Ket language

Ket
Spoken in	Russia
Region	Krasnoyarsk Krai
Ethnicity	Ket people
Native speakers	550  (date missing)
Language family	Dené–Yeniseian Yeniseian Northern Yeniseian Ket
Writing system	Cyrillic
Language codes
ISO 639-3	ket

The Ket language, formerly known as Yenisei Ostyak, is a Siberian language long thought to be an isolate, the sole surviving language of a Yeniseian language family. It is spoken along the middle Yenisei basin by the Ket people.

The language is threatened with extinction—the number of ethnic Kets that are native speakers of the language had dropped from 1,225 in 1926 to 537 in 1989. Another Yeniseian language, Yugh, is believed to have recently become extinct.

Classification

Attempts have been made by Soviet scholars to establish a relationship with either Burushaski or the Sino-Tibetan languages, and it frequently forms part of the Dene–Caucasian hypothesis. None of these attempts have been conclusive. Joseph Greenberg proposed a link between Ket and other Yeniseian languages and the Na-Dene language group of North America in his final study of Eurasiatic languages. In February 2008, linguist Edward Vajda also submitted a paper on the proposed link between Ket with the Na-Dene languages. Now published in 2010, Vajda's paper has been favorably reviewed by several experts on Na-Dene and Yeniseian languages, including Michael Krauss, Jeff Leer, James Kari, and Heinrich Werner, as well as a number of other well-known linguists, including Bernard Comrie, Johanna Nichols, Victor Golla, Michael Fortescue, and Eric Hamp, so that a broad consensus has formed in support of this connection. Some experts on Yenisein remain extremely skeptical or reject the hypothesis (e.g. Stefan Georg).

Documentation

The earliest observations about the language were published by P. S. Pallas in 1788 in a travel diary (Путешествия по разным провинциям Русского Государства Puteshestviya po raznim provintsiyam Russkogo Gosudarstva). In 1858, M. A. Castrén published the first grammar and dictionary (Versuch einer jenissei-ostjakischen und Kottischen Sprachlehre), which also included material on the Kot language. During the 19th century, the Kets were mistaken for a tribe of the Finno-Ugric Khanty. A. Karger in 1934 published the first grammar (Кетский язык Ketskij jazyk), as well as a Ket primer (Букварь на кетском языке Bukvar' na ketskom jazyke), and a new treatment appeared in 1968, written by A. Kreinovich. E. Alekseyenko has written a historical-ethnological treatment of the Kets (Кеты Kety, 1967). Western Washington University historical linguist Edward Vajda offers better substantiated findings into the origins of the Ket people, where DNA claims show genetic affinities with that of Tibetan, Burmese, and others [1]. Edward Vajda spent a year in Siberia (2005–2006) studying the Ket people, and finds a relationship of Ket language to that of Native American Na-Dene languages, and also suggests the tonal system of the Ket language is closer to that of Vietnamese than any of the native Siberian languages [2]. His (2004) monograph Ket is the first modern scholarly grammar of the Ket language in English. (Lueders 2008)

Phonology

Vowels

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i	ɨ	u
Mid	ɛ1	ə	ɔ1
Open	a 2

1. The normally open-mid /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ are pronounced as close-mid [e] and [o], respectively, when they have the high-steady tone.
2. /a/ freely varies between [æ], [a], [ɐ], and [ɑ].

Consonants

Vajda analyses Ket as having only twelve consonant phonemes:

		Bilabial	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Uvular	Glottal
Nasal		m	n		ŋ
Plosive	voiceless		t		k	q
	voiced	b	d
Fricative			s	ç			h
Lateral fricative			ɮ

There is much allophony, and the phonetic inventory of consonants is essentially as below. This is the level of description reflected by the Ket alphabet.

		Bilabial	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Uvular	Glottal
Nasal		m	n		ŋ
Plosive	voiceless	p	t		k	q	ʔ
	voiced	b	d		ɡ	ɢ
Fricative	voiceless		s	ç	(x)	(χ)	h
	voiced	β		ʝ	ɣ	ʁ
Lateral fricative			ɮ
Tap			ɾ
Trill			r

Furthermore, all nasal consonants in Ket have voiceless allophones at the end of a monosyllabic word with a glottalized or descending tone (i.e., [m, n, ŋ] turn into [m̥, n̥, ŋ̥]), likewise, [ɮ] becomes [ɬ] in the same situation. Alveolars are often pronounced laminal and possibly palatalized, though not in the vicinity of a uvular consonant. /q/ is normally pronounced with affrication, as [q^χ].

