1
Loanwords in Ket
Edward J. Vajda
1. The language and its speakers
Ket is the sole surviving member of the formerly widespread Yeniseian
(Yeniseian) family. Substrate river names and 17th century Tsarist fur tax records
attest to the existence of other, now extinct Yeniseian-speaking groups throughout
much of the taiga forests of central and western Siberia.
Several of these
languages were recorded in varying degrees of lexical and grammatical detail
before they vanished. Figure 1, adapted from Vajda (2009+) shows the known
members of the Yeniseian family in their likely subgrouping.
Figure 1: Documented members of the Yeniseian language family
2
The Ket-Yugh subgroup (Northern Yeniseian) is obvious from ample lexical and
grammatical homologies, as is the close connection between Kott and Assan. The
position of Pumpokol is more difficult to assess. This language probably forms an
early branch with Arin, as presented above; however, it may be that Arin and
Pumpokol form separate primary nodes, a possibility that cannot be excluded
given the scanty documentation of both languages. Because some Yugh material
was misidentified as Pumpokol in the early attestations, identifying genuine
Pumpokol forms can sometimes be difficult. The fullest and most accessible
account of data known from the extinct members of Yeniseian can be found in
Werner (2005).
Today the Ket as an ethnic group number around 1200, but fewer than 200
can be regarded as fluent speakers. Exhaustive sociolinguistic surveys conducted
by the ethnographer V. P. Krivonogov during the past two decades (Krivonogov
1998, 2003) attest to the rapid and apparently irrevocable language shift to
Russian among the ethnic Ket, as well as to a rise in inter-ethnic marriages and
the beginnings of a sort of Ket diaspora, where over 200 ethnic Ket have now left
their native Turukhansk District to reside in other parts of the Russian
Federations. Most fluent speakers of Ket are older than 50.
As shown in Map 1, the location of villages where concentrations of Ket
speakers reside today is generally farther north than the forests the Ket and other
Yeniseian tribes inhabited during the 1600s, when Russians first made contact
with them.
3
Map 1: Ket in its geographical context
4
Map 2: Location of contemporary speakers of Ket (shown in black) and of Yeniseian groups in
1600 as well as Yeniseian substrate river names (marked by labels such as -ses)
5
The labels -ses, -šet, and so forth in Figure 2 provide a rough approximation1 of
areas located outside of the documented area inhabited by Yeniseian speakers
that nevertheless contain river names based on cognates of the Ket word for river,
ses, or water ul.
These vast areas presumably represent places of former
habitation of linguistic relatives of the Ket prior to the Russians’ arrival in Siberia
after 1582. In many cases, the substrate river names appear to be closely related
to one of the known Yeniseian languages: Ket (-ses, -sis), Yugh (-čes), Kott (-šet),
Assan (-čet), Arin (-sat), Pumpokol (-dat, -tat). The widespread hydronymic
formants -tys or –tyš, represented in the river name Irtysh and in the names of
many smaller rivers in Western Siberia, may attest to a distinct branch of
Yeniseian that otherwise disappeared without a trace. Because the hydronyms
north of Mongolia and west of Lake Baikal are dialectally the most diverse, this
general area likely represents the geographic origin of the Yeniseian-speaking
tribes.
The ethnonym Ket was adopted only in the 1930s, based on the word kɛ’t
‘person, human being’. Prior to this time, the Russians called the Ket “Yenisei
Ostyak”, hardly distinguishing them from their linguistically unrelated neighbors
to the west, the Selkup (formerly the “Ostyak-Samoyed”) and the Ugric-speaking
Khanty (formerly known simply as “Ostyak”).
In tsarist times, the Russians
generally referred to all of the West Siberian forest people as “Ostyaks” of some
sort, a term whose origin remains unclear; cf. Georg (2007: 11-15) for the most
authoritative discussion of Yeniseian ethnonyms. Most Ket people today live in
small villages on the middle reaches of the Yenisei River or its tributaries. The
1
Ket-related hydronyms of Siberia include additional minor variations (sis ~ ses ~ sas, set ~ sat,
det ~ dat, etc.) not shown in Map 2 that are difficult to connect with specific Yeniseian languages
or dialects since they appear to reflect nothing more than pronunciation adjustments on the part
of the peoples who took over the given territory from Yeniseian speakers. South Siberian Turkic
speakers, for example, probably harmonized vowel quality (e ~ a) to match the articulation of the
preceding vowel in many cases. Also not shown are areas with river names ending in -tym, -tom,
-sym, etc., which are of unknown origin but tend to be prevalent in areas known to be inhabited
by Yeniseian tribes in the 1600s. Also not shown are toponyms in –tes, also conceivably Yeniseian,
though no documented Yeniseian language shows this pronounciation of the word for river. Cf.
Werner (2006: 148-156) for more detail on the distribution of early Yeniseian peoples and their
cultures.
6
largest concentration – about 250 – is to be found in Kellog Village on the Yelogui
River, though only a minority of these are fluent speakers. This village, like most
locations inhabited by the Ket, is accessible to the outside world only by boat (in
summer) or helicopter (year round).
The Ket, as well as their documented linguistic relatives, were the last huntergatherers of North Asia outside the Pacific Rim. Having no domesticated animals
besides the dog, the Yeniseian tribes had been pushed northward out of south
Siberia by pastoral peoples such as the Yenisei Kirghiz. Even before the coming of
the Russians the Ket had experienced centuries of encroachment from the
reindeer-breeding Enets to the north and the Evenki to the east, as attested in Ket
folklore. The Southern Ket, however, had formed a sort of social alliance with the
Selkup-speaking reindeer-breeders to the west.
All three dialects of Ket are rapidly disappearing today. Northern Ket was
reported to have only a single speaker in 2006, though a second fluent speaker
has since been identified. Attempts to write Ket using a Latin script based on
Central Ket in the 1930s or a Cyrillic script oriented toward the Southern Ket
dialect in the 1990s did little to reverse this trend, though basic lessons in Ket
language continue to be given in the first few grades of primary school in Kellog
and a few other villages even today. While most ethnic Ket spoke their language
fluently and used Russian, at most, as a second language even as late as the
1920s, the events of the Soviet period irrevocably placed Ket on the path toward
oblivion. During the 1930s the Ket were collectivized and forced to live alongside
Russians and other Native Siberian minorities in the riverside villages where they
currently reside, leading to a general adoption of Russian for interethnic
communication. During the 1960s the Ket were forced to give up their children to
boarding-school education where a Russian-only rule was vigorously enforced.
This led to general language shift by the younger generations. By the time a new
policy of ethnic education was adopted in the 1980s, leading to the creation of
elementary language textbooks in the 1990s, most Ket children entered primary
school speaking little or no Ket. As a rule, neither their parents nor even their
schoolteachers were sufficiently fluent in Ket to pass it on as a native tongue. A
few hours a week of elementary-school lessons of Ket as a second language could
not reverse the overwhelming trend toward language replacement by Russian.
