Dene–Yeniseian is a proposed language family consisting of the Yeniseian languages of central Siberia and the Na-Dene languages of northwestern North America.
88-416: Reception among experts has been somewhat favorable; thus, Dene–Yeniseian has been called "the first demonstration of a genealogical link between Old World and New World language families that meets the standards of traditional comparative - historical linguistics ". The main cause of skepticism among other linguists, geneticists and researchers from related fields can be attributed to the significance of such
176-474: A Japonic language family rather than dialects of Japanese, the Japanese language itself was considered a language isolate and therefore the only language in its family. Most of the world's languages are known to be related to others. Those that have no known relatives (or for which family relationships are only tentatively proposed) are called language isolates , essentially language families consisting of
264-646: A clade with Sino-Tibetan, which he called Sino-Yeniseian . The Sino-Caucasian hypothesis has been expanded by others to " Dene–Caucasian " to include the Na-Dene languages of North America, Burushaski , Basque and, occasionally, Etruscan . A narrower binary Dene–Yeniseian family has recently been well received. The validity of the rest of the family, however, is viewed as doubtful or rejected by nearly all historical linguists . An updated tree by Georgiy Starostin now groups Na-Dene with Sino-Tibetan and Yeniseian with Burushaski ( Karasuk hypothesis). A link between
352-652: A Proto-Dene-Yeniseian homeland located in eastern Siberia around the Amur and Aldan Rivers . These people would have been hunter-gatherers , as are the modern Yeniseians, but unlike nearly all other Siberian groups (except for some Paleosiberian peoples located around the Pacific Rim of far eastern Siberia, who appear genetically unrelated to the Yeniseians). Eventually all descendants in Eurasia were eliminated by
440-592: A change operates unconditionally (in all environments), the context in which it applies must be specified: For example: Here is a second example: The symbol "#" stands for a word boundary (initial or final) and so the notation "/__#" means "word-finally", and "/#__" means "word-initially": That can be simplified to in which P stands for any plosive . In historical linguistics , a number of traditional terms designate types of phonetic change, either by nature or result. A number of such types are often (or usually) sporadic, that is, more or less accidents that happen to
528-633: A complex agglutinative prefixing verb structure, which differs from most of the other languages in Asia and—to a lesser extent—North America. The first peer-reviewed publication to propose the existence of a distinct Dene–Yeniseian family was written by the macrofamily supporter Merritt Ruhlen (1998) in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , United States. However, Vajda (2010a :34) states, without specifying which ones, that 26 of
616-497: A genealogical relationship between Na-Dene and Yeniseian". The Ket people themselves have received the Dene–Yeniseian hypothesis well, being aware of similar features they observe on documentaries on television. Dene–Yeniseian is generally classified as follows: Yeniseian Tlingit Eyak Athabaskan Using computational phylogenetic methods, Sicoli & Holton (2014) proposed that Dene–Yeniseian did not split into
704-509: A linguistic area). In a similar vein, there are many similar unique innovations in Germanic , Baltic and Slavic that are far more likely to be areal features than traceable to a common proto-language. But legitimate uncertainty about whether shared innovations are areal features, coincidence, or inheritance from a common ancestor, leads to disagreement over the proper subdivisions of any large language family. The concept of language families
792-475: A link being conclusively proven as there have been numerous attempts of establishing definite linguistic relationships between languages natively spoken throughout Eurasia to those of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and most have been widely rejected due to their being mostly based on superficial if not erroneous phonological , lexicological and morphological similarities. Consequently, Dene-Yeniseian
880-610: A link between Sino-Tibetan, Na-Dene, and Yeniseian to be plausible but did not support the hypothesis that Sino-Tibetan and Na-Dene were related to the Caucasian languages (Sino–Caucasian and Dene–Caucasian). A 2023 analysis by David Bradley using the standard techniques of comparative linguistics supports a distant genetic link between the Sino-Tibetan, Na-Dene, and Yeniseian language families. Bradley argues that any similarities Sino-Tibetan shares with other language families of
968-426: A number of sign languages have developed in isolation and appear to have no relatives at all. Nonetheless, such cases are relatively rare and most well-attested languages can be unambiguously classified as belonging to one language family or another, even if this family's relation to other families is not known. Language contact can lead to the development of new languages from the mixture of two or more languages for
