User:Petusek/Drafts/Na-Dene languages

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[edit] (intro)

Na-Dene
Nadene, Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit, Tlina-Dene
Geographic
distribution:		 North America
Genetic
classification:		 Dene-Caucasian (controversial)
 Dene-Yeniseian (controversial)
  Na-Dene
Subdivisions:
    Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit
Athabaskan-Eyak
Athabaskan
Eyak
Tlingit
    Haida (disputed)
Na-Dene langs.png

Na-Dene (pronounced [nadɪ'ne] or [nadə'ne]); [1] [2] [3] is a proposed Native American language family which includes the Athabaskan languages, Eyak, and Tlingit, whose relationship is now widely accepted, and possibly Haida, whose connection to the other languages is controversial.

Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit(Campbell) and, more recently, Tlina-Dene(Leer) have been used as synonyms by those who exclude Haida from the family. To the advocates of Haida's membership in the family, however, Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit constitutes only a branchCore Na-Dene or Continental Na-Dene (as opposed to Insular Na-Dene represented by Haida). See the section on the history of the proposal for more details.The second part of the term is based on the reconstruction of Proto-Athabaskan *[dənæ].</ref>

[edit] Family division

[edit] General agreement

In its non-controversial core, Na-Dené consists of two branches, Tlingit and Athabaskan-Eyak:

0. Na-Dene

1. Tlingit language (700 speakers by 1995) (Michael Krauss)
2. Athabaskan-Eyak
2.1. Eyak language † (extinct in 2008)
2.2. Athabaskan languages
2.2.1. Northern
2.2.2. Pacific Coast
2.2.3. Southern

[edit] Haida as a member

For linguists who follow Edward Sapir in connecting Haida to the above languages, the Haida isolate represents an additional branch, with Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit together forming the other:

0. Na-Dene

1. Insular Na-Dene
= Haida language: 45 native speakers (Krauss 1997)
2. Continental Na-Dene
= Core Na-Dene, Tlina-Dene or Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit

The view is, however, further complicated by the recent Dene-Yeniseic proposals in which Both Merrit Ruhlen[citation needed] and Edward Vajda[citation needed] consider the Yeniseian languages the closest relatives of Na-Dene. While the former maintains that Haida belongs to Na-Dene, the latter denies its inclusion in the stock admitting it still might be related at a time-depth greater than the Yeniseic languages. The following chart summarizes the differences between the three positions:

DY
ND Y
H T E A
(Uncontroverial) - + + + -
Vajda - + + + +
Ruhlen + + + + +

Notes:

In the above chart, "+" means related, whereas "-" means unrelated or isolated; A stands for Athabaskan, DY for Dené-Yeniseian, E for Eyak, H for Haida, ND for Na-Dené and T for Tlingit.

Dene or Dine (the Athabaskan languages) is a widely distributed group of Native languages and peoples spoken in Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Northwest Territories, Nunavut, Saskatchewan, Yukon, Alaska, and parts of Oregon and northern California. Eyak was spoken in south central Alaska; the last speaker died in 2008. Navajo is the most widely spoken language of the Na-Dené family, spoken in Arizona, New Mexico, and other regions of the American Southwest.

[edit] History of the Proposal

Year Author(s) A E T H Y S Reference Notes
1798-1800 Fleurieu  ?  ?  ?  ?  ?  ? [citation needed]  ?
1805 Nikolai Petrovich Rezanov  ?  ?  ?  ?  ?  ? [citation needed]  ?
1816 Johann Christoph Adelung & Johann Severin Vater  ?  ?  ?  ?  ?  ? [citation needed]  ?
1839 Ferdinand von Wrangell R R R NA NA NA [citation needed] German Rear Admiral Ferdinand von Wrangell (1839) suspects the relationship between Koloschisch (Tlingit), Ugalenzisch (Eyak) and Athabaskan and presented some word comparisons.
1857? Karl Eduard Buschmann R (R) U NA NA NA [citation needed] The German Karl Eduard Buschmann knew about Eyak (called Ugalenzisch) and considered it (wrogly) another Athabaskan language (his Kinai group). Buschmann (1857) considered Tlingit isolated.
1857/8? Leopold Radlov/ff?  ?  ?  ?  ?  ?  ? [citation needed]  ???
1891 Powell  ?  ?  ?  ?  ?  ? [citation needed]  ?
1894 Franz Boas  ?  ? R R  ?  ? [citation needed] Franz Boas explicitly puts together Haida and Tlingit in a single grouping.
1908 Swanton  ?  ? R R  ?  ? [citation needed]  ?
1911 Swanton  ?  ?  ?  ?  ?  ? [citation needed]  ?
1914 Edward Sapir R  ? R R  ?  ? [citation needed] (A paper read at the Philadelphia meeting of the American Anthropological Association, mentioned in Goddard 1920.)
1915 Edward Sapir R NA R R NA NA The Na-Dene Languages, A Preliminary Report Athabaskan + Tlingit + Haida
1920 Pliny Earl Goddard U NA U  ? NA NA Has Tlingit a Genetic Relation to Athapascan? He considers Athabaskan and Tlingit unrelated. He doesn't mention Haida.
1938 Birket-Smith and Frederica de Laguna NA NA NA NA NA NA The Eyak Indians of the Copper River Delta, Alaska. København. Eyak rediscovered!
1979 Robert D. Levine  ?  ?  ? U NA NA Levine, Robert D. 1979. “Haida and Na-Dene: A New Look at the Evidence,” International Journal of American Linguistics 45: 157–70. “the evidence offered in support of the

