Ket language

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The Ket language, formerly known as Yenisei Ostyak, a Siberian language long thought to be an isolate, the sole surviving language of a Yeniseian language family, is spoken along the middle Yenisei basin by the Ket people.

The language is threatened with extinction—the number of ethnic Kets that are native speakers of the language has dropped from 1,225 in 1926 to 537 in 1989. Another Yeniseian language, Yugh, is believed to have recently gone extinct.

Classification

Attempts have been made by Soviet scholars to establish a relationship with either Burushaski or the Sino-Tibetan languages, and it frequently forms part of the Dene-Caucasian hypothesis. None of these attempts have been conclusive. Joseph Greenberg proposed a link between Ket and other Yeniseian languages and the Na-Dene language group of North America in his final study of Eurasiatic languages. More recently, in February 2008, linguist Edward Vajda also submitted a paper on the proposed link between Ket with the Na-Dene languages. His paper has been favorably reviewed by several experts on Na-Dene and Yeniseic languages, including Michael Krauss, Jeff Leer, James Kari, and Heinrich Werner, as well as a number of other well-known linguists, including Bernard Comrie, Johanna Nichols, Victor Golla, Michael Fortescue, and Eric Hamp, while other experts on Yenisein remain extremely skeptical or reject the hypothesis (e.g. Stefan Georg).

Documentation

The earliest observations about the language were published by P. S. Pallas in 1788 in a travel diary (Путешествия по разным провинциям Русского Государства Puteshestviya po raznim provintsiyam Russkogo Gosudarstva). In 1858, M. A. Castrén published the first grammar and dictionary (Versuch einer jenissei-ostjakischen und Kottischen Sprachlehre), which also included material on the Kot language. During the 19th century, the Kets were mistaken for a tribe of the Finno-Ugric Khanty. A. Karger in 1934 published the first grammar (Кетский язык Ketskij jazyk), as well as a Ket primer (Букварь на кетском языке Bukvar' na ketskom jazyke), and a new treatment appeared in 1968, written by A. Kreinovich. E. Alekseyenko has written a historical-ethnological treatment of the Kets (Кеты Kety, 1967). Western Washington University historical linguist Edward Vajda offers better substantiated findings into the origins of the Ket people, where DNA claims show genetic affinities with that of Tibetan, Burmese, and others[1]. Edward Vajda spent a year in Siberia (2005-2006) studying the Ket people, and finds a relationship of Ket language to that of Native American languages, and also suggests the tonal system of the Ket language is closer that that of Vietnamese than any of the native Siberian languages[2]. His (2004) monograph Ket is the first modern scholarly grammar of the Ket language in English. (Lueders 2008)

Phonology

Vowels

1. The normally open-mid /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ are pronounced as close-mid [e] and [o], respectively, when they have the high-steady tone.
2. /a/ freely varies between [æ], [a], [ɐ], and [ɑ].

Consonants

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1. All nasal consonants in Ket have voiceless allophones at the end of a monosyllabic word with a glottalized or descending tone (i.e., [m, n, ŋ] turn into [m̥, n̥, ŋ̥]), likewise, [l] becomes [ɬ] in the same situation.

Tones

Whether or not Ket is a tonal language is debatable, but most individuals agree that it is. Unlike most other tonal languages, Ket does not employ a tone on every syllable, Ket uses one tone per word. The five basic tones are as follows:

Ket Alphabet

In the 1930s a Latin based alphabet was developed and used:

In the 1980s a new, Cyrillic-based, alphabet was created:

Literature

• N. K. Karger, Кетский язык. — Языки и письменность народов Севера. Ч. III, Moscow, Leningrad (1934)
• E. A. Kreinovich, Кетский язык. — Языки народов СССР. Т. V, Leningrad (1968)
• Edward J. Vajda. Ket Prosodic Phonology. (2000) Munich: Lincom Europa Languages of the World vol. 15.
• Edward J. Vajda. Ket. (2004) Munich: Lincom Europa Languages of the World vol. 204. ISBN 3895862215. 109pp.
• E. Vajda, M. Zinn. Morfologicheskii slovar ketskogo glagola: na osnove iuzhno-ketskogo dialekta. = Morphological dictionary of the Ket verb: Southern dialect / E. Vajda, M. Zinn. (2004)

External links

Ket language test of Wikipedia at Wikimedia Incubator

• Endangered Languages of the Indigenious Peoples of Siberia - The Ket Language
• Filtchenko, Andrei. 2001. Ket Language
• Georg, Stefan. 2006. A Descriptive Grammar of Ket (Yenisei-Ostyak). Folkestone, Kent: Global Oriental. 10-ISBN 1-901-90358-3; 13-ISBN 978-1-901-90358-4
• Gordon, Raymond G., Jr. (ed.), 2005. Ket. In Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Fifteenth edition. Dallas, Tex.: SIL International.
• Kazakevich, Olga, et al. 2006?. Multimedia Database of Ket Language, Moscow State (Lomonosov) University
• Lueders, Ulrich. Books: Language Description, Ket: Vajda. Publisher's announcement on LINGUIST List
• Vajda, Edward J. 2000. Ket and other Yeneseic Peoples
• Vajda, Edward J. 2006. The Ket People - Google Video
• Vajda, Edward J. 2008. The Siberian Origin of the Na-Dene Languages. Lecture presented at Dene-Yeniseic Symposium, February 26-29, 2008, Fairbanks and Anchorage, Alaska.
• Viikberg, Jüri. Kets. In The Red Book of the Peoples of the Russian Empire, NGO Red Book, ISBN 9985-9369-2-2 (Wikipedia article)