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#17327904407341056-469: A possible relation between Yeniseian and Sino–Tibetan, citing several possible cognates . Gao Jingyi (2014) identified twelve Sinitic and Yeniseian shared etymologies that belonged to the basic vocabulary, and argued that these Sino-Yeniseian etymologies could not be loans from either language into the other. The " Sino-Caucasian " hypothesis of Sergei Starostin posits that the Yeniseian languages form
1144-528: A previous sound change causes X,Y > Y (features X and Y merge as Y), a new one cannot affect only an original X. Sound change ignores grammar : A sound change can have only phonological constraints, like X > Z in unstressed syllables . For example, it cannot affect only adjectives . The only exception is that a sound change may recognise word boundaries, even when they are unindicated by prosodic clues. Also, sound changes may be regularized in inflectional paradigms (such as verbal inflection), when it
1232-537: A proto-language into daughter languages typically occurs through geographical separation, with different regional dialects of the proto-language undergoing different language changes and thus becoming distinct languages over time. One well-known example of a language family is the Romance languages , including Spanish , French , Italian , Portuguese , Romanian , Catalan , and many others, all of which are descended from Vulgar Latin . The Romance family itself
1320-431: A range of topics ( archaeology , prehistory , ethnogeography , genetics , kinship , and folklore ) by experts in these fields. The evidence offered by Vajda includes over 110 proposed cognate morphemes and about ten homologous prefix and suffix positions of the verbs. Vajda compared the existing reconstructions of Proto-Yeniseian and Proto-Na-Dene, augmented the reconstructions based on the apparent relationship between
1408-834: A result, he agreed with the consensus belief that lexical evidence of a genetic relationship becomes virtually undetectable after about 8,000 to 10,000 years of linguistic separation, but suggested that certain sorts of complex morphology may remain stable beyond this time period. Further evidence for Dene–Yeniseian is in Vajda (2013a) . Vajda presents comparanda for an ancient Dene-Yeniseian possessive connector prefix (possibly *ŋ) that appears in idiosyncratic ways in Dene (or Athabaskan), Eyak, Tlingit, and Yeniseian nouns, postpositions, directionals, and demonstratives. Vajda also suggests one new lexical cognate: PA directional *ñəs-d "ahead", "out on open water" and Yeniseian root *es "open space". In terms of
1496-473: A robust tree that does not depend on the initial choice of the "tree prior", i.e. the model for the tree generation. In addition, Wilson (2023) has argued that a cluster of related technology words in proto-Athabaskan and Yeniseian languages suggests a linguistic continuum between the two continents that extended well into the Common Era , clouding any conclusive evidence for the back-migration model. Below
1584-427: A single language and have no single ancestor. Isolates are languages that cannot be proven to be genealogically related to any other modern language. As a corollary, every language isolate also forms its own language family — a genetic family which happens to consist of just one language. One often cited example is Basque , which forms a language family on its own; but there are many other examples outside Europe. On
1672-512: A single language. A speech variety may also be considered either a language or a dialect depending on social or political considerations. Thus, different sources, especially over time, can give wildly different numbers of languages within a certain family. Classifications of the Japonic family , for example, range from one language (a language isolate with dialects) to nearly twenty—until the classification of Ryukyuan as separate languages within
1760-462: A single language. There are an estimated 129 language isolates known today. An example is Basque . In general, it is assumed that language isolates have relatives or had relatives at some point in their history but at a time depth too great for linguistic comparison to recover them. A language isolate is classified based on the fact that enough is known about the isolate to compare it genetically to other languages but no common ancestry or relationship
1848-449: A study he did with Johanna Nichols investigating the history of complex prefixing verb structures in various families possessing morphology of this sort. His conclusion was that, contrary to prevailing belief, such structures are often preserved intact with little change over several thousands of years, and as a result may actually be stronger evidence of a genetic connection than the lexical relationships that are traditionally sought. As