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Today, it is generally only older adults, especially those born before the early
1960s, who retain strong fluency in their ancestral tongue. Even among this group
there are no monolingual Ket speakers. For a concise overview of the history of
Ket people and of the scholars who have studied them, see Vajda (2001).
2. Sources of data
The first substantial publication of Yeniseian vocabulary came in 1858, with the
posthumous appearance of Finnish linguist Mathias Castrén’s “Yenisei-Ostyak”
grammar (Castrén 1858), which contained lists of words with their German
translations. The “Ostyak” materials in this work primarily represent Yugh rather
than Ket. This first Yeniseian grammar also contains the only extensive collection
of Kott vocabulary and grammatical forms, as Castrén was the last scholar to work
with native speakers of Kott. Earlier recordings of Yeniseian vocabulary – brief
word lists of Arin, Pumpokol, Assan, Kott, Yugh and Ket taken down by explorers
during 18th century – long remained accessible only through visits to the archives
in Moscow, Leningrad or other places in the Soviet Union where they were
housed (Vajda 2001: 341-351). Tomsk linguist Andreas Dulson gathered the data
from these disparate sources and published them together for the first time,
though in a regional periodical difficult to obtain outside of Russia (Dul’zon
1961). Fortunately, Heinrich Werner, a linguist from Tomsk who is now based in
Bonn, Germany, has recently published a full compilation of all 18th century
Yeniseian language documentation (Werner 2005). Werner’s monograph includes
not only the materials published earlier by Dul’zon (1961), but also two
vocabulary lists (one Arin, the other Pumpokol) newly discovered in the 1980s by
Moscow linguist Eugen Helimski (Xelimskij 1986). Werner has also republished
Castren’s 19th century Kott vocabulary, together with Kott words recorded in the
18th century, in a Kott-Russian glossary appended to his Kott grammar (Verner
1990: 284-394). Unfortunately, this work remains largely inaccessible, as it was
printed in only 250 copies by a regional university (Rostov University). No
comprehensive dictionary of either Yugh or Kott has yet been published.
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Fortunately, all of the extant words from the extinct Yeniseian languages,
including Castrén’s Kott dictionary materials have recently been published
together with all of the Ket and Yugh vocabulary gathered during the 20th
century. This magnum opus is Heinrich Werner’s three-volume Comparative
Dictionary of the Yeniseian Languages, a work written in German with English and
Russian glossaries at the end of the third volume (Werner 2003). At present, this
dictionary can be regarded as the authoritative publication of all recorded
Yeniseian vocabulary. Not only did Werner gather together all material on the
extinct Yeniseian languages, he also greatly expanded the rather scant earlier
publications of Ket vocabulary. At the close of the 20th century substantial
compilations of Ket words were limited to three publications2. The first was a
glossary of Central Ket published in German in a book about Ket ethnography
(Donner 1955: 15-111). The second was a short dictionary and morpheme list of
Southern Ket that appeared in a volume largely devoted to Ket texts and folklore
(Krejnovič 1969: 22-90). The third was a Ket-Russian/Russian-Ket elementaryschool pedagogical dictionary with 4,000 Ket lexemes, based on Southern Ket
(Verner 1993). Amazingly, no comprehensive dictionary of Ket appeared during
the 20th century.
The present study employs Werner (2003) as its basic source, supplementing it
with new fieldwork among the remaining native speakers of Ket. In some cases,
new words were discovered, in many other cases, it was confirmed that Ket lacks
any word for a given item. This was particularly common for words denoting
features of the natural world not present in central Siberia (‘palm tree’,
‘mainland’, ‘elephant’, and the like), as well as many items of modern culture and
society with which Ket speakers had never come into contact (‘judge’, ‘oath’, ‘to
convict’, etc.). Judgments about recent Russian loanwords into Ket listed in
Werner (2003) were also elicited from these native speakers, and in a number of
cases brought to light interesting facts about the sociolinguistic status of these
items. These new findings will eventually contribute to the publication of two
2
Vajda (2001: 374) provides an exhaustive list of publication of Ket and Yugh vocabulary since
the second half of the 19th century. These include several shorter lists, as well as a few pamphlets
written to introduce Ket vocabulary in elementary school classes.
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major new works on Yeniseian lexicon, both of which are currently in preparation
under the sponsorship of the Linguistics Department of the Max Planck Institute
for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig. The first is a comprehensive Ket-RussianEnglish-German dictionary of words gathered from all three Ket dialects reelicited in idiomatic context from the remaining native speakers (Kotorova ed.
2009+). The second is an etymological dictionary of Yeniseian aimed at
explaining, whenever possible, the origins of all known Yeniseian vocabulary,
including loanwords (Vajda & Werner 2009+). The present study has both
informed and been informed by both of these projects.
3. Contact situations
3.1. Introduction
As isolated bands of hunter-gatherer-fishers, the Ket evolved a vocabulary
uniquely suited to their taiga and riverine environment. Up until the 20th century
the Ket had little intensive contact with other linguistic groups, since they lived as
small mobile bands in a vast northern forest. Most Ket words show no sign of
borrowing and quite a number of them are semantically rather unique. There are
nouns conveying special attributes of northern ecology: atɛ́tliŋ ōks 3 ‘a lone tree of
one species in a pure stand of another species’, hʌlis ‘small raised mound in the
tundra’, taʁo ‘swampy, treeless area in the taiga’, sɔlgup ‘point of land jutting out
into a small river’, etc. Many words express details of forest life: ɯráq ‘spring
camp’, itáŋ ‘distance traveled between two encampments’ (<
ī ‘day’ + tàŋ
‘drag’), imtɛt ‘to harvest pine nuts’, tɯ̄t ‘swarms of bloodsucking insects (a major
3
The phonemic prosody in the Ket examples is transcribed using: a macron denotes high-even
tone (ōks ‘tree’); an apostrophe denotes abrupt tone ending in glottal constriction (bɔ’k ‘fire’); a
grave accent denotes falling tone (ùs ‘birch tree’); an acute accent denotes rising pitch on a
second syllable (hɔráp ‘fish tail’); the lack of any tone mark on disyllabic or polysyllabic words
indicates an initial syllable pitch peak (sɛniŋ ‘shaman’); finally, a double vowel denotes risingfalling tone on a geminate vowel (huut ‘animal tail’). The forms given are from the Southern Ket
dialect unless otherwise noted.
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feature of forest life in the brief summer)’, lilgej ‘the crunch of snow under moving
sled runners’, qɯ’j ‘large piece of birchbark used to cover the summer tent’, etc.
