Edward J. Vajda

Etymological dictionary of the Kartvelian languages

With about 1400 entries, this dictionary presents an etymological analysis of Karvelian vocabulary. The analysis presented draws a clear distinction between two important stages, earlier Common Karvela on the one hand and later Georgia-Zan on the other. In addition to systematically registering Indo-Euroean analogues, this volume also contributes to the largely neglected question of Kartvelian-Armenian lexical interpretation.

The Languages of Siberia

Although Russian today is the dominant language in virtually every corner of North Asia, Siberia and the Northern Pacific Rim of Asia remain home to over three dozen mutually unintelligible indigenous language varieties. Except for Tuvan, Buryat, and Yakut, most are rapidly losing ground to Russian if not already critically endangered. Several more have already become extinct in the four centuries since the areas incorporation into the Russian state. From an ethnographic perspective, Siberian languages merit attention for their interplay of pastoral and hunter–gatherer influences and also for the fact that Siberia represents the staging ground for prehistoric migrations into the Americas. North Asia contains several autochthonous microfamilies and isolates not found outside this region – the so-called ‘Paleo-Asiatic’ (or ‘Paleosiberian’) languages Ket, Yukaghir, Nivkh, and the Chukotko-Kamchatkan microfamily, which includes Chukchi, Koryak, and Itelmen. Ainu, formerly spoken on Sakhalin and the Kuriles as well as in Hokkaido, and the three varieties of Eskimoan spoken in historic times on the Russian side of Bering Strait, likewise belong to the earlier, non-food producing layers of ethnolinguistic diversity in North Asia. All of these languages, aside from Eskimoan, are entirely autochthonous to the northern half of Asia. Siberian languages spoken by pastoral groups, on the other hand, belong to families represented more prominently elsewhere. Families, such as Uralic, Turkic, Mongolic, and especially Tungusic (the northern branch of the Tungus-Manchu family), became dominant in Siberia long before the coming of the Russians. As an extension of pastoral Inner Eurasia, Siberia displays many traits characteristic of a linguistic area: suffixal agglutination, widespread dependent marking typology, a fairly elaborate system of spatial case markers, and the use of case suffixes or postpositions to signal syntactic subordination. There are also notable idiosyncratic features, particularly among the so-called Paleo-Siberian languages. These include the areally atypical feature of possessive prefixes and verb-internal subject/object prefixes in Ket, the unique verb-internal focus markers of Yukaghir, the extensive numeral allomorphs that serve as nominal classifiers in Nivkh, and the reduplicative stem augmentation used by Chukchi nouns to express the absolutive singular (in contrast to plurals and oblique case forms, where the stem is simple). While North Asia has long been the preserve of linguists writing in Russian or German (including many Finns and Hungarians), since the collapse of the Soviet Union the number of English-language treatments of Siberian languages is increasing.

Na-Dene populations descend from the Paleo-Eskimo migration into America

Prehistory of Native Americans of the Na-Dene language family remains controversial. Genetic continuity of Paleo-Eskimos (Saqqaq and Dorset cultures) and Na-Dene was proposed under the three-wave model of America’s settlement; however, recent studies have produced conflicting results. Here, we performed reconstruction and dating of Na-Dene population history, using genome sequencing data and a coalescent method relying on rare alleles (Rarecoal). We also applied model-free approaches for analysis of rare allele and autosomal haplotype sharing. All methods detected Central and West Siberian ancestry exclusively in a fraction of modern day Na-Dene individuals, but not in other Native Americans. Our results are consistent with gene flow from Paleo-Eskimos into the First American ancestors of Na-Dene, and a later less extensive bidirectional admixture between Na-Dene and Neo-Eskimos. The dated gene flow from Siberia to Na-Dene is in agreement with the Dene-Yeniseian language macrofamily proposal and with the succession of archaeological cultures in Siberia.