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#17327904407341936-487: Is a geographic area having several languages that feature common linguistic structures. The similarities between those languages are caused by language contact, not by chance or common origin, and are not recognized as criteria that define a language family. An example of a sprachbund would be the Indian subcontinent . Shared innovations, acquired by borrowing or other means, are not considered genetic and have no bearing with
2024-450: Is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor, called the proto-language of that family. The term family is a metaphor borrowed from biology, with the tree model used in historical linguistics analogous to a family tree , or to phylogenetic trees of taxa used in evolutionary taxonomy . Linguists thus describe the daughter languages within a language family as being genetically related . The divergence of
2112-454: Is a table of Ket and Navajo words. As noted by Tailleur and Werner, some of the earliest proposals of genetic relations of Yeniseian, by M.A. Castrén (1856), James Byrne (1892), and G.J. Ramstedt (1907), suggested that Yeniseian was a northern relative of the Sino–Tibetan languages. These ideas were followed much later by Kai Donner and Karl Bouda. A 2008 study found further evidence for
2200-483: Is also a sister language to that fourth branch, then the two sister languages are more closely related to each other than to that common ancestral proto-language. The term macrofamily or superfamily is sometimes applied to proposed groupings of language families whose status as phylogenetic units is generally considered to be unsubstantiated by accepted historical linguistic methods. Some close-knit language families, and many branches within larger families, take
2288-452: Is an absolute isolate: it has not been shown to be related to any other modern language despite numerous attempts. A language may be said to be an isolate currently but not historically if related but now extinct relatives are attested. The Aquitanian language , spoken in Roman times, may have been an ancestor of Basque, but it could also have been a sister language to the ancestor of Basque. In
2376-543: Is based on the historical observation that languages develop dialects , which over time may diverge into distinct languages. However, linguistic ancestry is less clear-cut than familiar biological ancestry, in which species do not crossbreed. It is more like the evolution of microbes, with extensive lateral gene transfer . Quite distantly related languages may affect each other through language contact , which in extreme cases may lead to languages with no single ancestor, whether they be creoles or mixed languages . In addition,
2464-415: Is deemed only as "plausible" by linguistic scholars at large. Researchers in historical linguistics have long sought to link the various known language families around the world into macrofamilies . The putative relationship between Na-Dene and Yeniseian families was first proposed by Alfredo Trombetti in 1923. Much of the early evidence adduced has been typological ; in particular, both families have
2552-473: Is expected to apply mechanically whenever its structural conditions are met, irrespective of any non-phonological factors like the meaning of the words that are affected. Apparent exceptions to regular change can occur because of dialect borrowing, grammatical analogy, or other causes known and unknown, and some changes are described as "sporadic" and so they affect only one or a few particular words, without any apparent regularity. The Neogrammarian linguists of
2640-533: Is found with any other known language. A language isolated in its own branch within a family, such as Albanian and Armenian within Indo-European, is often also called an isolate, but the meaning of the word "isolate" in such cases is usually clarified with a modifier . For instance, Albanian and Armenian may be referred to as an "Indo-European isolate". By contrast, so far as is known, the Basque language
2728-417: Is inevitable : All languages vary from place to place and time to time, and neither writing nor media prevents that change. A statement of the form is to be read as "Sound A changes into (or is replaced by, is reflected as, etc.) sound B". Therefore, A belongs to an older stage of the language in question, and B belongs to a more recent stage. The symbol ">" can be reversed, B < A, which also means that
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2816-401: Is most suggestive, but most compelling evidence for actual relationship comes from those sound correspondences which can be accounted for by independently motivated regular sound changes". Campbell (2024: 365) doubts the validity of Dene–Yeniseian, saying that "neither the lexical evidence with putative sound correspondences nor the morphological evidence adduced has proven sufficient to support
2904-477: Is no longer phonological but morphological in nature. Sound change is exceptionless : If a sound change can happen at a place, it will affect all sounds that meet the criteria for change. Apparent exceptions are possible because of analogy and other regularization processes, another sound change, or an unrecognized conditioning factor. That is the traditional view expressed by the Neogrammarians. In
