Yeniseian languages
From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.
The Yenisei-Ostyak language family is spoken in central Siberia. Only two languages remain of this family, Ket, with around 1,000 speakers and Yugh, with less than 5 speakers remaining, possibly extinct. Other probable members of this family, including 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.
The unrelated Ostyak language is an old name for Khant, a Ugric language.
Attempts have been made by Soviet scholars to establish a relationship with either Burushaski or the Sino-Tibetan languages, and Yeniseian frequently forms part of the Dene-Caucasian hypothesis.
Recently, George van Driem (http://www.semioticon.com/people/vanDriem.htm) has found evidence that the Yeniseian family may be closely related to Burushaski in a family he calls Karasuk. Probably the strongest piece of evidence are the case forms of the pronoun thou. Both the nominative and the accusative cases appear to be related, which makes it unlikely that the similarities are due to chance:
- Burushaski [ʔu] thou, [gu] thee
- Yeniseian [un] thou, [ku] thee
Van Driem believes thinks the connection wasn't noticed earlier only because Yeniseian is itself so obscure. He postulates that the Burusho people were part of the migration out of Central Asia that resulted in the Indo-European conquest of India. These claims are by no means widely accepted, however.es:Lenguas yeniseianas fi:Jeniseiläiskielet