Characteristic words and phrases express key aspects of Ket spiritual culture: sɛniŋ
‘shaman’, hās ‘shaman’s drum’, allɛ́l ‘female guardian spirit image’, ulvéj ‘the
primary soul from among the seven spirits associated with each person’. Fire was
conceived as a feminine-class animate being: bɔ’k dγ̄p ‘fire burns’ (literally, ‘fire,
she-eats’). The Ket used specialized, taboo-related vocabulary during their Bear
Ceremony,
an
ancient
tradition
featuring
the
ritualized
slaughter
and
consumption of a bear thought to be the reincarnation of a human relative; for
example, huktɛŋ are ‘bear eyes’, while dɛstáŋ are eyes of other animals or people.
A rich inventory of spatial adverbs expresses specific types of orientation with
regard to rivers or lakes and forested land: igda ‘from the forest to the riverbank’,
ʌtá ‘from water to shore’, aγá ‘from shore to forest’, ɛtá ‘movement on foot upriver
along the ice’, etc. These adverbs can be incorporated into motion verbs. Some
adjectives build classificatory distinctions involving animacy: sukŋ ‘thick (said of a
tree)’, bōl ‘fat (person or animal)’, and bʌsl ‘fat, thick (object)’; ka’t ‘old, elderly
(animals, people)’, qà or qa’ ‘old, big, grown up (said of children, young adults)’,
and sīn ‘old (object or person; also said of large trees)’; kitéj ‘young (animals,
people)’ and ki’ ‘new (object or plant)’. Some verbs have suppletive stems for
animate- and inanimate-class subjects: dīn ‘he (person or animal) stands’ [du-k-ain 3MASC.SBJ-erect-PRES-stand], duγata ‘it (a masculine-class tree) stands’ [du-h-a-ta
3MASC.SBJ-area-PRES-extend], ujbɔʁut ‘it (a movable, inanimate-class object) stands’
[uj-b-a-qut at.rest-3INAN.SBJ-STATE-occupy.position]. Certain nouns describing
natural phenomena are more elaborately classificatory than is typical of most
Eurasian languages: bɛ’s ‘falling snow’, tīk ‘layer of fallen snow on the ground’,
tɔqpul ‘layer of fallen snow on branches’; also, huut ‘animal tail’, hi’s ‘bird tail’,
hɔráp ‘fish tail’. But certain kinship terms are surprisingly generic with regard to
gender (bisɛ́p ‘brother, sister’, qīp ‘uncle, aunt’, qàl ‘grandchild, niece, nephew’),
especially given the fact that Ket marriages were traditionally patrilocal and
arranged on the basis of two exogamous phratries, called hɔγɔ́tpul (< hō ‘same’ +
a’t ‘bone’ + hɯl ‘accumulation’).
As far as can be ascertained, none of this
specialized vocabulary is borrowed, though some of it could involve areal
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metaphoric diffusion. For example, Mongolian groups also refer to kinship
lineages using the word jas ‘bone’.
Yeniseian vocabulary bears no clear genealogical affinity with other North
Asian families. Contact with other peoples of Eurasian, however, either directly or
through the mediation of neighboring tribes, has produced several layers of
loanwords. By far the largest layer results from recent Russian contact. A much
smaller set of loanwords derives from contact with the Samoyedic-speaking
Selkup reindeer breeders, who were the western neighbors of the Ket, or from
diffusion north from the Turco-Mongol world of the steppes much farther south.
The few attested loanwords that originated from the steppes, e.g., talɯ́n ‘flour’ (cf.
Halh Mongolian talxan), may have diffused into Ket via other languages of the
taiga.
It is possible that some words inherited from Common Yeniseian by Ket were
borrowed from Turkic or Uralic at some very great time depth, but these are
difficult to trace, and the direction of borrowing, if it occurred could have been
from rather than into Yeniseian. Yeniseian words for 'birchbark', 'birch tree',
'reindeer', and 'falling snow' bear some resemblance to words in Uralic, while
Yeniseian 'stone' resembles Turkic words for stone.
3.2. Contact with Russian
Cossacks and other Russian-speaking adventurers began to infiltrate the middle
reaches of the Yenisei watershed less than two decades after Yermak’s successful
invasion across the Urals in 1582. The Ket and other Yeniseian-speaking peoples
were soon incorporated into the fur-tax (yasak) system. Yasak entailed regular
payment of sable and other pelts by the natives to a local representative of the
Tsarist government, the voyevoda, who, as a rule, established a base camp in the
form of a fort (ostrog) on some convenient riverway. Since the Ket were nomadic
hunters, contact with Russians in this early period was limited to a few brief
encounters every year, when yasak was delivered. In general, Ket groups tried to
avoid the Russians for fear their kinsman would be kidnapped as a means of
coercing regular yasak payments. The southern Yeniseian peoples were more
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immediately affected by the Russian presence, since they found themselves torn
between fur-tax obligations to the Russian newcomers as well as to the TurcoMongol polities of the forest-steppe fringe. In the taxation tug of war that
developed, such peoples as the Arin and Pumpokol were devastated by reprisals
taken against them by the Tatars for submitting to the Russian fur tax system. By
1735 the Arin as a distinct ethnic community had all but disintegrated. By 1800
the Assan and Pumpokol likewise melded with the local Russian or Turkic
populations and their languages disappeared. The Kott lasted until at least the
1840s, when Mathias Castrén worked with the last five known native speakers.
Social, geographic and linguistic data on the extinct Yeniseian peoples can be
found in Dolgix (1960) and Werner (2005).
Another factor that decimated all of the tribes of the Yenisei watershed to
some significant degree was the introduction of European diseases (Alekseenko
1967: 26). Recurrent smallpox epidemics during the course of the 17th century
(notably in 1627-28 and again during the period 1654-1682) all but wiped out
the fisherfolk along the middle Yenisei, with the riverine Yugh especially hard hit.
Although Yugh continued to be spoken by a few elderly people up to the early
1970s (Heinrich Werner, p.c.), already by the mid-19th century the tribe had
decreased to several dozen individuals from an original population of probably
ten times that number. Some of the Ket hunting groups, though affected by the
same epidemics, fared somewhat better, as their mobile upland lifestyle took
them away from close contact with the Russians and others living in the riverside
zones hardest hit. The Ket were likewise fortunate in living far enough northward
on the Yenisei so as to be out of range of reprisals by steppe peoples bent on
keeping their subjects from submitting to the Russians. In fact, after the coming of
the Russians, the Ket gradually relocated considerably farther upstream along the
Yenisei. For most Ket groups, contact with the Russians continued to be limited to
times when separate family hunting parties emerged from the forest onto the
riverbank during the spring to fish and pay their fur tax.
