From: Harald Hammarstrom
Message: 32697
Date: 2004-05-18
> > 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
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