--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Miguel Carrasquer <mcv@...> wrote:
> I don't know anything about Na-Dene, except that its
> existence (Haida, Tlingit) is disputed.
For those who may be mystified by this, a little background:
The Athabascan languages form a clear genetic family, with easily
observable phonetic and morphological correspondences among the
different languages. This family includes the Northern Athabascan
languages (subgroups disputed due to close contact and borrowing) in
Alaska and Western Canada (Beaver, Slave, Tanaina, Ahtna, and many
others), the Pacific Coast Athabascan languages in Oregon and northern
California (Hupa and a few others), and the Apachean languages of the
southwestern US (Navajo and the various Apache languages).
This family is quite clearly related to Eyak, a language of
southeastern Alaska. Eyak is sufficiently different from all
Athabascan languages to not be included in the family, but there are
regular sound correspondences between it and Proto-Athabascan, and
Eyak forms are often cited to shed light on unusual forms in
Athabascan languages. The language family including both Eyak and the
Athabascan (sub)family is called Athabascan-Eyak.
There are two other languages of southeastern Alaska which show
striking grammatical similarities to Athabascan-Eyak, but no obvious
phonetic correspondences. These are Haida and Tlingit, which Miguel
mentioned above. Edward Sapir noticed this and decided that Haida and
Athabascan-Eyak belonged to a single family, which he named Na-Dene
(from Haida na "house" and Athabascan dene "people," a root found in
all Athabascan languages which usually forms groups' names for
themselves). Whether Tlingit also belongs to this family was
controversial then and is controversial now; some accept it, some
don't. I don't know if it was part of Sapir's original formulation or
not.
Since then the family has played a prominent role in macrofamily
speculations, because the languages in it are very different from
other languages of North America. Note that Greenburg did not include
it in his highly controversial "Amerind," which included almost all
the languages of the Americas, putting it rather in "Dene-Caucasian"
with Sino-Tibetan and (NW? NE?) Caucasian.
However, many Athabascanists are not convinced that the family exists
at all. Haida and Tlingit are lexically very dissimilar to
Athabascan-Eyak and to each other, and "Proto-Na-Dene" reconstructions
require a lot of phonetic alchemy to account for Haida and Tlingit forms.
And as for connections to Sino-Tibetan etc., well, I don't know. I do
wonder what sort of correspondences the supposed connection is based
on, though.
Jedediah Drolet