Yeniseian languages
Categories: Yeniseian languages
The Yeniseian family of languages (sometimes known as Yenisei-Ostyak) is spoken in central Siberia.
Family division
Only two languages of this family survived into the 20th century, Ket, with around 1,000 speakers and Yugh, which is now possibly extinct. The other known members of this family, Arin, Assan, Pumpokol, and Kott, have been extinct for over a century. It appears from Chinese sources that a Yeniseian group was among the peoples that made up the tribal confederation known as the Huns.
Another unrelated language formerly known as Ostyak is Khanty, a Uralic language spoken in the neighbouring region of Khantia-Mansia.
Genetic relations
Attempts have been made by Soviet scholars to establish a relationship with the Burushaski or Sino-Tibetan languages, and Yeniseian frequently forms part of the Dene-Caucasian hypothesis, all of which remain speculative.
Recently, George van Driem put forward new evidence, mostly morphological, that the Yeniseian family may be related to Burushaski in a family he calls Karasuk. For example, second-person singular prefixes on intransitive verbs are [gu-, gó-] in Burushaski and [ku-, gu-] in Ket. Van Driem postulates that the Burusho people were part of the migration out of Central Asia that resulted in the Indo-European conquest of India. This claim has been publicized by Roger Blench.
Family features
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 that language. The Yeniseian languages have highly elaborate verbal morphology, to an extreme found elsewhere in Eurasia only in Burushaski and, to a lesser extent, in Basque and the Caucasian languages. (All of these languages are ergative as well.)
de:Jenisseische Sprachen es:Lenguas yeniseianas lt:Jenisėjaus kalbos fi:Jeniseiläiskielet