2992-460: Is no upper bound to the number of languages a family can contain. Some families, such as the Austronesian languages , contain over 1000. Language families can be identified from shared characteristics amongst languages. Sound changes are one of the strongest pieces of evidence that can be used to identify a genetic relationship because of their predictable and consistent nature, and through
3080-637: Is not a measure of) a genetic relationship between the languages concerned. Linguistic interference can occur between languages that are genetically closely related, between languages that are distantly related (like English and French, which are distantly related Indo-European languages ) and between languages that have no genetic relationship. Some exceptions to the simple genetic relationship model of languages include language isolates and mixed , pidgin and creole languages . Mixed languages, pidgins and creole languages constitute special genetic types of languages. They do not descend linearly or directly from
3168-451: Is not attested by written records and so is conjectured to have been spoken before the invention of writing. A common visual representation of a language family is given by a genetic language tree. The tree model is sometimes termed a dendrogram or phylogeny . The family tree shows the relationship of the languages within a family, much as a family tree of an individual shows their relationship with their relatives. There are criticisms to
3256-446: Is part of the larger Indo-European family, which includes many other languages native to Europe and South Asia , all believed to have descended from a common ancestor known as Proto-Indo-European . A language family is usually said to contain at least two languages, although language isolates — languages that are not related to any other language — are occasionally referred to as families that contain one language. Inversely, there
3344-422: Is possible to recover many features of a proto-language by applying the comparative method , a reconstructive procedure worked out by 19th century linguist August Schleicher . This can demonstrate the validity of many of the proposed families in the list of language families . For example, the reconstructible common ancestor of the Indo-European language family is called Proto-Indo-European . Proto-Indo-European
3432-453: Is the critical review of the volume of collected papers by Lyle Campbell and a response by Vajda published in late 2011 that imply that the proposal is not settled at the present time. Other reviews and notices of the volume appeared in 2011 and 2012 by Keren Rice , Jared Diamond , and Michael Dunn. Sicoli and Holton 2014, applying Bayesian analysis to typological data from Dene and Yeniseian languages, constructed phylogenies that suggest that
3520-465: The North Germanic language family, including Danish , Swedish , Norwegian and Icelandic , which have shared descent from Ancient Norse . Latin and ancient Norse are both attested in written records, as are many intermediate stages between those ancestral languages and their modern descendants. In other cases, genetic relationships between languages are not directly attested. For instance,
3608-468: The Tuscan dialect , which was once [k] as in di [k] arlo 'of Carlo' but is now [h] di [h] arlo and alternates with [k] in other positions: con [k] arlo 'with Carlo'), that label is inherently imprecise and must often be clarified as referring to either phonemic change or restructuring. Research on sound change is usually conducted under the working assumption that it is regular , which means that it
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3696-674: The comparative method can be used to reconstruct proto-languages. However, languages can also change through language contact which can falsely suggest genetic relationships. For example, the Mongolic , Tungusic , and Turkic languages share a great deal of similarities that lead several scholars to believe they were related . These supposed relationships were later discovered to be derived through language contact and thus they are not truly related. Eventually though, high amounts of language contact and inconsistent changes will render it essentially impossible to derive any more relationships; even
3784-489: The comparative method of linguistic analysis. In order to test the hypothesis that two languages are related, the comparative method begins with the collection of pairs of words that are hypothesized to be cognates : i.e., words in related languages that are derived from the same word in the shared ancestral language. Pairs of words that have similar pronunciations and meanings in the two languages are often good candidates for hypothetical cognates. The researcher must rule out
