Ket language

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Ket language

The Ket language, formerly known as Yenisei Ostyak, a Siberia

Siberia

Siberia , is the name given to the vast region constituting almost all of North Asia and for the most part currently serving as the massive central and eastern portion of the Russian Federation, having served in the same capacity previously for the Soviet Union from its beginning, and the Russian Empire beginning in the 16th century....
n language long thought to be an isolate

Language isolate

A language isolate, in the absolute sense, is a natural language with no demonstrable genealogical relationship with other living languages; that is, one that has not been demonstrated to descend from an ancestor common to any other language....
, the sole surviving language of a Yeniseian language family

Yeniseian languages

The Yeniseian language family is spoken in central Siberia....
, is spoken along the middle Yenisei Basin by the Kets

Ket people

Kets are a Siberian people who speak the Ket language. In Imperial Russia they were called Ostyaks, without differentiating them from several other Siberian peoples....
.

Attempts have been made by Soviet

Soviet Union

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a Constitution of the Soviet Union socialist state that existed in Eurasia from 1922 to 1991.The name is a translation of the , romanization of Russian Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik, abbreviated ????, SSSR....
scholars to establish a relationship with either Burushaski

Burushaski language

Burushaski is a language isolate . It is spoken by some 87,000 Burusho people in the Hunza Valley, Nagar Valley, Yasin Valley, and parts of the Gilgit Valley valleys in the Northern Areas in Pakistan....
or the Sino-Tibetan languages

Sino-Tibetan languages

The Sino-Tibetan languages form a language family composed of, at least, the Chinese language and the Tibeto-Burman languages, including some 250 languages of East Asia, Southeast Asia and parts of South Asia....
, and it frequently forms part of the Dene-Caucasian hypothesis. None of these attempts have been conclusive. However, in February 2008, linguist Edward Vajda

Edward Vajda

Edward Vajda is a historical linguist at Western Washington University. He has become known for his work on the proposed Den?-Yeniseian languages, seeking to establish that the Ket language of Siberia has a common linguistic ancestor with the Na-Den? languages of North America....
proposed a link between Ket with the Na-Dene languages

Na-Dené languages

Na-Dene is a Indigenous peoples of the Americas language family which includes at least the Athabaskan languages, Eyak, and Tlingit language languages....
of North America.

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Encyclopedia

The Ket language, formerly known as Yenisei Ostyak, a Siberia

Siberia

Language isolate

Yeniseian languages

The Yeniseian language family is spoken in central Siberia....
, is spoken along the middle Yenisei Basin by the Kets

Ket people

Soviet Union

Burushaski language

Sino-Tibetan languages

Edward Vajda

Na-Dené languages

Na-Dene is a Indigenous peoples of the Americas language family which includes at least the Athabaskan languages, Eyak, and Tlingit language languages....
of North America. His paper has been favorably reviewed by several experts on Na-Dene and Yeniseic languages, including Michael Krauss

Michael Krauss

Michael E. Krauss is a linguist who has worked extensively on the Na-Den? languages language family, especially on proto-Athabaskan, pre-proto-Athabaskan, the Eyak language, which became extinct in January 2008, and also numerous other Athabaskan and Eskimo-Aleut languages....
, Jeff Leer, James Kari

James Kari

James Kari is a linguist and Professor Emeritus specializing in Athabascan languages of Alaska.In the past twenty-five years he has done extensive linguistic work in many Athabascan languages including Ahtna language, Dena'ina language, Koyukon language, Deg Hit'an, Holikachuk, Tanana, and Upper Tanana....
, and Heinrich Werner, as well as a number of other well-known linguists, including Bernard Comrie

Bernard Comrie

Bernard Comrie is a British-born linguist. He is a professor at and director of the Department of Linguistics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and Distinguished Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara....
, Johanna Nichols

Johanna Nichols

Linguistics Johanna Nichols is a professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests include the Slavic languages, the linguistic prehistory of northern Eurasia, language typology, ancient linguistic prehistory, and languages of the Caucasus, chiefly Chechen languag...
, Victor Golla, Michael Fortescue

Michael Fortescue

Michael D. Fortescue is a British-born linguistics specializing in Arctic and native North American languages, including Kalaallisut, Inuktun, Chukchi language and Nitinaht language....
, and Eric Hamp

Eric P. Hamp

Eric Pratt Hamp is an United States linguist. Born November 16 1920, he received his PhD from Harvard University in 1950s and since then he taught at the University of Chicago where he is Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus, Departments of Linguistics, Slavic Languages and Literatures, Psychology and the Committe...
.

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.