‘classical’ Na-Dene hypothesis (i.e., as set up by Sapir in his 1915 statement) is spurious, and that there is currently no empirical basis for including Haida in the Na-Dene grouping” (p. 157)
1979 Michael E. Krauss R R R U NA NA Krauss, Michael E. 1979. “Na-Dene and Eskimo-Aleut,” in Lyle Campbell

and Marianne Mithun, eds., The Languages of Native America. Austin, Tex., 803–901. || “there is no detectable genetic relationship between Haida and the others in the group, Tlingit and Athabaskan-Eyak” (p. 838)
1987 Joseph H. Greenberg R R R R  ?  ? Greenberg, Joseph H. 1987. Language in the Americas. Stanford, Calif. 321–30, Levine’s method of dismantling Na-Dene could just

as easily be turned against Indo-European, “Even after Levine’s unreasonable attack (1979), what survives is a body of evidence superior to that which could be adduced under similar restrictions for the affinity of Albanian, Celtic, and Armenian, all three universally recognized as valid members of the Indo-European family of languages” (p. 331)
1991 Sergei L. Nikolaev R R R R  ?  ? Nikolaev, Sergei L. 1991. “Sino-Caucasian Languages in America,” in Shevoroshkin, Vitaly, ed. 1991. Dene-Sino-Caucasian Languages. Bochum, Germany., 1991: 42–66. “certain doubts have been expressed regarding the inclusion of Haida in the Na-Dene family, but they should be considered unsubstantiated.” (p. 43)


Legend:

  • A: Athabascan
  • E: Eyak
  • T: Tlingit
  • H: Haida
  • S: Sino-Tibetan
  • Y: Yeniseian
  • R: Related
  • U: Unrelated or Isolated
  • NA: Not assessed, not applicable, not available or not considered
  • ?: Unknown or uncertain


Preliminary notes...


- Boas was opposed to the idea that Tlingit was related to Athabaskan, let alone Haida. How is this documented????

- Boas supported Pliny Earle Goddard's (1920) article attacking the inclusion of not only Haida but also Tlingit in the family. How is this documented????

[edit] Typological profile of Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit

All of these languages share a highly complex prefixing verb structure in which tense and mood markers are interdigitated between subject and object agreement markers. The morphological hallmark of the family is a series of prefixes found directly before the verb root that raise or lower the transitivity of the verb word. These prefixes, traditionally known as "classifiers", derive historically from a combination of three distinct classes of morphemes and not found in any other Native American family.


Generalized model of Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit verb morphology

object agreement shape or anatomical prefix tense-mood-aspect prefix 1,2p subject agreement perfective-stative prefix classifier prefix(es) verb root tense-mood-aspect suffix

The phoneme system contains a large number of guttural (velar or uvular) consonants (fronting in many modern Athabaskan languages to palatals and velars, correspondingly) as well as a general absence of labial obstruents (except where /b/ has arisen from *w). In the historical phonology there is a widespread tendency, observable across many Athabaskan languages, for phonemic tonal distinctions to arise from glottal features originally found at the end of the syllable. The glottal features in question are often evident in Eyak or Tlingit. These languages are typologically unusual in containing extensive prefixation yet being SOV and postpositional, features normally associated with suffixing languages.