3872-591: The "splitters" caricatured as rigid enforcers of orthodoxy willing to "shout down" researchers who disagree with their belief that long-range connections are impossible to establish. At a symposium in Alaska in 2008, Edward Vajda of Western Washington University summarized ten years of research, based on verbal morphology and reconstructions of the proto-languages , indicating that the Yeniseian and Na-Dene families might be related. The summation of Vajda's research
3960-422: The (more recent) B derives from the (older) A": The two sides of such a statement indicate only the start and the end of the change, but additional intermediate stages may have occurred. The example above is actually a compressed account of a sequence of changes: * [t] first changed to [θ] (like the initial consonant of English thin ), which has since yielded [f] and can be represented more fully: Unless
4048-467: The 19th century introduced the term sound law to refer to rules of regular change, perhaps in imitation of the laws of physics, and the term "law" is still used in referring to specific sound rules that are named after their authors like Grimm's law , Grassmann's law , etc. Real-world sound laws often admit exceptions, but the expectation of their regularity or absence of exceptions is of great heuristic value by allowing historical linguists to define
4136-414: The 34 sets of words offered by Ruhlen are coincidental look-alikes, whereas 8 of Ruhlen's word sets follow Vajda's rules of sound correspondences. Michael Fortescue independently suggested the possible existence of a Dene–Yeniseian family in his 1998 book Language Relations Across Bering Strait . He writes, "I have attempted throughout to find a middle way between the cavalier optimism of ' lumpers ' and
4224-539: The Dene-Yeniseian Workshop at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. There were nine papers, the first new papers on Dene–Yeniseian since the 2010 volume was published. As of July 2012, there are no plans to publish the papers, but video from the workshop is available. Vajda's presentations at the 2012 workshop augmented his proposal with additional linguistic and non-linguistic evidence. He discussed
4312-472: The Dene-Yeniseian connection "more likely represents a radiation out of Beringia with a back migration into Central Asia than a migration from Central Asia or Western Asia to North America ". In 2012, George Starostin questioned the validity of the macrofamily, citing the fact that "Vajda’s 'regular correspondences' are not... properly 'regular' in the classic comparative-historical sense of
4400-490: The East Asia area such as Hmong-Mien , Altaic (which is actually a sprachbund ), Austroasiatic , Kra–Dai , and Austronesian came through contact; but as there has been no recent contact between the Sino-Tibetan, Na-Dene, and Yeniseian language families then any similarities these groups share must be residual. Genetic relationship (linguistics) This is an accepted version of this page A language family
4488-512: The Na–Dene languages and Sino-Tibetan languages, known as Sino-Dene had also been proposed by Edward Sapir . Around 1920 Sapir became convinced that Na-Dene was more closely related to Sino-Tibetan than to other American families. Edward Vadja's Dene–Yeniseian proposal renewed interest among linguists such as Geoffrey Caveney (2014) to look into support for the Sino–Dene hypothesis. Caveney considered
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#17327904407344576-630: The Romance languages and the North Germanic languages are also related to each other, being subfamilies of the Indo-European language family , since both Latin and Old Norse are believed to be descended from an even more ancient language, Proto-Indo-European ; however, no direct evidence of Proto-Indo-European or its divergence into its descendant languages survives. In cases such as these, genetic relationships are established through use of
4664-496: The common ancestor of the Germanic subfamily, was itself a descendant of Proto-Indo-European , the common ancestor of the Indo-European family. Within a large family, subfamilies can be identified through "shared innovations": members of a subfamily will share features that represent retentions from their more recent common ancestor, but were not present in the overall proto-language of the larger family. Some taxonomists restrict
4752-419: The creation of a new sound. A sound change can eliminate the affected sound, or a new sound can be added. Sound changes can be environmentally conditioned if the change occurs in only some sound environments , and not others. The term "sound change" refers to diachronic changes, which occur in a language's sound system. On the other hand, " alternation " refers to changes that happen synchronically (within
4840-563: The family tree model. Critics focus mainly on the claim that the internal structure of the trees is subject to variation based on the criteria of classification. Even among those who support the family tree model, there are debates over which languages should be included in a language family. For example, within the dubious Altaic language family , there are debates over whether the Japonic and Koreanic languages should be included or not. The wave model has been proposed as an alternative to