The sporadic nature of Ket contact with the Russians remained little changed
until the 1930s, and relatively few words from Russian were taken into the
language in this initial period. Early loanwords include trade items such as teslá
‘adze’ (< Russian teslo ‘adze’), kurúk ‘hook’ (< Russian krʲuk ‘hook’), and postóp
13
‘glass bottle’ (< Russian stopka ‘shot glass’). There are also a few terms relating to
Christianity, e.g., ho’p ‘priest’ (< Russian pop ‘parish priest’), though the Ket did
not adopt the new religion but instead retained their traditional spiritual culture
into the 20th century. Direct linguistic borrowing, however, was the exception
rather than the rule, even for new realia. Rather, the Ket showed a more marked
tendency to coin native terms for new objects, concepts, or social categories. A
typical example of these neologisms is bogdóm ‘gun’ (< Ket bo’k ‘fire’ + qām
‘arrow’).
Ket interaction with Russians underwent a drastic revolution as a result of
Stalin’s collectivization campaign of the 1930s, which forced the Ket and other
Native Siberians to settle in Russian-style villages where they came increasingly
under pressure to deal with spoken Russian on a regular basis. During the 1960s
the Soviet government intensified its policy of forcing Ket families to give up their
children to Russian-language boarding schools. This seems to have triggered the
crucial breaking point in transmission of the language, as Ket children born after
the 1960s rarely learned fluent Ket. Older native speakers, however, continued to
use Ket with relatively little influence from Russian, preferring instead to coin
neologisms based on native morphological material, such as ēγ suul ‘iron sled’ for
‘automobile, truck’. Nevertheless, the majority of Russian loans seem to date after
the period of collectivization.
3.3. Contact with other Siberian peoples
The Yeniseian languages spoken to the south of Yugh and Ket, all of which
became extinct before massive Russian influence could affect them, show loans
from South Siberian Turkic, especially in the realms of stockbreeding, farming, or
metallurgy: Kott bal ‘cattle’, bagar ‘copper’, šero ‘beer’; Kott/Assan tabat ‘camel’,
kulun ‘foal’, araka ‘wine’; Assan talkan ‘flour’, alton ‘gold’; Arin ogus ‘bull’, bugdai
‘wheat’, kajakok ‘butter’, etc. A few Turkic loans even name natural phenomena,
e.g., Kott/Assan boru ‘wolf’, attesting to the pervasive Turkic influence on later
stages of these languages; cf. Ket qɨ̵̄t ‘wolf’ and Yugh Xɨ̵̄t ‘wolf’, terms presumably
inherited from Proto-Yeniseian.
14
The contact situation for Ket and Yugh, the northern Yeniseian languages, is
quite different, since these tribes were not in direct association with
stockbreeding peoples of the steppes. Rather, the Ket in their taiga home lived in
desultory proximity to reindeer-breeding tribes on all sides. The Nenets and Enets
groups to the north, as well as the Evenki tribes pushing into the Yenisei
watershed from eastern Siberia, tended to be adversarial toward the Ket. Contact
was sporadic and generally hostile, with few or no identifiable loanwords into the
Ket dialects from Nenets, Enets, or Evenki. A rare exception is soγuj ‘sokui’, an
Evenki word in Northern and Central Ket for a type of pullover jacket without a
hood (cf. Alekseenko 1967: 138). The situation with the Selkup was different,
since the Ket developed friendly relations with this tribe and even exchanged
marriage partners after the traditional inter-Ket exogamous phratry system
collapsed in the wake of smallpox epidemics. Selkup loans in Ket are somewhat
more common and include the ethynonym la’q ‘Selkup’, a word that means
‘friend’ in Selkup, symbolizing the close relations between Ket and Selkup
peoples. There are also loans relating to domesticated reindeer (qobd ‘castrated
reindeer’, ollas ‘reindeer calf’, kaγli ‘reindeer sled’), with some Ket in the Yelogui
River area (near present-day Kellog Village) even adopting reindeer breeding by
the early 20th century. Other words shared between Ket and Selkup were more
likely borrowed in the other direction, notably Selkup aqlalta ‘guardian spirit
image’. This word is only found in the Selkup dialect spoken adjacent to Ket and
likely derives from an earlier pronunciation of Ket allɛ́l ~ allalt ‘guardian spirit
doll’ (the disappearance of the final -ta, which appears to have been a native Ket
nominalizing suffix, gave rise to the final stress in the first variant). Xelimskij
(1982: 238-239), conversely, interprets this word as a Selkup loan into Ket which
derives from a nominalization of the Selkup verb ‘to amaze’, an etymology
unlikely on semantic grounds. A few loanwords in Ket were likely borrowed
through Selkup or Turkic and ultimately derive from more distant sources. One is
kančá ‘(smoking) pipe’, a word of Chinese origin found in many Native Siberian
languages. Another is Ket/Yugh na’n ‘bread’, which might represent a Wanderwort
of Iranian origin, though it might just as likely be a nursery word.
15
4. Numbers and kinds of loanwords in Ket
4.1. Introduction
The subdatabase for Ket contains 1018 words, alongside 443 gaps, most involving
concepts irrelevant or unknown to Ket speakers and therefore lacking any
dedicated lexical designation. Most lexical gaps involve items alien to the
traditional world of taiga hunter-gatherers. These include exotic realia such as
‘palm tree’, ‘elephant’, ‘beech tree’, ‘kangaroo’, etc., as well as technological
concepts or social categories typical of stratified sedentary society: ‘battery’,
‘axle’, ‘judge’, ‘jury’, ‘birth certificate’, and so forth. Other gaps involve cases
where Ket lacks a superordinate term that would correspond to a general category
typically designated by a lexeme in other languages, such as ‘weapon’, ‘tool’,
‘age’, ‘plant’. A number of the completed entries represent super-counterparts –
single lexical items used to express two or more basic meanings. Once example is
ba’ŋ, the Ket noun used to refer to the concepts, ‘earth’, ‘land’, ‘soil’, as well as
‘time’. Another is bisɛ́p, a generic word for ‘sibling’ that can be used to mean
either ‘brother’ or ‘sister’. Finally, a number of lexical gaps unfortunately result
from insufficient information about Ket vocabulary.
Among the coded forms in the subdatabase, only 78 show clear evidence of
having been borrowed. In most of the remaining 940 cases, there is little or no
evidence for borrowing, and the word must be considered as belonging to native
Ket vocabulary. While in a majority of these cases, the words in question were
recorded by linguists only during the mid 20th century, a comparison of core Ket
vocabulary with that of the documented extinct Yeniseian languages (most
notably Kott and Yugh) suggests that virtually all basic Ket words are of native
provenance. In the case of the clearly borrowed items, the age of most of them
can be surmised based of what is known historically about episodes of language
contact. The overwhelming majority of clearly attested loanwords (72 out of 78)
derive from Russian, with most of these acquired by Ket during the 20th century.
Early Russian loans are defined as words incorporated into Ket before the 1930s,
when the Ket were forced to settle down in Russian-style villages and began to
communicate in Russian on a regular basis. These early loans can be identified on
16
the basis of their more complete phonological adaptation (about which cf. §5
below), or their meanings (i.e., they refer to Tsarist era categories such as
‘priest’). In addition, there are a few cases where early Russian loans into Ket
were actually attested during the 19th century.
