Dené–Caucasian languages
Dené–Caucasian is [|a] proposed language family that includes widely-separated languages spoken in the Northern Hemisphere: Sino-Tibetan, Yeniseian, Burushaski and North Caucasian in Asia; Na-Dené in North America; and from Europe the Vasconic languages.
A narrower connection specifically between North American Na-Dené and Siberian Yeniseian was proposed by Edward Vajda in 2008, and has met with some acceptance within the community of professional linguists. The validity of the rest of the family, however, is viewed as doubtful or rejected by nearly all historical linguists.
History of the hypothesis
Classifications similar to Dené–Caucasian were put forward in the 20th century by Alfredo Trombetti, Edward Sapir, Robert Bleichsteiner, Karl Bouda, E. J. Furnée, René Lafon, Robert Shafer, Olivier Guy Tailleur, Morris Swadesh, Vladimir N. Toporov, and other scholars.Morris Swadesh included all of the members of Dené–Caucasian in a family that he called "Basque-Dennean" or "vascodene". It was named for Basque and Navajo, the languages at its geographic extremes. According to Swadesh, it included "Basque, the Caucasian languages, Ural-Altaic, Dravidian, Tibeto-Burman, Chinese, Austronesian, Japanese, Chukchi, Eskimo-Aleut, Wakash, and Na-Dene", and possibly "Sumerian". Swadesh's Basque-Dennean thus differed from Dené–Caucasian in including Uralic, Altaic, Japanese, Chukotian, and Eskimo-Aleut, Dravidian, which is classed as Nostratic by Starostin's school, and Austronesian. Swadesh's colleague Mary Haas attributes the origin of the Basque-Dennean hypothesis to Edward Sapir.
In the 1980s, Sergei Starostin, using strict linguistic methods, became the first to put the idea that the Caucasian, Yeniseian and Sino-Tibetan languages are related on firmer ground. In 1991, Sergei L. Nikolaev added the Na-Dené languages to Starostin's classification.
The inclusion of the Na-Dené languages has been somewhat complicated by the ongoing dispute over whether Haida belongs to the family. The proponents of the Dené–Caucasian hypothesis incline towards supporters of Haida's membership in Na-Dené, such as Heinz-Jürgen Pinnow or, most recently, John Enrico. Edward J. Vajda, who otherwise rejects the Dené–Caucasian hypothesis, has suggested that Tlingit, Eyak, and the Athabaskan languages are closely related to the Yeniseian languages, but he denies any genetic relationship of the former three to Haida. Vajda's ideas on the relationship of Athabaskan–Eyak–Tlingit and Yeniseian have found support independently in works of various authors, including Heinrich K. Werner or Merritt Ruhlen. DNA analyses have not shown any special connection between the modern Ket population and the modern speakers of the Na-Dené languages.
In 1996, John D. Bengtson added the Vasconic languages, and in 1997 he proposed the inclusion of Burushaski. The same year, in his article for Mother Tongue, Bengtson concluded that Sumerian might have been a remnant of a distinct subgroup of the Dené–Caucasian languages. However, two other papers on the genetic affinity of Sumerian appeared in the same volume: while Allan R. Bomhard considered Sumerian to be a sister of Nostratic, Igor M. Diakonoff compared it to the Munda languages.
In 1998, Vitaly V. Shevoroshkin rejected the Amerind affinity of the Almosan languages, suggesting instead that they had a relationship with Dené–Caucasian. Several years later, he offered a number of lexical and phonological correspondences between the North Caucasian, Salishan, and Wakashan languages, concluding that Salishan and Wakashan may represent a distinct branch of North Caucasian and that their separation from it must postdate the dissolution of the Northeast Caucasian unity, which took place around the 2nd or 3rd millennium BC.
Evidence for Dené–Caucasian
The existence of Dené–Caucasian is supported by:- Many words that correspond between some or all of the families referred to Dené–Caucasian.
- The presence in the shared vocabulary of words that are rarely borrowed or otherwise replaced, such as personal pronouns.