4928-415: The family. The largest five language families in terms of number of speakers (Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Afro-Asiatic, Niger-Congo and Austronesian) make up five-sixths (almost 83.3%) of the world’s population. Two languages have a genetic relationship , and belong to the same language family, if both are descended from a common ancestor through the process of language change , or one is descended from
5016-415: The family. Thus, the term family is analogous to the biological term clade . Language families can be divided into smaller phylogenetic units, sometimes referred to as "branches" or "subfamilies" of the family; for instance, the Germanic languages are a subfamily of the Indo-European family. Subfamilies share a more recent common ancestor than the common ancestor of the larger family; Proto-Germanic ,
5104-495: The following families that contain at least 1% of the 7,164 known languages in the world: Glottolog 5.0 (2024) lists the following as the largest families, of 7,788 languages (other than sign languages , pidgins , and unclassifiable languages ): Language counts can vary significantly depending on what is considered a dialect; for example Lyle Campbell counts only 27 Otomanguean languages, although he, Ethnologue and Glottolog also disagree as to which languages belong in
5192-468: The form of dialect continua in which there are no clear-cut borders that make it possible to unequivocally identify, define, or count individual languages within the family. However, when the differences between the speech of different regions at the extremes of the continuum are so great that there is no mutual intelligibility between them, as occurs in Arabic , the continuum cannot meaningfully be seen as
5280-503: The global scale, the site Glottolog counts a total of 423 language families in the world, including 184 isolates. One controversial theory concerning the genetic relationships among languages is monogenesis , the idea that all known languages, with the exceptions of creoles , pidgins and sign languages , are descendant from a single ancestral language. If that is true, it would mean all languages (other than pidgins, creoles, and sign languages) are genetically related, but in many cases,
5368-542: The language family concept. It has been asserted, for example, that many of the more striking features shared by Italic languages ( Latin , Oscan , Umbrian , etc.) might well be " areal features ". However, very similar-looking alterations in the systems of long vowels in the West Germanic languages greatly postdate any possible notion of a proto-language innovation (and cannot readily be regarded as "areal", either, since English and continental West Germanic were not
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#17327904407345456-487: The language of an individual speaker, depending on the neighbouring sounds) and do not change the language's underlying system (for example, the -s in the English plural can be pronounced differently depending on the preceding sound, as in bet [s], bed [z], which is a form of alternation, rather than sound change). Since "sound change" can refer to the historical introduction of an alternation (such as postvocalic /k/ in
5544-444: The latter case, Basque and Aquitanian would form a small family together. Ancestors are not considered to be distinct members of a family. A proto-language can be thought of as a mother language (not to be confused with a mother tongue ) being the root from which all languages in the family stem. The common ancestor of a language family is seldom known directly since most languages have a relatively short recorded history. However, it
5632-687: The male and female lines, respectively, except for mutations. His most compelling DNA evidence is the Q1 Y-chromosomal haplogroup subclade, which he notes arose c. 15,000 years ago and is found in nearly all Native Americans and nearly all of the Yeniseian Ket people (90%), but almost nowhere else in Eurasia except for the Selkup people (65%), who have intermarried with the Ket people for centuries. Using this and other evidence, he proposes
5720-474: The modern Na-Dene people were not similarly threatened. In fact, reindeer herding spread throughout Siberia rather recently and there were many other hunter-gatherer peoples in Siberia in modern times. In his 2012 reply to George Starostin , Vajda clarifies that Dene-Yeniseian "as it currently stands is a hypothesis of language relatedness but not yet a proper hypothesis of language taxonomy". He leaves "open
5808-411: The notion of regular correspondence by the comparative method . Each sound change is limited in space and time and so it functions in a limited area (within certain dialects ) and for a limited period of time. For those and other reasons, the term "sound law" has been criticized for implying a universality that is unrealistic for sound change. A sound change that affects the phonological system or