Tone

Descriptions of Ket vary widely in the number of contrastive tones they report: as many as eight and as few as zero have been counted. Given this wide disagreement, whether or not Ket is a tonal language is debatable, although the non-tonal argument "seems to be the most well-supported."

In tonal descriptions, Ket does not employ a tone on every syllable but instead uses one tone per word. Following one description^{[citation needed]} that employs tone, the five basic tones are as follows:

Tone name	Glottalized	High-Even	Rising Falling	Falling	Rising High-Falling
Tone contour	34	55	13.31	31	13.53
Example	[bɛ̌ʔs] "rabbit"	[súl] "blood"	[hə̌.nûl] "puddle"	[ɛ̂m̥] "flying squirrel"	[qǐ.bá͜âŋ] "grandfathers"

Ket Alphabet

In the 1930s a Latin based alphabet was developed and used:

A a	Ā ā	Æ æ	B b	Ç ç	D d	E e	Ē ē
Ə ə	F f	G g	H h	Ҕ ҕ	I i	Ī ī	J j
K k	L l	M m	N n	Ņ ņ	Ŋ ŋ	O o	Ō ō
P p	Q q	R r	S s	Ş ş	T t	U u	Ū ū
V v	Z z	Ƶ ƶ	Ь ь

In the 1980s a new, Cyrillic-based, alphabet was created:

А а	Б б	В в	Г г	Г̡ г̡	Д д	Е е	Ё ё
Ж ж	З з	И и	Й й	К к	Ӄ ӄ	Л л	М м
Н н	Ӈ ӈ	О о	Ө ө	П п	Р р	С с	Т т
У у	Ф ф	Х х	Ц ц	Ч ч	Ш ш	Щ щ	Ъ ъ
Ә ә	Ы ы	Ь ь	’	Э э	Ю ю	Я я

Literature

• N. K. Karger, Кетский язык. — Языки и письменность народов Севера. Ч. III, Moscow, Leningrad (1934)
• E. A. Kreinovich, Кетский язык. — Языки народов СССР. Т. V, Leningrad (1968)
• Edward J. Vajda. Ket Prosodic Phonology. (2000) Munich: Lincom Europa Languages of the World vol. 15.
• Edward J. Vajda. Ket. (2004) Munich: Lincom Europa Languages of the World vol. 204. ISBN 3895862215. 109pp.
• E. Vajda, M. Zinn. Morfologicheskii slovar ketskogo glagola: na osnove iuzhno-ketskogo dialekta. = Morphological dictionary of the Ket verb: Southern dialect / E. Vajda, M. Zinn. (2004)
• Vajda, Edward J. "Siberian Link with Na-Dene Languages." The Dene–Yeniseian Connection, ed. by J. Kari and B. Potter, 33-99. Anthropological Papers of the University of Alaska, new series, vol. 5. Fairbanks: University of Alaska Fairbanks, Department of Anthropology. (2010)

External links

• Endangered Languages of the Indigenous Peoples of Siberia – The Ket Language
• Ket language vocabulary with loanwords (from the World Loanword Database)
• Filtchenko, Andrei. 2001. Ket Language
• Georg, Stefan. 2006. A Descriptive Grammar of Ket (Yenisei-Ostyak). Folkestone, Kent: Global Oriental. 10-ISBN 1-901-90358-3; 13-ISBN 978-1-901-90358-4
• Gordon, Raymond G., Jr. (ed.), 2005. Ket. In Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Fifteenth edition. Dallas, Tex.: SIL International.
• Kazakevich, Olga, et al. 2006?. Multimedia Database of Ket Language, Moscow State (Lomonosov) University
• Lueders, Ulrich. Books: Language Description, Ket: Vajda. Publisher's announcement on LINGUIST List
• Vajda, Edward J. 2000. Ket and other Yeneseic Peoples
• Vajda, Edward J. 2006. The Ket People – Google Video
• Table of contents and ordering information for The Dene–Yeniseian Connection.
• Notices and news items on Dene–Yeniseian
• Viikberg, Jüri. Kets. In The Red Book of the Peoples of the Russian Empire, NGO Red Book, ISBN 9985-9369-2-2 (Wikipedia article)