, initially proposed two years ago by U.S. researcher Edward Vajda, represents the only known link between any Old World language and the hundreds of speech systems among First Nations in the Western Hemisphere.

The collection of articles by Vajda and other experts details a multitude of clear connections -- nouns, verbs and key grammatical structures -- between the language spoken by the Ket people of Russia's Yenisei River region and dozens of languages used by North American aboriginal groups.

The newly recognized link has prompted the Yukon-based Arctic Athabaskan Council to begin forging cultural and political ties with Russia's tiny population of Ket speakers. They live 8,000 kilometres west of Whitehorse and are separated from their linguistic cousins in North America by some 10,000 years of history.

University of Alberta linguist Jack Ives writes in the essay collection that "the question of just how such a distribution arose -- with a separation between Siberia and northwestern North America involving thousands of kilometres -- is simply fascinating."

University of Alaska linguist James Kari, co-editor of the book, titled The Dene-Yeniseian Connection: Bridging Asia and North America, said the discovery could rewrite the story of when, where and how ancient Asian migrants arrived in North America at the end of the last Ice Age. He said it should also trigger new avenues of research "across several disciplines," including archeology, anthropology, paleo-ecology, biology and genetics.

In April, representatives of some of the North American nations believed to share a root language with the Ket travelled to Moscow for a "historic meeting" with their new-found linguistic kin.

Vajda, a linguistics professor at Western Washington University, told Canwest News Service in 2008 how years of research with the Ket culminated with a dramatic insight involving words associated with the canoe.

He found that the few remaining Ket speakers in Russia and the Dene, Gwich'in and other Athapaskan speakers in North America used almost identical words for canoe and such component parts as the prow and cross-piece.

"Finally, here was the beginning of a system that struck me as beyond the realm of chance," Vajda wrote at the time. "At that moment, I think I realized how an archeologist must feel who peers inside a freshly opened Egyptian tomb and witnesses what no one has seen for thousands of years."

Currently, only the Eskimo-Aleut family of aboriginal languages spoken by the Inuit of Canada, Alaska, Greenland and Russia straddle the hemispheric divide between Asia and the Americas. Those connections aren't surprising, given the relatively recent arrival of the Inuit to North America.

But linguists had never definitively linked any ancient, Old World language to those spoken by the Indian nations of North and South America. Their ancestors are believed to have migrated from Asia to the New World -- across what was then a dried-up Bering Strait -- at least 13,000 years ago.

© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen

See also February 12, April 9 and April 20, 2010 press releases by the Athabascan Council from earlier this year. 

Linguistics Again - The Yenseic-Na Dene Connection

Prior post. I found this story at Mike Ruggeri's "The Ancient Americas Breaking News": From The Anchorage Daily News Distant Native languages bridge Bering Sea Siberian culture's words have echo in North America By GEORGE BRYSONgbryson@adn.com Published: March 4th, 2008 12:41 AM Last Modified: March 4th, 2008 03:31 AM A remote population of a few hundred indigenous Siberians who live thousands of miles west of Alaska speak a language that appears to be an ancient relative of more than three dozen Native languages in North America, experts say. A panel of respected linguists who met in Anchorage on Friday are hailing new research that links the Old World language of Ket, still spoken sparingly along the Yenisei River in western Siberia, and the sprawling New World family of Na-Dene languages -- a broad grouping that encompasses the many Athabascan tribes in Alaska, along with the Tlingit and Eyak people, as well as Indian populations in western Canada and the American Southwest, including the Navajo and the Apache. Other than Siberian Yupik, a regional Eskimo dialect that straddles the Bering Strait, a connection between North American and Asian language families had never before been demonstrated. The research by University of Western Washington linguist Edward Vajda, who spent 10 years deciphering the Ket language, drew upon parallel work by three Alaskans -- Jeff Leer, Michael Krauss and James Kari, professors of linguistics at the University of Alaska Fairbanks -- who independently detailed patterns in Na-Dene languages. Establishing that two such far-distant language groups are closely related is both demanding and rare in the exacting field of historical linguistics, according to participants who attended a language symposium at the annual meeting of the Alaska Anthropological Association. That Interior Indian languages spoken in North America are related to languages spoken in Asia has long been assumed, since other fields of science have widely concluded that the Americas weren't populated until ice age hunters migrated across a temporary land bridge from the old world to the new some 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. And as early as 1923, other linguists speculated specifically about a genetic link between the Yeniseic family of languages spoken along the Yenisei River (of which Ket is now the only surviving member) and the Na-Dene family, spoken in North America. Ten years ago, American linguist Merritt Ruhlen did so again after producing a list of 36 cognates -- comparable words in two languages that sound alike and mean the same thing. But producing lists of similar-sounding words isn't sufficient evidence to establish a real genetic relationship between two languages, declared Bernard Comrie, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, speaking at the conference. That's because cognates can also occur by accident or chance -- when selective words are adopted by travelers from unrelated languages, or when words have a universal appeal. [Yeah, okay. So, what are the odds that this happened 15,000 years ago in a remote region of Siberia???] What makes the new finding so exciting, Comrie said, is that it's based on complex and verifiable morphologies that show how certain Ket words were systematically altered to create Athabascan words -- or vice versa (the research doesn't speculate on which language came first or when). Vajda began studying the Ket language firsthand in the 1990s after the Iron Curtain fell and he interviewed Ket speakers in the southwestern Siberia city of Tomsk, as well as in Germany. "There is no road and no train," Vajda said in an interview last week in Anchorage, here to address the symposium. "You have to go by steamboat or helicopter to get there." Through his research and interviews, Vajda determined that there are about 1,200 people who say they are Ket, including about 200 people who speak the language. But only about 100 speak Ket fluently, Vajda said, and nearly all of them are now older than 50. "They were the last hunters of north Asia that didn't have any domesticated animals that they used for food," he said. "They moved around, they didn't live in the same place." That came to an end when the Stalin regime in the Soviet Union forced the Ket to live in villages. Now their traditional lifestyle is nearly gone, Vajda said -- and their language is disappearing too. While trying to capture it before it vanishes altogether, Vajda gained a new understanding about the peculiarities of Ket verbs, suffixes and tonalities -- which are unlike any of the other Siberian languages to the east. Comparing what he learned with research conducted independently in Alaska, Vajda began to find words the two languages had in common. A news release issued this week by the Alaska Native Language Center at UAF concurs, noting language similarities "too numerous and displaying too many idiosyncratic parallels to be explained by anything other than common descent." Among linguistic scholars elsewhere who've reviewed Vajda's paper in its draft form and reacted favorably so far is Dr. Heinrich Werner of Bonn, Germany -- a world authority in the Ket language, whose work Vajda cited and incorporated into his own, along with that of the Alaskans. Vajda thinks his research might be a door-opener for scientists in other fields, including those who work in human genetics and archaeology, to proceed with additional comparisons of the two cultures. He says it also points out the necessity and urgency to record dying languages before they disappear.