5896-467: The number or the distribution of its phonemes is a phonological change . The following statements are used as heuristics in formulating sound changes as understood within the Neogrammarian model. However, for modern linguistics, they are not taken as inviolable rules but are seen as guidelines. Sound change has no memory : Sound change does not discriminate between the sources of a sound. If
5984-423: The oldest demonstrable language family, Afroasiatic , is far younger than language itself. Estimates of the number of language families in the world may vary widely. According to Ethnologue there are 7,151 living human languages distributed in 142 different language families. Lyle Campbell (2019) identifies a total of 406 independent language families, including isolates. Ethnologue 27 (2024) lists
6072-422: The other language. Sound change In historical linguistics , a sound change is a change in the pronunciation of a language. A sound change can involve the replacement of one speech sound (or, more generally, one phonetic feature value) by a different one (called phonetic change ) or a more general change to the speech sounds that exist ( phonological change ), such as the merger of two sounds or
6160-454: The other. The term and the process of language evolution are independent of, and not reliant on, the terminology, understanding, and theories related to genetics in the biological sense, so, to avoid confusion, some linguists prefer the term genealogical relationship . There is a remarkably similar pattern shown by the linguistic tree and the genetic tree of human ancestry that was verified statistically. Languages interpreted in terms of
6248-660: The past decades, however, it has been shown that sound change does not necessarily affect all possible words. However, when a sound change is initiated, it often eventually expands to the whole lexicon . For example, the Spanish fronting of the Vulgar Latin [g] ( voiced velar stop ) before [i e ɛ] seems to have reached every possible word. By contrast, the voicing of word-initial Latin [k] to [g] occurred in colaphus > golpe and cattus > gato but not in canna > caña . See also lexical diffusion . Sound change
6336-454: The pessimism of orthodox 'splitters' on the matters of deep genetic relationship between the continents". As alluded to by Fortescue's comment, scientific investigations of long-range language family relationships have been complicated by an ideological dispute between the so-called "lumpers" and "splitters" , with "lumpers" caricatured as bumbling amateurs willing to group together disparate, unrelated families based on chance resemblances and
6424-542: The possibility that either Yeniseian or ND (or both) might have a closer relative elsewhere in Eurasia". At the time of publication, Vajda's proposals had been favorably reviewed by several specialists of Na-Dene and Yeniseian languages—although at times with caution—including Michael Krauss , Jeff Leer , James Kari , and Heinrich Werner , as well as a number of other respected linguists, such as Bernard Comrie , Johanna Nichols , Victor Golla , Michael Fortescue , Eric Hamp , and Bill Poser . One significant exception
6512-470: The possibility that the two words are similar merely due to chance, or due to one having borrowed the words from the other (or from a language related to the other). Chance resemblance is ruled out by the existence of large collections of pairs of words between the two languages showing similar patterns of phonetic similarity. Once coincidental similarity and borrowing have been eliminated as possible explanations for similarities in sound and meaning of words,
6600-653: The purposes of interactions between two groups who speak different languages. Languages that arise in order for two groups to communicate with each other to engage in commercial trade or that appeared as a result of colonialism are called pidgin . Pidgins are an example of linguistic and cultural expansion caused by language contact. However, language contact can also lead to cultural divisions. In some cases, two different language speaking groups can feel territorial towards their language and do not want any changes to be made to it. This causes language boundaries and groups in contact are not willing to make any compromises to accommodate
6688-482: The putative phylogenetic tree of human languages are transmitted to a great extent vertically (by ancestry) as opposed to horizontally (by spatial diffusion). In some cases, the shared derivation of a group of related languages from a common ancestor is directly attested in the historical record. For example, this is the case for the Romance language family , wherein Spanish , Italian , Portuguese , Romanian , and French are all descended from Latin, as well as for
6776-413: The relationships may be too remote to be detectable. Alternative explanations for some basic observed commonalities between languages include developmental theories, related to the biological development of the capacity for language as the child grows from newborn. A language family is a monophyletic unit; all its members derive from a common ancestor, and all descendants of that ancestor are included in