It should be noted that some modern Ket words may ultimately derive from
early Turkic or Uralic loans into ancient Yeniseian, though such a possibility is
difficult to verify.
One such word is Ket qɯ̄nt ‘ant’, possibly associated
historically with Proto-Finno-Ugric *kuńće ‘ant’ (Xelimskij 1982: 244). Another is
Ket bo’q ‘bag net’, apparently connected with Selkup *pok ‘bag net’ (Alekseenko
1967: 62). In such cases, however, it is not possible to determine with certainty
whether we are dealing with a chance resemblance or, in the case of a genuine
loanword, to determine the direction or time of borrowing. Conversely, some panYeniseian terms of basic vocabulary, such as ‘stone’ (Ket tɯ’s, Yugh čɯ’s, Kott šiš,
Arin kes), are more likely to be the source of early loans into Common Turkic (cf.
Proto-Turkic *taš ‘stone’). The dialectal differentiation of the Yeniseian words visà-vis the Turkic form suggest that, if the resemblance is more than simply chance,
then it was Turkic that borrowed the word from Yeniseian, presumably from a
Yeniseian language with initial *t.
In summary, there are no incontrovertible examples of basic Ket content words
(body parts, kinship terms, words for basic actions and the like) originating as
direct loans from another language. Nor do borrowed nouns, adjectives, or verbs
from Russian belong to the core vocabulary.
4.2. Loanwords by semantic word class
Table 1 shows the breakdown of loanwords from the four attested source
languages into Ket by semantic word class. The decimal values indicate instances
where a native synonym exists for a given loanword.
Table 1: Loanwords in Ket by donor language and semantic field (percentages)
Mongolian
Selkup
Evenki
Chinese
Total
loanwords
Nonloanwords
Nouns
Verbs
Function words
Adjectives
Adverbs
all words
Russian
17
12.3
4
6.1
3.5
8.9
0.7
0.4
0.3
0.2
0.2
0.1
0.2
0.1
13.6
4
6.1
3.5
0
9.7
86.4
96
93.9
96.5
100
90.3
The vast majority of loanwords are nouns, which make up about 14% of the
total number of nouns in the subdatabase. Loan verbs are much more rare, and
are limited to the borrowing of Russian infinitives or nouns incorporated into the
Ket verb complex in the morpheme position normally reserved for nominal forms:
(da-deld-uγabet ‘she shares it’ (< Russian delit' ‘to share’), da-kerasin-ataγit ‘she
rubs him with kerosene’ (< Russian kerosin ‘kerosene’). Therefore, in a sense,
even these verb-related loans are nominal in nature.
4.3. Loanwords by semantic field
A breakdown of percentages of loanwords in the 24 semantic fields represented in
the subdatabase likewise reflects the predominance of Russian loans in
comparison to loans attested from other families.
18
Selkup
Evenki
Chinese
Total
loanwords
Nonloanwords
The physical world
Kinship
Animals
The body
Food and drink
Clothing and grooming
The house
Agriculture and vegetation
Basic actions and technology
Motion
Possession
Spatial relations
Quantity
Time
Sense perception
Emotions and values
Cognition
Speech and language
Social and political relations
Warfare and hunting
Law
Religion and belief
Modern world
Miscellaneous function words
Mongolian
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
Russian
Table 2: Loanwords in Ket by donor language and semantic field (percentages)
4.9
1.5
6.7
3.3
14.6
13
23.1
12.8
10
6
24.1
6.3
2.9
9.9
5.6
13.8
9.7
3.5
30.8
15.4
54.8
8.9
1.8
9.7
4.8
0.4
1.7
1.7
0.2
3.2
0.1
3.2
0.1
4.9
1.5
8.3
3.3
16.5
13
23.1
19.2
11.7
6
24.1
6.3
2.9
9.9
0
5.6
13.8
0
19.4
3.5
30.8
15.4
59.5
0
9.7
95.1
98.5
91.7
96.7
83.5
87
76.9
80.8
88.3
94
75.9
93.7
97.1
90.1
100
94.4
86.2
100
80.6
96.5
69.2
84.6
40.5
100
90.3
As can be seen from Table 2, loanwords are scattered widely across the semantic
spectrum. A relatively larger number of loanwords belong to the categories Food
and drink (a total of 8 loans), The house (6), Possession (6), and Animals (5).
Unsurprisingly, these are all semantic fields involving realia with which the Ket
came into regular daily contact only after the sedentarization campaign of the
1930s. Even in these categories, it must be noted, the majority of new items
encountered by the Ket after their adoption of a Russian village lifestyle received
names based on native Ket neologisms rather than borrowing or even calquing
based on Russian, if they received any dedicated nominalization at all. For
example, alongside Ket sa’j ‘tea’, a loanword deriving earlier from either Russian
čaj or Mongol tsai, other drinks received native Ket nominalizations. Vodka came
to be referred to as bɔγul (< bɔ’k ‘fire’ + ūl ‘water’), and coffee was called qʌliŋ ūl
19
(<qʌliŋ ‘bitter’ + ūl ‘water’). The concept ‘guilty’ was interpreted in Ket as saʁan,
derived from a combination of native Ket sa’q ‘squirrel’ with the case marker -an
‘without, lacking’, since someone without furs to pay their tax was ‘guilty’ or ‘at
fault’ in a legalistic sense. Neologisms of this sort far exceed the actual loanwords.
Judging from the dearth of clearly attested borrowings that predate contact with
the Russians, resistance to outright lexical borrowing could be regarded as a
strong feature of traditional Ket linguistic culture.
5. Integration of loanwords
Despite this apparent linguistic conservatism, Ket does contain a fair number of
Russian loans. However, very few of these have been fully assimilated to
Yeniseian phonology. Many begin with /m/, /n/, or /p/ – sounds not normally
found as onsets in native Ket words: mina ‘pig’ (< Russian svinja ‘pig’), nela ‘week’
(< Russian nedelja ‘week’), pamagat ‘to help’ (< Russian pomogat' ‘to help’).
Another feature that distinguishes many Russian loans words from words of
native Ket provenance is their polysyllabicity. Native Ket nouns tend to be
monosyllabic unless each syllable can be associated with a separate morpheme.
This is less often the case with Russian loans, many of which are polysyllabic and
of course semantically opaque: tɛslá ‘adze’ (< Russian teslo ‘adze’), kurúk ‘hook’
(< Russian kr'uk ‘hook’). A very few recent Russian loans are not integrated at all
and even initial consonant clusters, which are impossible in native Ket words.
