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Edward J. Vajda: Loanwords in Ket
Edward J. Vajda: Loanwords in Ket
Edward J. Vajda: Loanwords in Ket
Loanwords in Ket
Edward J. Vajda
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 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
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.
8
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 elementary-
school 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.
9
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-Russian-
English-German dictionary of words gathered from all three Ket dialects re-
elicited 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
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 rising-
falling tone on a geminate vowel (huut ‘animal tail’). The forms given are from the Southern Ket
dialect unless otherwise noted.
10
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-a-
in 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
11
immediately affected by the Russian presence, since they found themselves torn
between fur-tax obligations to the Russian newcomers as well as to the Turco-
Mongol 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.
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
4.1. 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 pan-
Yeniseian 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 vis-
à-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.
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.
Mongolian
loanwords
loanwords
Russian
Chinese
Selkup
Evenki
Total
Non-
Nouns 12.3 0.7 0.3 0.2 0.2 13.6 86.4
Verbs 4 - - - - 4 96
Function words 6.1 - - - - 6.1 93.9
Adjectives 3.5 - - - - 3.5 96.5
Adverbs - - - - - 0 100
all words 8.9 0.4 0.2 0.1 0.1 9.7 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.
Mongolian
loanwords
loanwords
Russian
Chinese
Selkup
Evenki
Total
Non-
1 The physical world 4.9 - - - - 4.9 95.1
2 Kinship 1.5 - - - - 1.5 98.5
3 Animals 6.7 - 1.7 - - 8.3 91.7
4 The body 3.3 - - - - 3.3 96.7
5 Food and drink 14.6 1.8 - - - 16.5 83.5
6 Clothing and grooming 13 - - - - 13 87
7 The house 23.1 - - - - 23.1 76.9
8 Agriculture and vegetation 12.8 - - 3.2 3.2 19.2 80.8
9 Basic actions and technology 10 - 1.7 - - 11.7 88.3
10 Motion 6 - - - - 6 94
11 Possession 24.1 - - - - 24.1 75.9
12 Spatial relations 6.3 - - - - 6.3 93.7
13 Quantity 2.9 - - - - 2.9 97.1
14 Time 9.9 - - - - 9.9 90.1
15 Sense perception - - - - - 0 100
16 Emotions and values 5.6 - - - - 5.6 94.4
17 Cognition 13.8 - - - - 13.8 86.2
18 Speech and language - - - - - 0 100
19 Social and political relations 9.7 9.7 - - - 19.4 80.6
20 Warfare and hunting 3.5 - - - - 3.5 96.5
21 Law 30.8 - - - - 30.8 69.2
22 Religion and belief 15.4 - - - - 15.4 84.6
23 Modern world 54.8 4.8 - - - 59.5 40.5
24 Miscellaneous function words - - - - - 0 100
8.9 0.4 0.2 0.1 0.1 9.7 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
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 syllable-
initial 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
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 wife-
without]. The loan particle bēs thus functions as a sort of optional circumfixal
23
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 quasi-
calquing “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.
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
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
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):
P8 P7 P6 P5 P4 P3 P2 P1 P0 P-1
subject left base subject thematic tense/ 3p- tense/ sub- base animate
person (serves as or consonant mood inanim- mood ject or (original subject
basic stem in object (originally or 3pl ate object verb root plural
most verbs) shape or animate subj. position)
trajectory subj or or obj.
prefix) obj.
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
P8 P7 P6 P5 P4 P3 P2 P1 P0 P-1
subject incor- subject thematic tense/ inanim. tense/ sub- verb anim.
(clitic) porated or consonant mood or subject mood ject or root sub-
noun object 3rd person or object ject
animate object 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’.
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
P8 P7 P6 P5 P4 P3 P2 P1 P0 P-1
subject infinitive sub-ject them- tense/ inanim. tense/ subject eroded verb anim.
(clitic) as semantic or atic mood or subject or mood or root as affix subject
peak object con- 3 animate
p
object object of aspect or plural
sonant sbj or obj 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
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
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
References