6864-570: The remaining explanation is common origin: it is inferred that the similarities occurred due to descent from a common ancestor, and the words are actually cognates, implying the languages must be related. When languages are in contact with one another , either of them may influence the other through linguistic interference such as borrowing. For example, French has influenced English , Arabic has influenced Persian , Sanskrit has influenced Tamil , and Chinese has influenced Japanese in this way. However, such influence does not constitute (and
6952-511: The sections within Vajda's 2010 paper, this 2013 article can be read as an addition to his §2 (which ends on p. 63). In a subsequent article, Vajda (2013b) , Vajda discusses features in Ket that arose due to prolonged areal contact with suffixal agglutinating languages. In his 2012 presentation, Vajda also addressed non-linguistic evidence, including analyses of Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA haplogroups , which are passed unchanged down
7040-525: The spread of reindeer -breeding pastoralist peoples (e.g. the speakers of the so-called Altaic languages ) except for the modern Yeniseians, who were able to survive in swampy refuges far to the west along the Yenisei River because it is too mosquito-infested for reindeer to survive easily. Contrarily, the caribou (the North American reindeer population) were never domesticated, and thus
7128-426: The term family to a certain level, but there is little consensus on how to do so. Those who affix such labels also subdivide branches into groups , and groups into complexes . A top-level (i.e., the largest) family is often called a phylum or stock . The closer the branches are to each other, the more closely the languages will be related. This means if a branch of a proto-language is four branches down and there
7216-502: The tree model. The wave model uses isoglosses to group language varieties; unlike in the tree model, these groups can overlap. While the tree model implies a lack of contact between languages after derivation from an ancestral form, the wave model emphasizes the relationship between languages that remain in contact, which is more realistic. Historical glottometry is an application of the wave model, meant to identify and evaluate genetic relations in linguistic linkages . A sprachbund
7304-498: The two primary branches Na-Dene and Yeniseian, but rather into four primary branches. Yeniseian is upheld as a single branch, whereas Na-Dene is assumed to be paraphyletic, being divided into several primary branches instead. Based on their classification, they suggest that Yeniseian represents a back-migration from Beringia back to Asia. However, this phylogenetic study was criticized as methodologically flawed by Yanovich (2020), since it did not employ sufficient input data to generate
7392-465: The two, and suggested sound changes linking the two into a putative Proto-Dene-Yeniseian language. He suggested that Yeniseian tone differences originated in the presence or absence of glottalized consonants in the syllable coda , as still present in the Na-Dene languages. Vajda and others also note that no compelling evidence has been found linking Haida with either Na-Dene or Yeniseian. As for
7480-586: The way towards research on grammaticalization paths in Yeniseian and Na-Dené". Instead of forming a separate family, Starostin believes that both Yeniseian and Na-Dene are part of a much larger grouping called Dene-Caucasian . Starostin states that the two families are related in a large sense, but there is no special relationship between them that would suffice to create a separate family between these two language families. In 2015, Paul Kiparsky endorsed Dene–Yeniseian, saying that "the morphological parallelism and phonological similarities among corresponding affixes
7568-511: The wider Dene–Caucasian hypothesis (see below), while Vajda did not find the kinds of morphological correspondences with these other families that he did with Yeniseian and Na-Dene, he did not rule out the possibility that such evidence exists, and urges that more work be done. In 2011 Vajda published a short annotated bibliography on Dene–Yeniseian languages. On March 24, 2012, the Alaska Native Language Center hosted
7656-428: The word". He also notes that Vajda's "treatment of the verbal morphology" involves "a tiny handful of intriguing isomorphisms... surrounded by an impenetrable sea of assumptions and highly controversial internal reconstructions that create an illusion of systemic reconstruction where there really is none". Nonetheless, Starostin concedes that Vajda's work "is, by all means, a step forward", and that it "may eventually point
7744-696: Was published in June 2010 in The Dene–Yeniseian Connection in the Anthropological Papers of the University of Alaska . This 369-page volume, edited by James Kari and Ben Potter, contains papers from the February 26–29, 2008, symposium plus several contributed papers. Accompanying Vajda's lead paper are primary data on Na-Dene historical phonology by Jeff Leer , along with critiques by several linguistic specialists and articles on
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