Instead of the more integrated kola ‘school’ (< Russian škola ‘school’), which is
encountered in Ket speech, one can also encounter the unintegrated pronunciation
škola. Such loans obviously date after the beginning of extensive Ket-Russian
bilingualism (after the 1930s). Phonologically non-integrated words of this type
tend to be rejected as genuine Ket words by my informants, and their occasional
usage as attested by their entry into Werner’s (2003) dictionary might best be
regarded as lexical code-switching. But a few, such as škola ‘school’, even in its
fully unintegrated pronunciation, were accepted as genuine Ket words.
Monosyllabic loanwords receive one of the four phonemic Ket tones. The
default tone appears to be the abrupt glottalized tone, which is found in a
20
majority of such words: hɔ’p ‘priest’ (< Russian pop ‘parish priest’). A few take
other tones due to some feature of the original phonology. For example, the
loanword kōn ‘horse’ (< Russian kon' ‘steed’) received high-even tone, apparently
because the final palatalized consonant in Russian served to raise the tongue
height in the pronunciation of the vowel to a level found only in high-even tone
in Ket words. Only high-even tone allows the mid-high vowel allophones [e], [o],
[γ], with these phonemes pronounced as the corresponding allophones [ɛ], [ɔ],
[ʌ] in all other prosodic environments.
6. Grammatical borrowing
Interestingly, there are no attested instances of grammatical affixes borrowed by
Ket from other languages. A number of Ket function words, however, are clearly
of foreign origin (§6.2). By far the most striking effect of language contact is what
could be called “typological accommodation” (cf. Vajda 2009+), whereby Ket
speakers gradually adapted their prefixing morphology to mimic the suffixing
structures found in all of the adjacent languages with which they came into
contact. Over time, this process profoundly affected the nominal morphology
(§6.3.1) as well as productive patterns of finite verb stem creation (§6.3.2).
Finally, the gradual change of Ket into a suffixing agglutinative language had the
phonological effect of replacing the phonemic tones of monosyllables by wordinitial pitch on the first or second syllable of the resultant polysyllabic word
forms. This phonological adaptation will be examined first.
6.1. Prosodic adaptation
Under the influence of the root-initial agglutinating languages of Inner Eurasia,
the tonal prosody in Yeniseian developed partially into a non-phonemic wordaccent system so that in modern Ket phonemic differences in pitch are largely the
domain of monosyllabic words (Vajda 2004, 2008).
21
Ket monosyllabic phonological words contain four phonemic prosodemes.
These can be called “tones”, though they actually consist of an amalgam of
melody, vowel length, vowel height and tenseness (in the case of mid vowels),
and the presence or absence of laryngealization (creaky voice).
(1) Phonemic prosodemes in Southern Ket monosyllables
tonal
vowel length
phonation
mid-vowel
melody
(syllable type)
type
quality
sūl
high-even
half-long
neutral
tense [e, γ, o]
su’l
abrupt rising
short
laryngealized lax [ɛ, ʌ, ɔ]
sùl
rising-falling
long
neutral
lax [ɛ, ʌ, ɔ]
sùl
falling
short
neutral
lax [ɛ, ʌ, ɔ]
‘blood’
‘salmon’
‘snowsled’
‘hook’
(closed or open)
(closed or open) (creaky)
(closed or open)
(closed only)
In polysyllables, many of which were created by attachment of relational
morphemes, distinctions in root prosody generally erode, being replaced by a rise
and fall of pitch on the first two syllables that resembles word-initial stress. The
degree of prosodic erosion – in other words the degree of clitic-like vs. suffix-like
behavior of the relational morpheme being attached – is free to vary to express
distinctions in focus:
(2) Degrees of prosodic erosion in ōp ‘father’ + da-ŋal ‘from’
focused
backgrounded
nominalization using the suffix -s
ōp-da-ŋal
ob-da-ŋal
ɔb-da-ŋal-s ‘the one from father’
Disyllabic stems have rising/falling pitch under focus or when pronounced in
isolation. In a few, the pitch peak falls on the second syllable, giving the
22
impression of stress on the second syllable. These are marked in our transcription
with an acute accent on the second syllable. The much more common syllableinitial prosodic prominence is left unmarked (though it is marked in (3) below for
contrast sake). This low-yield distinction in disyllables is likewise eroded by the
attachment of relational morphemes:
(3) Phonemic contrast in disyllabic stem prosody and its erosion before relational
morphemes
rising-falling pitch:
qɔ́pqun ‘cuckoos’ > qɔ́pqun-di-ŋal
rising-high falling pitch: qɔpqún ‘cuckoos’ > qɔ́pqun-na-ŋal
‘from the cuckoo’
‘from the cuckoos’
The discourse-related replacement of phonemic prosody with a generally noncontrastive word-initial emphasis in polysyllables renders modern Ket phonology
closer to that of the surrounding languages. Yeniseian failed to develop vowel
harmony, but combinations of stem plus strings of grammatical suffixes or clitics –
with only the first syllable nucleus capable of reflecting the language’s full range
of phonemic distinctions – organizes polysyllabic phonological words in an
analogous fashion.
6.2. Function morphemes
Ket has borrowed a few basic function words from Russian, including the
conjunctions i ‘and’, a ‘and/but’. There is also the adverb bɛ’k ‘always’ (< Russian
vek ‘century’) and the particle qōt (< Russian xot' ‘at least’) which has come to be
combined with native Ket question words as a formant creating indefinite
pronouns: qōt bisɛŋ ‘wherever’, qōt anɛt ‘whoever’, qōt akus ‘whatever’, etc.
Perhaps the most interesting loan particle is Ket bēs ‘without (< Russian bez
‘without’). This particle is preposed to a noun followed by the native Ket
morpheme -an, commonly known as the caritive case marker, which already
expresses the meaning ‘without’: bēs qim-an ‘without a wife’ [without wifewithout]. The loan particle bēs thus functions as a sort of optional circumfixal
23
element, since unpreposed forms such as qim-an ‘without a wife’ [wife-without]
remain entirely acceptable.
6.3. Typological accommodation
This section examines how core Yeniseian morphological traits were gradually
modified to become more like the suffixal-agglutinating language type of the
surrounding peoples. Morphosyntactic development in both the nominal and
verbal morphology is examined. I have called this process “typological
accommodation” (Vajda 2008), since it represents a sort of grammatical quasicalquing “by design”. Malcolm Ross’s (2001) term metatypy is too strong in this
case, since what has occurred in Ket does not represent typological replacement
but rather the achievement of a new, unique hybrid between two originally
radically different morphological types. Adaptation to the suffixal agglutinating
languages of Inner Eurasia affected both the nominal morphology as well as the
finite verb string, yet did not involve the borrowing of a single morpheme.