Between Lake Baikal and the Baltic Sea: genomic history of the gateway to Europe

BackgroundThe history of human populations occupying the plains and mountain ridges separating Europe from Asia has been eventful, as these natural obstacles were crossed westward by multiple waves of Turkic and Uralic-speaking migrants as well as eastward by Europeans. Unfortunately, the material records of history of this region are not dense enough to reconstruct details of population history. These considerations stimulate growing interest to obtain a genetic picture of the demographic history of migrations and admixture in Northern Eurasia.ResultsWe genotyped and analyzed 1076 individuals from 30 populations with geographical coverage spanning from Baltic Sea to Baikal Lake. Our dense sampling allowed us to describe in detail the population structure, provide insight into genomic history of numerous European and Asian populations, and significantly increase quantity of genetic data available for modern populations in region of North Eurasia. Our study doubles the amount of genome-wide profiles available for this region.We detected unusually high amount of shared identical-by-descent (IBD) genomic segments between several Siberian populations, such as Khanty and Ket, providing evidence of genetic relatedness across vast geographic distances and between speakers of different language families. Additionally, we observed excessive IBD sharing between Khanty and Bashkir, a group of Turkic speakers from Southern Urals region. While adding some weight to the “Finno-Ugric” origin of Bashkir, our studies highlighted that the Bashkir genepool lacks the main “core”, being a multi-layered amalgamation of Turkic, Ugric, Finnish and Indo-European contributions, which points at intricacy of genetic interface between Turkic and Uralic populations. Comparison of the genetic structure of Siberian ethnicities and the geography of the region they inhabit point at existence of the “Great Siberian Vortex” directing genetic exchanges in populations across the Siberian part of Asia.Slavic speakers of Eastern Europe are, in general, very similar in their genetic composition. Ukrainians, Belarusians and Russians have almost identical proportions of Caucasus and Northern European components and have virtually no Asian influence. We capitalized on wide geographic span of our sampling to address intriguing question about the place of origin of Russian Starovers, an enigmatic Eastern Orthodox Old Believers religious group relocated to Siberia in seventeenth century. A comparative reAdmix analysis, complemented by IBD sharing, placed their roots in the region of the Northern European Plain, occupied by North Russians and Finno-Ugric Komi and Karelian people. Russians from Novosibirsk and Russian Starover exhibit ancestral proportions close to that of European Eastern Slavs, however, they also include between five to 10 % of Central Siberian ancestry, not present at this level in their European counterparts.ConclusionsOur project has patched the hole in the genetic map of Eurasia: we demonstrated complexity of genetic structure of Northern Eurasians, existence of East-West and North-South genetic gradients, and assessed different inputs of ancient populations into modern populations.

Comparative Wakashan dictionary

Reviewed by (Edward J. Vajda)In pre-contact times, languages belonging to the Wakashan family occupied much of Canadas Vancouver Island and coastal British Columbia, as well as a small enclave on ...

Ditransitive constructions in Ket

Fig. 1 Position classes in Modern Ket P8 P7 P6 P5 P4 P3 P2 P1 P0 P-1 subject or thematic valence reducing affix incorporate infinitive as semantic peak or incorporated noun, adj, or adverb root subject or object thematic consonant (most are semantically opaque) tense/ mood /a/, /s/ or 3 person animate subject or object inanim. subject or object; or thematic valence change affix tense/ mood/ aspect consonant /n/, /l/ subject or object or thematic valence reducing affix base 1. verb root as semantic peak or 2. aspect/voice auxiliary) anim. subject plural (in many verbs that use P8 for subject)

Ket Verb Structure in Typological Perspective

This article describes finite verb form creation in Ket, an isolate spoken by a few hundred people in Russias Krasnoyarsk Province (central Siberia). The only inflectional categories are tense (past/ non-past), mood (indicative/imperative), and subject/object agreement (person-class-number). Despite this modest inventory, verbs are polysynthetic and conform to a ten-slot position-class model. Incorporation involves certain non-agentive subjects, as well as objects, Instruments, and directional adverbs. Most stems are discontinuous, and lexical morphemes often appear semantically opaque. In addition, an intricate series of morphotactic rules insert phonetic elements that disambiguate the position-class of adjacent morphemes occupying non-adjacent slots. The verbs most unusual feature is its use of subject/ object agreement (actant) positions as a component of stem creation a typologically unique functional analog to Indo-European conjugational classes. This divides the verbal lexicon into five productive conjugations, two of which use redundant subject marking to derive such meanings as quick action, involuntary action, or deliberate action performed without a tool or conveyance. Causatives, inceptives, resultatives, reflexives, reciprocals and even infinitives are distinct lexemes rather than inflectional forms of another stem. The most pervasive derivational categories are event number (punctual vs. iterative) and transitivity, with transitive and intransitive stems obligatorily differing morphologically apart from the presence of an object affix. Though the description is synchronic, the article also proposes an origin for the more characteristic features of Yeniseic verb stnicture that suggests a genetic link with Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit.

The role of position class in Ket verb morphophonology

Abstract Each Ket verb lexically determines the morpheme positions its subject/object agreement markers will occupy (Vajda 2000a), raising an interesting question about the division between derivation and inflection in this language. Stump (1997) showed that inflectional morphology in all languages is “templatic” according to Simpson and Withgotts (1986) definition, but suggested a non-trivial distinction may exist between “templatic” and “non-templatic” forms of derivation. Vajda (2000a, 2001, 2002) argued that Ket actant agreement patterns use inflection position selection as a component of derivation. The present article examines the various morphophonemic strategies that identify position-class configuration in this unusual type of word formation, demonstrating that rules based on position class (which I call “morphotactic rules”) elegantly account for many hitherto puzzling features of Ket verb structure.