Re: Yeneseic and Na-Dene

First, Torsten, thanks for the nice excerpt.

Once of the nicest things about this list is that we all are into different
things as well as having intersecting interests. It gives a breadth to our
discussions that I love.

I guess one of the reasons I have not gone into identifying loanwords is
that I am so fascinated by the cognate connections I discover.

But, sure, someone should look.


Patrick

----- Original Message -----
From: "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Monday, March 10, 2008 7:10 AM
Subject: [tied] Re: Yeneseic and Na-Dene


--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Patrick Ryan" <proto-language@...>
wrote:
>
> I am glad to finally be able to provide a very interesting link to our
> group:
>
>
> http://www.uaf.edu/anlc/docs/vajda-2008.pdf
>
>
> Vajda has made an absolutely brilliant analysis of the _now_ certain
> relationship between Siberian Yeneseian and North American Na-Dene.
>
> His statement on the proper way to compare language families is a
> classic formulation of all the right principles, in my opinion. And
> he applies them competently to the hypothesis at hand.
>

EDWIN G. PULLEYBLANK:
Central Asia and Non-Chinese Peoples of Ancient China

IV The Chinese and Their Neighbors in Prehistoric and Early Historic
Times, p 451
"
I have shown elsewhere (1962) that, contrary to what has often been
believed, there is no evidence that the Hsiung-nu were either Turkish
or Mongolian in their linguistic and ethnic affinities. Indeed, there
are cogent linguistic arguments against their having spoken an Altaic
language of any kind. On the other hand, as Ligeti (1950) was the
first to point out, there is a good possibility that they may have
spoken a language belonging to the Palaeo-Siberian family, the only
surviving member of which is Kettish, also known as Yenissei-Ostyak.
Several languages related to Kettish were still spoken in Siberia,
some of them by horse-riding nomads, when the Russians first arrived
there in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The few Hsiung-nu
words transcribed in Chinese characters for which semantic glosses are
supplied show a number of striking contacts with Kettish or with
recorded items of vocabulary from the extinct Palaeo-Siberian
languages. Though little is known about the earlier history of the
Palaeo-Siberians, the possibility that they are a remnant of a
linguistic family which included the Hsiung-nu and once played an
important role in East Asian history deserves to be seriously studied.
The identification of the Hsiung-nu with the European Huns was first
proposed by de Guignes in the eighteenth century and has been much
debated ever since. As far as the names are concerned, one can now
assert confidently that they must be the same. It is unnecessary to
discuss this issue here or the more complicated question of the
transmission of the name from east to west and what it may mean in
terms of ethnic, linguistic, and political continuites.

Of greater bearing on this discussion is the clear evidence of
specific cultural affinities between the Hsiung-nu and the Scythians
(Egami 1948; 1951; Pulleyblank 1962 and in press [a]). These extend
beyond what can be accounted for by the exigencies of nomadic life and
into specific religious customs. Horse-riding nomadism evidently
originated as a specific creative adaptation to the steppe environment
and spread from a center by conquest or imitation.
"

XIII EARLY CONTACTS BETWEEN INDO-EUROPEANS AND CHINESE, p 15
"
The first identifiable Altaic speakers in the Chinese world seem to be
the Hu ##, who appear as mounted archers on the steppe frontier in
northern Shanxi at the end of the fourth century BCE. In Han times
they were called Eastern Hu to distinguish them from the Xiongnu, who
then dominated the steppe, and continuities in the historical record
allow us to identify them with a high degree of probability as
speakers of an ancestral form of Mongolian. Although it is still
commonly believed both in China and the west that the Xiongnu
themselves were also Altaic, or even specifically Turkic, speakers, I
showed already in 1962 that the extensive corpus of Xiongnu words and
proper names transcribed in Chinese which implies that there were many
words beginning with the liquids, [r] and [1], makes this highly
unlikely. In my 1962 article, following a suggestion in Ligeti (1950),
I proposed a connection between the Xiongnu language and the Yeniseian
languages now represented by one sole survivor, Ket, but formerly more
widely spoken in southern Siberia. Though some of the etymological
connections I proposed between Yeniseian words and Xiongnu words in
Chinese transcription still seem to me quite plausible, I never
regarded this idea as more than an interesting hypothesis for further
research. More recently, I have come to the conclusion that the
Xiongnu must have originated in the Ordos close to the Chinese
frontier and were probably descended from peoples known earlier to the
Chinese as Rong or Dí who adopted mounted archery and the associated
nomadic way of life when this new and formidable technique of warfare
came to the eastern steppe from the west after the middle of the first
millennium BCE (Pulleyblank 1994). This would not rule out a
connection with Yeniseian. The speakers of Yeniseian languages could
be descendants of Xiongnu who moved north after the collapse of the
Xiongnu empire in the second century of the present era.
"

If the identity proposed between the Huns and the Hsiung-nu/Xiongnu
holds, perhaps we should look for unexplained Germanic words in Ket?


Torsten