6.3.1. Nominal morphology
Ket has developed a system of postposed case markers that resembles the case
systems of other Siberian languages, but the case markers themselves are not
borrowed from any known language and likely derive from native Ket
morphemes. The morphological influence of the surrounding languages on
Yeniseian was much farther reaching, and appears to have been well under way
even during the time of Common Yeniseian. In this sense, Yeniseian languages
belong firmly to the broader Inner Eurasian spread zone with its penchant for
suffixal agglutination, despite their stark underlying genetic and typological
dissimilarity to the other language families of Eurasia. Shared features include an
extensive system of postposed bound relational morphemes, which Vajda (2008)
has argued are clitics rather than true suffixes. Yeniseian cases and postpositions
are functionally and structurally analogous to the case suffixes and clausal
24
subordinating enclitics found in neighboring Turkic and Samoyedic languages
(Anderson 2004). In Yeniseian, however, the morphemes in question show signs
of having arisen by coalescence. What are usually described as cases in Yeniseian
still pattern phonologically as enclitics rather than true suffixes (Vajda 2008). The
system of grammatical enclitics in Yeniseian also shows morphological
heterogeneity. One set cliticizes directly to the preceding nominal stem. These
include the instrumental, caritive (meaning ‘without’), locative (used only with
inanimate-class nouns), and the prosecutive (meaning ‘past’ or through’). In
particular, the prosecutive is typically present in North Asian case systems
(Anderson 2004).
(4) Case markers that attach directly to the noun stem
masculine animate feminine animate
class
‘god’
locative
prosecutive
class
‘gods’
ɛs-bɛs
inanimate
-
‘daughter’
class
‘daughters’
-
-
‘tent’
‘tents’
qus-ka
quŋ-ka
ɛsaŋ-bɛs
hun-bɛs
hɔnaŋ-bɛs
qus-bɛs
quŋ-bɛs
instrumental ɛs-as
ɛsaŋ-as
hun-as
hɔnaŋ-as
qus-as
quŋ-as
caritive
ɛsaŋ-an
hun-an
hɔnaŋ-an
qus-an
quŋ-an
ɛs-an
The other set requires an augment in the form of a possessive morpheme as
connector, analogous to the way possessive noun phrases are constructed. Note
that the possessive morpheme is a clitic that tends to encliticize to the preceding
word whenever one is available:
(5) Possessive noun phrases
hun=d qu’s
hɯp=da qu’s
dɯlgat=na qu’s
daughter=POSS.FEM tent
son=POSS.FEM tent
children=POSS.ANIM.PL tent
‘daughter’s tent’
‘son’s tent’
‘children’s tent
25
If there is no preceding word to serve as host, the possessive formant
procliticizes to the possessum noun: da=qu’s ‘her tent’.
As in possessive phrases, these case-marker augments reflect class and number
distinctions of the preceding (possessor) noun: da (masculine class singular), na
(animate class plural), di (feminine class singular or inanimate class singular and
plural). Three Ket cases require a possessive augment4:
(6) Case markers that require a possessive augment
MASCULINE ANIMATE CLASS
‘god’
‘gods’
FEMININE ANIMATE CLASS
‘daughter’
‘daughters’
INANIMATE CLASS
‘tent’
‘tents’
ablative
ɛs-da-ŋal
ɛsaŋ-na-ŋal
hun-di-ŋal
hɔnaŋ-na-ŋal
qus-di-ŋal
quŋ-di-ŋal
dative
ɛs-da-ŋa
ɛsaŋ-na-ŋa
hun-di-ŋa
hɔnaŋ-na-ŋa
qus-di-Na
quŋ-di-ŋa
adessive
ɛs-da-ŋta
ɛsaŋ-na-ŋta
hun-di-ŋta
hɔnaŋ-na-ŋta
qus-di-Nta
quŋ-di-ŋta
Postpositions concatenate with case markers to form long agglutinative strings
that prosodically represent single words, with a stress on the first syllable:
(7) Suffix-like concatenations of relational enclitics in Ket
dɛŋ-na-hɯt-ka
people-PL-under-LOC
hɯp-da-ʌʌt-di-ŋa
son-PL-M-on-N-DAT
‘located under the people’ ‘onto the son’
quŋ-d-inbal-di-ŋal
tents-N-between-N-ABL
‘from between the tents’
Etymologically, many Ket postpositions are obvious adaptations of body part
nouns or other noun roots: -hɯt ‘under’ < hɯ̄j ‘belly’; -ʌʌt ‘on the surface’ < ʌʁat
‘back’; -inbal ‘between’ < inbal ‘gap, space between objects’. The resulting
concatenations superficially resemble the strings of suffixes in the neighboring
agglutinating Turkic and Samoyedic languages.
4
A fourth possessive-augmented case, called “benefactive”, appears in past grammars of Ket (cf.
Vajda 2004): da-ta ‘for him’, di-ta ‘for her’, etc. Recent fieldwork has shown that the
“benefactive” is simply a truncated pronunciation of the adessive forms by some speakers: da-ŋta
‘for him’, di-ŋta ‘for her’, etc.
26
6.3.2. Finite verb morphology
The most striking morphological feature of modern Ket is its rigid series of verb
prefix slots, which stand out starkly against the exclusively suffixing inflectional
morphology of other verb systems in western and south Siberia. Modern Ket finite
verbs conform to a morphological model consisting of eight prefix positions, an
original root or base position (P0), and a single suffix position (P-1):
(8) Generalized model of the Modern Ket finite verb
P8
P7
P6
subject
left base
person
P4
P3
P2
P1
P0
P-1
subject thematic
tense/
3p-
tense/
sub-
base
animate
(serves as
or
consonant
mood
inanim- mood
ject or (original
basic stem in
object
(originally
or 3pl
ate
object verb root plural
shape or
animate subj.
trajectory
subj or
prefix)
obj.
most verbs)
P5
subject
position)
or obj.
Two features of modern Ket verb morphology are extremely unusual
typologically. First, the configuration of subject/object markers is not determined
by an overall grammatical rule, so that agreement morphemes appear in different,
and largely unpredictable combinations of the following positions: P8, P6, P4, P3,
P1 and P-1. The resultant combinations form two productive transitive
subject/object
configurations,
and
five
productive
intransitive
subject
configurations (Vajda 2004). Which configuration a given verb requires is
determined by idiosyncratic etymological factors rather than general semantic
principles and must be listed as a feature of the verb’s lexical entry. Second, the
verb’s primary lexical element – its semantic head – occupies either P7 near the
beginning of the verb, or P0, near the end, depending on the stem in question.
The intervening affixes thus appear as prefixes in some verbs but as suffixes in
others.
The oldest verbs are invariably root-final, with the semantic head in P0.