Documentation

The earliest observations about the language were published by P. S. Pallas in 1788 in a travel diary (??????????? ?? ?????? ?????????? ???????? ??????????? 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 (??????? ???? Ketskij jazyk), as well as a Ket primer (??????? ?? ??????? ????? 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 (???? Kety, 1967). Edward Vajda's (2004) monograph Ket is the first modern scholarly grammar of the Ket language in English. (Lueders 2008)

Phonology

Vowels

	Front Front vowel A front vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a front vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far forward as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant....	Back Back vowel A back vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a back vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far back as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant....
Close Close vowel A close vowel is a type of vowel sound used in many spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a close vowel is that the tongue is positioned as close as possible to the roof of the mouth without creating a constriction that would be classified as a consonant....
Close-mid Close-mid vowel A close-mid vowel is a type of vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a close-mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned two-thirds of the way from a close vowel to a mid vowel....	¹	¹
Mid Mid vowel A mid vowel is a vowel sound used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of a mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned mid-way between an open vowel and a close vowel....
Open-mid Open-mid vowel The open-mid vowels make a class of vowel sounds used in some spoken languages. The defining characteristic of an open-mid vowel is that the tongue is positioned two-thirds of the way from an open vowel to a mid vowel....
Open Open vowel An open vowel is a vowel sound of a type used in most spoken languages. The defining characteristic of an open vowel is that the tongue is positioned as far as possible from the roof of the mouth....	²

and are pronounced as and , respectively, when they have the high-steady tone.
freely varies between , , , and .

Consonants

		Bilabial Bilabial consonant In phonetics, a bilabial consonant is a consonant articulated with both lips. The bilabial consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are:...	Alveolar Alveolar consonant Alveolar consonants are articulated with the tongue against or close to the superior alveolar ridge, which is called that because it contains the Dental alveolus of the superior teeth....	Palatal Palatal consonant Palatal consonants are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate . Consonants with the tip of the tongue curled back against the palate are called retroflex consonant....	Velar Velar consonant Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth, known also as the Soft palate)....	Uvular Uvular consonant Uvulars are consonants articulated with the back of the tongue against or near the Palatine uvula, that is, further back in the mouth than velar consonants....	Glottal Glottal consonant Glottal consonants are consonants articulated with the glottis. Many phoneticians consider them, or at least the so-called fricatives, to be transitional states of the glottis without a point of articulation as other consonants have; in fact, some do not consider them to be consonants at all....
Nasal Nasal consonant A nasal consonant is produced with a lowered soft palate in the mouth, allowing air to escape freely through the nose. The oral cavity still acts as a resonance chamber for the sound, but the air does not escape through the mouth as it is blocked by the tongue.... ¹
Plosive	voiceless
Plosive	voiced
Fricative	voiceless
Fricative	voiced
Tap
Trill Trill consonant In phonetics, a trill is a consonantal sound produced by vibrations between the articulator and the place of articulation. Standard Spanish <rr > as in perro is an alveolar trill, while in Parisian French it is almost always uvular trill....
Lateral Lateral consonant Laterals are "L"-like consonants pronounced with an occlusion made somewhere along the axis of the tongue, while air from the lungs escapes at one side or both sides of the tongue....

All nasal consonants in Ket have voiceless allophones at the end of a monosyllabic word with a glottalized or descending tone (i.e., turn into ), likewise, becomes 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:

Tone name Tone name In Chinese language and Vietnamese language, tone names are the names given to the tone s these languages use....	Glottalized	High-Even	Rising Falling	Falling	Rising High-Falling
Tone contour Tone contour A tone contour is a tone in a tonal language which shifts from one pitch to another over the course of the syllable or word. Tone contours are especially common in East and Southeast Asia, but occur elsewhere, such as the Kru languages of Liberia and the Ju languages of Namibia....	34	55	13.31	31	13.53
Example	"rabbit"	"blood"	"puddle"	"flying squirrel"	"grandfathers"

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, ??????? ????. — ????? ? ???????????? ??????? ??????. ?. III, Moscow, Leningrad (1934)
E. A. Kreinovich, ??????? ????. — ????? ??????? ????. ?. 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: 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

Filtchenko, Andrei. 2001.
Georg, Stefan: A Descriptive Grammar of Ket (Yenisei Ostyak), Volume I: Introduction, Phonology, Morphology, Folkestone/Kent 2007.
Gordon, Raymond G., Jr. (ed.), 2005. . In Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Fifteenth edition. Dallas, Tex.: SIL International.
Kazakevich, Olga, et al. 2006?.
Lueders, Ulrich. Books: Language Description, Ket: Vajda. on LINGUIST List
Linguist List

The LINGUIST List is a major online resource for the academic field of linguistics. It was founded by Anthony Aristar in early 1990 at the University of Western Australia....
Vajda, Edward J. 2000.
Vajda, Edward J. 2006.
Vajda, Edward J. 2008. . Lecture presented at , February 26-29, 2008, Fairbanks and Anchorage, Alaska.
Viikberg, Jüri. . In , NGO Red Book, ISBN 9985-9369-2-2 (Wikipedia article
The Red Book of the Peoples of the Russian Empire

The Red Book of the Peoples of the Russian Empire is a book about the small nations of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and the Russia and some other post-Soviet states of today....
)