[edit] Proposals of deeper genetic relations involving Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit

The genetic relationship betweeen Tlingit, Eyak and Athabaskan languages was suggested early in the 19th century, but not universally accepted until much later. Haida, with 15 fluent speakers (M. Krauss, 1995), was originally linked to Tlingit by Franz Boas in 1894. Both Haida and Tlingit were then connected to Athabaskan by Edward Sapir in 1915. Linguists such as Lyle Campbell (1997) today consider the evidence inconclusive and have classified Haida as a language isolate. In order to emphasise the exclusion of Haida, Campbell refers to the language family as Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit rather than Na-Dene. Jeff Leer has recently proposed the name "Tlina-Dine" instead of the cumbersome AET, to emphasize the exclusion of Haida.

[edit] Dené-Yeniseian

Main article: Dené-Yeniseian languages

Recently, Professor Edward Vajda of Western Washington University has presented compelling evidence that the Na-Dene languages (Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit) are actually related to Yeniseian (or Yeniseic) languages of Siberia.[4], the only living representative of which is the Ket language. Key evidence includes homologies in verb prefixes and also a systematic correspondence between the distribution of Ket tones and consonant articulations found in Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit. His paper has been favorably reviewed by several experts on Na-Dene and Yeniseic 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. It was also the conclusion of this seminar that this comparison of Yeniseic and Na-Dene shows that Haida cannot be classified as a genetic unit with Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit if data from Yeniseic languages are considered. [5]

[edit] Earlier Proposals

According to Joseph Greenberg's controversial classification of the languages of Native North America, Na-Dené (including Haida as well as Athabaskan-Eyak + Tlingit) is one of the three main groups of Native languages spoken in the Americas, and represents a distinct wave of migration from Asia to the Americas. The genetic relationship of Tlingit, Eyak and Athabaskan is widely accepted, while the inclusion of Haida remains controversial. The other two families recognized by Greenberg for the Americas are the widely accepted Eskimo-Aleut family, spoken in Siberia, Alaska, the Canadian Arctic and Greenland, and the far less widely accepted Amerind, Greenberg's most controversial classification, which includes every language native to the Americas that is not Eskimo-Aleut or Na-Dené.

Contemporary supporters of Greenberg's theory such as Merritt Ruhlen have suggested that the Na-Dené language family represents a distinct migration of people from Asia to the New World. Ruhlen claims this migration occurred six to eight thousand years ago, placing it around four thousand years later than the previous migration into the Americas by Amerind speakers. Ruhlen speculates that the Na-Dené speakers may have arrived in boats, initially settling near the Queen Charlotte Islands, now in British Columbia, Canada. [1]

According to Sergei Starostin and his followers, Na-Dené (including Haida) belongs to the much broader Dene-Caucasian superfamily, which also contains the North Caucasian languages, Sino-Tibetan languages, Yeniseian languages and Basque. Some of the links subsumed by the Dene-Caucasian proposal were suggested much earlier. The hypothesis that Sino-Tibetan is genetically related to Na-Dene (including Haida) was considered by Edward Sapir nearly a century ago.[6]

[edit] Lexicon

Gloss PAET PA PPA E PAE T PY
head ~*--kye/i(:)ng' tsi' tsiN' shá *ts[ɨ]ʔɢ-
hair-head ~*kye/i(:)ng'+Xa()w *tsî:-gha: sha-Xa`w *tsǝŋe
rock, stone ~*kya(:)y tse: tsa: tsay sha` *čɨʔ-s

PAET ~*--kye/i(:)ng' "head" Tlingit --shá "head" PA --tsi' "head" Eyak tsiN'-dE- "neck" (tsiN'- originally incorporate, with dE- gender)

PAET ~*kye/i(:)ng'+Xa()w "hair of the head", lit. "head+hair" PA *tsî:-gha:, poss. *--tsî:-gha' "id." > Carrier --ts_igha' Tlingit sha-Xa`w, poss. --sha-Xa`wú: "id."

PAET ~*kya(:)y "rock, stone" Tlingit sha` "mountain" PAE *tsay "stone, rock" Eyak tsa: "stone, rock" PA *tse: "stone, rock"

PAE -VCˈ# = Ket -VˑC# short vowel+glot.obstr.coda = high-even tone on a half-long vowel (Vajda 28, wrongly writes "after" short vowel???) Ket \VC# < VCS# falling tone < fricative cluster: Ket q\on < *qonS "cartilage, gristle" PA *gəndz "gristle" PEC *q̇ăm[s_]V "cartilage, gristle" !!!

