Yeniseian linguistics

Bu çalışma, Stephanos Byzantinos’un Ethnika adlı eseri başta olmak üzere, Bizans kaynaklarında geçen ve ‘Karca’ olarak nitelendirilen bazı sözcükler üzerinde durmaktadır. Bu sözcükler, Karca yazıtlarda tanıklanmadığı için, ilgili literatürde ‘sözde Karca’ (pseudo-glosses) olarak adlandırılmaktadır. Çalışmamızda, altı ‘sözde Karca’ kelime ele alınmış ve bunlar için (Pre-)Proto-Türkçeye kadar dayanan etimolojiler önerilmiştir. Bizanslı yazarların eserlerinde Karca olarak ortaya çıkan bu sözcüklerin Urartularla temas hâlindeki Kimmerler veya Hurrilerle yakın ilişki içinde olan Turukkular aracılığıyla Anadolu’ya girmiş olabileceği öne sürülmüştür. Bu sebeple, Hurri-Urartuca ve Türkçenin söz varlıkları arasındaki toplam otuz yedi benzer kelime listelenmiş, bunların Urartucadan Türkçeye alıntılar olabileceği sonucuna varılmıştır. Bu karşılaştırmalara dayanarak, Pre-Proto-Türkçenin ses özelliklerine değinilmiştir. Kimmer nüfusunun kısmen Türkçe konuşanlardan oluştuğu ve dillerinin bir yandan ‘sözde Karca’ sözcüklerin kaynağı, diğer yandan Urartuca sözcüklerin alıcısı olduğu varsayımı en makul öneri olarak görülmektedir. /// The present study deals with a number of glosses which appear in the Byzantinian sources, most of them in Ethnica of Stephanos Byzantinos, and are labeled as Carian. As these glosses are not actually attested in Carian inscriptions, they are called pseudo-glosses in the relevant literature. Six of these pseudo-Carian glosses are examined and for all of them, Turkic etymologies are proposed which reach into the depth of (Pre-)Proto-Turkic. It is asserted that the glosses which surface as Carian in the works of the Byzantinian historians may have entered into Anatolia by the Cimmerians or by the Turukku which were in close contact with the Urartians and Hurrians, respectively. Therefore, thirty-seven similar lexical items in the Hurro-Urartian and Turkic vocabularies are listed. It has been concluded that these may be Urartian loanwords in Turkic. Based on these correspondences, the phonological features of Pre-Proto-Turkic are discussed. The supposition that the Cimmerian population was partly Turkic-speaking and their language was the donor of the pseudo-Carian glosses and the recipient of the Urartian loanwords proves to be the most plausible one.

This new four-volume collection from Routledge brings together the major works of scholarship concerned with the ‘language isolates’ of the world. ‘Isolated’ languages are languages without any known relatives, languages which are not demonstrably part of any ‘language family’, with Etruscan, Basque, and Ainu being arguably some of the best-known examples of such ‘linguistic orphans’. The language-specific materials collected here are arranged geographically, and each language-chapter is preceded by a short introduction to the linguistic situation of the language(es) involved and, if not given in anthologized works themselves, to the current state of research and past and present scholarly debates. The volumes are preceded by a problem-oriented general introduction, which deals with the basic concepts and methodological principles of language classification, the present state and the nature of ongoing controversies, an epistemiological typology of language families, and, in the light of this, a theoretical justification of the concept of isolates as well as the choice of languages covered in the volumes.

Some of the gathered works are general introductions to their object language (in terms of sociolinguistics, attestation, documentation, history of scholarship, guides to published studies, overviews of linguistic characteristics), others highlight and discuss particularly salient and interesting typological characteristics of an isolate (some of them are breakthrough studies for the understanding of a particular language), and others focus on the very status of the language under discussion as an isolate in the first place. Some isolated languages are still very much alive; at least one of them, Korean, is a major national language. The majority of the languages and small families covered here are endangered, and some will certainly cease to be used during the coming decades. Thus, isolated languages are particularly interesting objects for students of language endangerment, but they are also prime research objects for linguistic descriptionists, for, when they are gone, not only will another of the 6,000 or so human languages have disappeared, but, in those cases, whole linguistic lineages (and their ways of coping with the world) will be gone forever.

I tried to reconstruct a version of Proto-Yeniseian, using (very limited) lexical items listed in the wikipedia article of Yeniseian languages( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yeniseian_languages ), and I list what I have reconstructed in the .ods file

This is only a very simple work.

