[Aztlan] Siberian-North American Language Connection

[Nick Hopkins]

 From the newsletter of SSILA, the Society for the Study of the  
Indigenous Languages of the Americas (http://www.ssila.org):

[Attached below is a summary by Johanna Nichols of the highly successful
Dene-Yeneseic Symposium, held at the end of February in Fairbanks and
Anchorage...]

A long-sought connection between Siberian and North American language
families has been demonstrated by linguists from Washington and Alaska.

Prof. Edward Vajda of Western Washington University (Bellingham),
a specialist on the Ket language isolate spoken by a shrinking number
of elders living along the Yenisei River of central Siberia, combining
ten years of library and field work on Ket and relying on the earlier
work of Heinrich Werner on the now-extinct relatives of Ket, has
clarified the dauntingly complex morphology and phonology of Ket and
its Yeniseic congeners.  At a symposium held Feb. 26-27 at the  
University
of Alaska, Fairbanks and a panel that took place Feb. 29 at the Alaska
Anthropological Association annual meeting in Anchorage, Vajda showed
that the abstract forms of lexical and grammatical morphemes and the
rules of composition of the Ket verb find systematic and numerous
parallels in the Na-Dene protolanguage reconstructed to account for
the modern Tlingit and Eyak languages and the Athabaskan language family
(whose daughters include Gwich'in, Koyukon, Dena'ina and others of  
Alaska,
Hupa of California, and Navajo of the U.S. Southwest).  The comparison
was made possible by recent advances in the analysis of Tlingit  
phonology
and Tlingit-Athabaskan-Eyak presented at the same symposium by Prof.
Jeffrey Leer of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and by earlier work
by Prof. Michael Krauss, also of UAF, on the now-extinct Eyak language
and on comparative Athabaskan, as well as work on Athabaskan  
lexicography
and verb stem analysis carried out by the symposium organizer, Prof.
James Kari of UAF.

Working independently, Vajda and the Alaska linguists have arrived at
abstract stem shapes and ancestral word-forms too numerous and  
displaying
too many idiosyncratic parallels to be explained by anything other than
common descent.  The comparison also shows conclusively that Haida,
sometimes associated with Na-Dene, is not related.

The distance from Yeniseic territory in Siberia to that of the most
distant Athabaskan languages in the American Southwest is the greatest
overland distance covered by any known language whose spread was not
facilitated by wheeled transport or sails.  Prof. Ben Potter of UAF,
an archaeologist, reviewed the postglacial prehistory of Beringia and
speculated that the Na-Dene speakers may descend from some of the
earliest colonizers of the Americas, who eventually created the
successful and long-lived Northern Archaic tool tradition that dominated
interior and northern Alaska almost until historical times.

Vajda's work has been well vetted.  In addition to Na-Dene specialists
Krauss, Leer, and Kari, who have reacted favorably, the symposium was
also attended by historical linguists Prof. Eric P. Hamp of the
University of Chicago and Prof. Johanna Nichols of the University of
California, Berkeley, both of whom announced their support for the
proposed relationship, and by Bernard Comrie, Director of the  
Linguistics
Department, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig
and professor at UC Santa Barbara, who endorsed Vajda's methods.  Atha-
baskanist Prof. Victor Golla of Humboldt State University, Eurasianist
Prof. Michael Fortescue of the University of Copenhagen, Yeniseicist
Dr. Heinrich Werner of Bonn (formerly of Taganrog University, Russia),
and Prof. Nicholas Evans (Australian National University) read the draft
of Vajda's report and reacted favorably.