Ket -nC < -nCV# Ket - < -nC# PY *qoʔn- fir tree PST *kūŋ "branches, etc." PAE *Gand "conifer tree, needles"

PA q'ʊs Eyak q'ahs Yugh q\oːʰn "dark, obscure, hidden..." Ket qon- "dark" (Starostin *ẋoʔn-)


  • PY velar approximant *ɰ
- elided word-initially: Pre-PY *ɰ- > PY *Ø-
- became *k before a consonant: Pre-PY *-ɰC- > PY *-kC-
- causes rounding of adjacent epenthetic vowels

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^ Many on-line sources, for example Microsoft Encarta Encyclopaedia and Merriam-Webster's Dictionary, indicate the pronunciation wrongly to be [nɑˈdeɪni] or [ˌnɑdeɪˈneɪ]; other spellings include Nadene, Na-Dené or Na-Déné;
  2. ^ In Sapir's 1915 paper, the spelling was simply "Na-Dene". Later he also used "Nadene". Most authors have predominantly used the former spelling, but some have used diacritics to mark the irregular pronunciation; alternative names are Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit and its recently proposed replacement Tlina-Dene.)
  3. ^ Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit has been used to stress the exclusion of Haida, but to the advocates of Haida's membership in the family, Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit has still been but a branch, the Core Na-Dene or Continental Na-Dene, as opposed to Insular Na-Dene represented by Haida.
  4. ^ See Vajda 2008b
  5. ^ Dene-Yeniseic Symposium. Alaska Native Language Center, University of Alaska Fairbanks
  6. ^ Campbell, Lyle (1997). American Indian Languages: The Historical Linguistics of Native America. Oxford: Oxford University Press