Die drei voluminösen Bände des vergleichenden Wörterbuchs der jenisseischen Sprachen, die Heinrich Werner vorlegt, stellen -soviel vorweg -zweifellos eine der wichtigsten Leistungen auf dem Gebiet der sibirischen Sprachwissenschaft des 20. Jahrhunderts dar (erschienen 2002, gehören doch ihre Zusammenstellung und die unermüdliche Forschungs-und Sammeltätigkeit des Verfassers, die dieses monumentale Werk möglich gemacht hat, noch ganz ins letzte Jahrhundert). Heinrich Werner, Schüler und wissenschaftlicher Erbe von Andreas Dul'zon, dem Pionier der jenisseischen und zentralsibirischen Linguistik, Archäologie, Toponomastik und Ethnographie in Tomsk, legt seit seiner Übersiedlung in die Bundesrepublik eine beeindruckende Reihe von Monographien zur Jenisseiologie vor, die, beinahe im Jahresrhythmus erscheinend, alle Aspekte dieser nach wie vor enigmatischen Sprachfamilie erschöpfend und umfassend behandelt. Das Vergleichende Wörterbuch (VW) ist sicherlich der vorläufige Höhepunkt dieser Reihe. Die Leistung des Verfassers kann nur ermessen, wer sich der immensen Schwierigkeiten bewusst ist, die ein solches Vorhaben bietet; vergleicht man es mit einem in Anlage und Zielsetzung vergleichbaren Werk, dem Sravnitel'nyj slovar' tunguso-man'čžurskich jazykov I-II, Leningrad 1975-77, das unter der Leitung der großen Tungusologin Vera I. Cincius von insgesamt acht Mitarbeitern erstellt wurde, erscheint die Tatsache, dass Werner seine Arbeit allein vervollständigen konnte, nahezu unglaublich. Es handelt sich um nichts weniger, als die Dokumentation des gesamten lexikalischen Materials, das der Forschung aus jenisseischen Sprachen überhaupt erreichbar ist. Die jenisseischen Sprachen sind eine kleine indigene Sprachfamilie Sibiriens, deren historisches Verbreitungsgebiet der Jenissej und einige seiner linken und rechten Nebenflüsse sind bzw.

The article is devoted to the hypothesis of ethnic belonging of builders of Ural megaliths. In this area place-names with roots in the dene-Caucasian language family were revealed. The same situation can be found in the regions of other megalithic cultures. This suggests that the megaliths of the Urals were associated with speakers of the Proto-Yenisei languages.

Linguists and specialists on Siberia are generally familiar with the name Ket, which designates a small ethnic group on the Yenisei and their language, widely regarded as a linguistic enigma in many respects. Ket is a severely endangered language with today ...

There appears to be plenty of evidence for Tocharian-Samoyedic language contact, and no traces of Tocharian-Yeniseic contact. Ergo: Proto-Yeniseians crossed the Western Sayan Mts. into the Minusinsk Hollow AFTER the Afanasievans (Proto-Tocharians) had left for the Tarim basin.

In 1931, the Soviet architect Ivan Il’ich Leonidov was sent 2,800km northeast of Moscow to help to design the Soviet Union’s new arctic port, Igarka: a pioneering something, inscribed into the vast nothing of Northern Siberia; that, anyway, is how the act was represented.  The Igarka region was, however, traditional territory of the indigenous, isolate Ket language, which is entirely unrelated to the Indo-European family that dominates architectural discourse.  Ket is spoken today – to any degree of fluency – by fewer than 70 people.  When it is used to represent an interpretation of architecture, the structures by which it organises experience, the distinctions it inscribes into the landscape, the specific relationships it establishes between facets of reality – the selections, in other words, that it makes in encoding information – are as with all languages, unique.  Yet until 2013, academic discussion of Leonidov’s fantastical, utopian architecture had never taken place in the medium of the Ket language.  This is an omission.  What alternative insight might be overlooked?
Leonidov’s City of the Sun itself evades certain definition, provoking multiple and irreconcilable interpretations: the obscure drawings of which it is comprised do not show a fixed vision for which to aim, but intricate us in the perpetuated contestation of what the future could, or should, be.  The City is an invitation to cant.  If it be utopia, it is utopia not as destination, but as fractious, negotiated journey.  This same irresolvability emerges in the act of translation, which as a research practice is my attempt to enact Leonidov’s proposed leap into a void of constant, productive uncertainty – to destabilise any ossified perspective or assumptions when approaching his work.  Or to perpetually attempt to.  This paper exposes some of the shards that have resulted from a collision provoked between Ivan Leonidov’s City of the Sun, and the grammar of Ket.