Alaska and Siberia: Distant Native languages bridge Bering Sea

Tue Mar 4 14:42:45 UTC 2008

 Distant Native languages bridge Bering Sea

Siberian culture's words have echo in North America

By GEORGE BRYSON
gbryson at adn.com | gbryson at adn.com

Published: March 4th, 2008 12:41 AM
Last Modified: March 4th, 2008 01:03 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.
[image: Click to enlarge]
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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. 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 began making field trips to the Yenisei River -- about
3,600 miles west of Fairbanks. "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.

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