27
(9) Examples of archaic root-final verbs with prefixes
durɔq
‘he flies’
du8-doq0
[3M.SBJ8-fly0]
dibbɛt
‘I make it’
di8-b3-bet0
[1SG.SBJ8-3N.OBJ3-make0]
dbiltaŋ
‘he dragged it’
du8-b3-il2-taŋ0
[3M.SBJ8-3N.OBJ3-PAST2-drag0]
However, all productive patterns of Ket verb-stem formation require a clearly
identifiable lexical element in P7, rendering the original prefixes in the rest of the
string as suffixes. Verbs with a clearly prefixing structure, such as those in (9)
above, generally belong to the oldest and most basic layers of the language and
are perhaps the equivalent of strong verbs in the Germanic verbal lexicon. The
semantic interaction between the morphemes in the newer P7 slot and the
original verb root slot in P0 is of two distinct types. The first involves genuine
incorporation of a noun or adjective form in P7, with P0 still containing a
recognizable verb root of some sort, as exemplified in (10). Note that the P8
subject agreement marker in verbs containing a P7 morpheme is a clitic that
normally attaches to the preceding word, so that the P7 morpheme regularly
stands in phonological verb initial position.
(10) Example of incorporation of (a) object noun or (b) instrument noun
a. (t)sálarɔp
du8-sal7-a4-dop0
‘he smokes’
3M.SBJ8-tobacco7-PRES4-injest0
b. (d)donbaγatɛt ‘he stabs me’
du8-do’n7-ba6-k5-a4-tet0
3M.SBJ8-knife7-1SG.OBJ6-TH5-PRES4-hit0
Only about seven P0 verb roots allow object or theme incorporation in P7, and
only two P0 roots allow instrument noun incorporation. Incorporating verbs
appear to be a new variation on an old model that arose as part of a general
typological shift toward root-initial word forms.
28
(11) Incorporating model of modern Ket verb formation
P8
P7
P6
P5
P4
P3
P2
P1
P0
P-1
verb
anim.
subject incor-
subject thematic
tense/
inanim. tense/
sub-
(clitic)
porated
or
mood or
subject
ject or root
sub-
noun
object
3rd person
or
object
ject
animate
object
consonant
mood
plural
sbj or obj
In the remaining productive patterns of Ket verb stem formation, the left base
(P7) contains an infinitive form that serves as the verb’s semantic peak, while the
original base (P0) contains an eroded verb root denoting generalized lexical
aspect or voice categories such as ‘single action transitive’ or ‘beginning of action’.
(12) Examples of infinitive-initial verb forms
daúsqibit
‘she thaws it (once)’
da8-us7-q5-b3-it0
3F.SBJ8-thaw7-CAUS5-3N.OBJ3-MOM.TRANS0
daúsqabda
‘she thaws it (repeatedly)’
da8-us7-q5-a4-b3-da0
3F.SBJ8-thaw7-CAUS5-PRES4-3N.OBJ3-ITER.TRANS0
Note that the remaining position classes serve the same functions as in
prefixing, root-final verb models, except that these slots serve as suffixes in verbs
with an infinitive in P7.
29
(13) Infinitive-initial pattern of modern Ket verb formation
P8
P7
subject infinitive
(clitic)
P6
P5
sub-ject them-
as semantic or
peak
atic
object
consonant
P4
P3
P2
P1
P0
P-1
tense/
inanim.
tense/
subject eroded verb
3 animate
object
or
root as affix
anim.
object
of aspect or
plural
mood or
p
subject or
sbj or obj
mood
subject
transitivity
The realignment of the phonological verb’s semantic head to the extreme left
edge served to accommodate the original Yeniseian prefixing structure to the
pattern of suffixal agglutination prevalent in all of the neighboring languages. Yet
no actual affixes were borrowed in this process. Nor did any change occur in the
order or function of the original prefix slots, which instead simply took on the
appearance of suffixes. There are only two types of morphemes in the modern
Ket verb system that can be identified as having been borrowed. These are a few
Russian infinitive forms along with several loan nouns that can be incorporated as
instrument or object.
(14) Ket verb forms containing loanwords in P7: (a) infinitive, (b) instrument
noun
a. (d)lečitbɔγavɛt
‘he cures me’
du8-lečit7-bo6-k5-a4-bet0
3M.SBJ8-cure7-1SG.OBJ6-TH5-PRES4-VERBALIZER0
b. (t)kɛrasinatakit ‘he rubs him (a dog) with kerosene (precaution against fleas)’
du8-kerasin7-a6-t5-a4-kit0
3M.SBJ8-kerosene7-3M.OBJ6-TH5-PRES4-rub0
In summary, it appears that during the centuries of development of Ket before
the arrival of the Russians in Siberia, certain areally dissonant features of
Yeniseian morphology gradually underwent typological accommodation to
Samoyedic and Turkic languages. This involved the innovation of root-initial verb
forms and the development of a system of case markers. It also affected the
30
phonemic prosody, which became eroded in longer, suffixal-agglutinative word
forms. Modern Ket, the best documented Yeniseian language, provides the best
available illustration of how these traits came to mimic the prevailing
morphological and phonological patterns of the surrounding languages without
actually being replaced. The resulting uniqueness of Modern Ket morphology is in
no small measure a product of this intricate process of structural hybridization.
7. Conclusion
Ket as well as its extinct relatives appear to be languages that are rather resistant
to outright borrowing of words and morphemes. The most significant exceptions
came during the initial phase of language shift as speakers became bilingual in a
superstrate language. In the case of 20th century Ket and Yugh, the superstrate
was Russian, while South Siberian Turkic dialects appear to have played the same
role in the final decades of Kott, Assan, Arin and Pumpokol. These late loans tend
to be only partly integrated to the phonologies of their recipient languages. Still,
despite today’s rapid pace of language loss the Ket continue to be resistant to
outright borrowing. Metaphoric neologisms made on the basis of native Ket
morphemes (e.g., bɔγul ‘fire water’, and the like) remain the preferred method of
concept naming even in the closing years of Ket as a viable form of
communication.
Outright grammatical borrowing is likewise the exception rather than the rule.
While there are a small number of function words that represent recent loans
from Russian, not a single bound morpheme in Ket can be identified as borrowed
from another language. Much more striking is the process of “typological
accommodation” that has gradually, over the centuries, shifted the morphological
profile of Ket from a prefixing language to one that places the lexeme’s semantic
head word-initially. This process, together with the seemingly contradictory
feature of resistance against borrowing actual morphemes and lexemes, is
probably connected with the traditional social situation in which Ket-speaking
groups lived. Selective bilingualism with outsiders, along with induction of
marriage partners from other groups, filtered out most outright borrowing, yet
31
gradually led to a sort of morphosyntactic calquing by design that rendered Ket
morphology into a unique hybrid of traditional prefixing structures expressed
root-initially. Judging from certain basic commonalities in Yeniseian case markers
and verb stem patterns, typological accommodation must have begun in Common
Yeniseian, though it has played itself out differently in each of the daughter
languages.
Abbreviations used in the verb morpheme glosses
ANIM
animate class
F
feminine
ITER
multiple action
M
masculine
MOM
single action
neuter (=inanimate) class
N
OBJ
object agreement affix
PL
plural
SG
singular
SBJ
subject agreement
TH
thematic consonant
TRANS
transitive
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