[edit] References

  • Bengtson, J.D. 1994. “Edward Sapir and the ‘Sino-Dene’ Hypothesis.” Anthropological Science 102: 207-230.
  • Dürr, Michael & Egon Renner. 1995. The history of the Na-Dene controversy: A sketch. Language and Culture in North America: Studies in Honor of Heinz-Jürgen Pinnow, ed. by Egon Renner & Michael Dürr, 3-18. (Lincom Studies in Native American Linguistics 2). Munich: Lincom Europa.
  • Enrico, John. 2004. Toward Proto – Na-Dene. Anthropological Linguistics 46(3).229 – 302.
  • Goddard, Pliny E. 1920. Has Tlingit a genetic relationship to Athapascan. International Journal of American Linguistics 1.266 – 279.
  • Greenberg, J.H. 1987a. Language in the Americas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
  • Greenberg, J.H. 1987b. “The Na-Dene Problem.” In Greenberg (1987a), pp. 321-330.
  • Greenberg, J.H., and Merritt Ruhlen. 1992. "Linguistic Origins of Native Americans." Scientific American 267.5: 94-99. (November 1992)
  • Hamp, Eric P. 1979. Tongass Tlingit and Na-Dene. Berkeley Linguistics Society 5.460 – 463.
  • Hymes, Dell. 1956. Na-Dene and positional analysis of categories. American Anthropologist 58.624 – 628.
  • Hymes, Dell. Na-Dene ethnopoetics: A preliminary report: Haida and Tlingit. Language and Culture in North America: Studies in Honor of Heinz-Jürgen Pinnow, ed. by Egon Renner & Michael Dürr, 265 – 311. (Lincom Studies in Native American Linguistics 2). Munich: Lincom Europa.
  • Kaye, A.S. 1992. "Distant Genetic Relationship and Edward Sapir." Semiotica 91.3/4: 273-300.
  • Krauss, Michael E. 1964. Proto-Athapaskan-Eyak and the problem of Na-Dene: The phonology. International Journal of American Linguistics 30(2).118 – 36.
  • Krauss, Michael E. 1965. Proto-Athapaskan-Eyak and the problem of Na-Dene II: The morphology. International Journal of American Linguistics 31(1).18 – 28.
  • Krauss, Michael E. 1968. Noun classification systems in Athapaskan, Eyak, Tlingit, and Haida verbs. International Journal of American Linguistics 34(3).194 – 203.
  • Krauss, Michael E. 1973. Na-Dene. Linguistics in North America, ed. by Thomas A. Sebeok, 903-78. (Current Trends in Linguistics 10). The Hague: Mouton.
  • Krauss, Michael E. 1997. The indigenous languages of the north: A report on their present state. Northern Minority Languages: Problems of Survival, ed. by Hiroshi Shoji & Juha Janhunen, 1-34. (Senri Ethological Studies 44.) Osaka, Japan: National Museum of Ethnology.
  • Leer, Jeff. 1979. Proto-Athabaskan verb stem variation, part one: Phonology. (Alaska Native Language Center Papers 1). Fairbanks, Alaska: Alaska Native Language Center.
  • Leer, Jeff. 1989. Directional systems in Athapaskan and Na-Dene. Athapaskan linguistics: Current perspectives on a language family, ed. by Eung-Do Cook & Keren Rice, ch. 15, pp. 575 – 622. (Trends in linguistics: State of the art reports 15). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. ISBN.
  • Levine, Robert D. 1979. Haida and Na-Dene: A new look at the evidence. International Journal of American Linguistics 45(2).157 – 70.
  • Manaster Ramer, A. 1996. "Sapir's Classifications: Haida and the Other Na-Dene Languages." Anthropological Linguistics 38: 179-216.
  • Pinnow, Heinz-Jürgen. 1962. Two problems of the historical phonology of Na-Dene languages. International Journal of American Linguistics 28.162 – 166.
  • Pinnow, Heinz-Jürgen. 1964. On the historical position of Tlingit. International Journal of American Linguistics 30.155 – 164.
  • Pinnow, Heinz-Jürgen. 1966. Grundzüge einer historischen Lautlehre des Tlingit. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz.
  • Pinnow, Heinz-Jürgen. 1968a. Genetic relationships versus borrowing in Na-Dene. International Journal of American Linguistics 34(3).194 – 203.
  • Pinnow, Heinz-Jürgen. 1968b. Sprachhistorische Studien zur Verbstammvariation im Tlingit. Orbis 17.509 – 531.
  • Pinnow, Heinz-Jürgen. 1970. Notes on the classifiers in the Na-Dene languages. International Journal of American Linguistics 36(1).63 – 67.
  • Pinnow, Heinz-Jürgen. 1976. Geschichte der Na-Dene-Forschung. (Indiana : Beihefte ; 5). Berlin: Mann. ISBN 3-7861-3027-2
  • Pinnow. H-J. 1985. Das Haida als Na-Dene Sprache. (Abhandlungen der völkerkundlichen Arbeitsgemeinschaft, Hefte 43-46.) Nortorf, Germany: Völkerkundliche Arbeitsgemeinschaft.
  • Pinnow. H-J. 2006a. Die Na-Dene-Sprachen im Lichte der Greenberg-Klassifikation. / The Na-Déné Languages in Light of Greenberg's Classification. Zweite erweiterte Auflage / Second revised edition. Bredstedt: Druckerei Lempfert.
  • Pinnow. H-J. 2006b. Sprachhistorische Untersuchung zur Stellung des Haida als Na-Dene-Sprache. (Unveränderte Neuausgabe aus INDIANA 10, Gedenkschrift Gerdt Kutscher. Teil 2. Berlin 1985. Mit einem Anhang = Die Na-Dene-Sprachen im Verhältnis zum Tibeto-Chinesischen.) Bredstedt: Druckerei Lempfert.
  • Rubicz, R., Melvin, K.L., Crawford, M.H. 2002. Genetic Evidence for the phylogenetic relationship between Na-Dene and Yeniseian speakers. Human Biology, Dec(6).743 – 761.
  • Ruhlen, Merritt. 1994a. The Origin of Language: Tracing the Evolution of the Mother Tongue. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
  • Ruhlen, Merritt. 1994b. "Na-Dene Etymologies." In Ruhlen (1994a), pp. 93-110
  • Ruhlen M. 1998. "The Origin of the Na-Dene". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 95, no. 23: 13994-6.
  • Sapir, Edward. 1915. The Na-Dene languages: A preliminary report. American Anthropologist 17.534 – 558.
  • Thompson, Chad. 1996. The Na-Dene middle voice: An impersonal source of the D-element. International Journal of American Linguistics 62(4).351 – 378.
  • Vajda, Edward (2008). A Siberian Link with Na-Dene Languages (PDF). Dene-Yeniseic Symposium, Fairbanks.

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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