- Elements of grammar, such as verb prefixes and their positions, noun class prefixes, and case suffixes that are shared between at least some of the component families.
- A reconstruction of the sound system, the basic parts of the grammar, and much of the vocabulary of the macrofamily's most recent common ancestor, the so-called Proto-Dené–Caucasian language.
- The somewhat heavy reliance on the reconstruction of Proto-Caucasian by Starostin and Nikolayev. This reconstruction contains much uncertainty due to the extreme complexity of the sound systems of the Caucasian languages; the sound correspondences between these languages are difficult to trace.
- The use of the reconstruction of Proto-Sino-Tibetan by Peiros and Starostin, parts of which have been criticized on various grounds, although Starostin himself has proposed a few revisions. All reconstructions of Proto-Sino-Tibetan suffer from the facts that many languages of the huge Sino-Tibetan family are underresearched and that the shape of the Sino-Tibetan tree is poorly known and partly controversial.
- The use of Starostin's reconstruction of Proto-Yeniseian rather than the competing one by Vajda or that by Werner.
- The use of Bengtson's reconstruction of Proto-/Pre-Basque rather than Trask's.
- The slow progress in the reconstruction of Proto-Na-Dené, so that Haida and Athabaskan–Eyak–Tlingit have so far mostly been considered separately.
Shared pronominal morphemes
The Algic, Salishan, Wakashan, and Sumerian comparisons should be regarded as especially tentative because regular sound correspondences between these families and the more often accepted Dené–Caucasian families have not yet been reconstructed. To a lesser degree this also holds for the Na-Dené comparisons, where only a few sound correspondences have yet been published.
/V/ means that the vowel in this position has not been successfully reconstructed. /K/ could have been any velar or uvular plosive, /S/ could have been any sibilant or assibilate.
All except Algic, Salishan and Wakashan are taken from Bengtson.
| Meaning | Proto-Dené–Caucasian | Proto- Basque | Proto- Caucasian | Proto- Burushaski | Proto- Sino-Tibetan | Proto- Yeniseian | Na-Dené | Proto- Salishan | Proto- Algic | Sumerian |
| 1st sg. | /ŋV/ | /ni/, /n/- | /nɨ/#pron.note.01| | /a/- | /ŋaː/- | /ŋ/ | /nV/ | /nˀV/- | /ŋa/#pron.note.02| | |
| 1st sg. | /d͡zV/ | -/da/-, -/t/ | /zoː/ | /d͡ʑa/ | /ʔad͡z/ | #pron.note.03| | -/t͡s/-, -/s/#pron.note.04| | |||
| 1st sg. | /KV/ | /gu/#pron.note.05|, /g/- | /ka/- | #pron.note.06| | ||||||
| 2nd sg. | /KwV/ | /hi/, /h/-, -/ga/-Dené–Caucasian languages#| | /ʁwVː/ | /gu/-~/go/- | /Kwa/- | /k/ | #pron.note.08| | /ʔaxʷ/ | /k̕V/- | |
| 2nd sg. | /u̯Vn/ | -/na/-Dené–Caucasian languages#| | /u̯oː-n/ | /u-n/ | /na-/ | /ʔaw/ | #pron.note.10| | /wV/ | ||
| 3rd sg. | /w/- or /m/- | /be-ra/ | /mV/ | /mu/-#pron.note.11| | /m/- | /wV/ | #pron.note.12| | |||
| 2nd pl. | /Su/ | /su/, /s/- | /ʑwe/ | /t͡sa/#pron.note.13| |
Footnotes:
1 On Caucasian evidence alone, this word cannot be reconstructed for Proto-Caucasian or even Proto-East Caucasian; it is only found in Lak and Dargwa.
2 The final found in Sumerian pronouns is the ergative ending. The Emesal dialect has.
3 Proto-Athabaskan, Haida dii.
4 Also in Proto-Southern Wakashan.
5 1st pl..
6 Tlingit xa, Eyak -,.
7 Masculine verb prefix.
8 Proto-Athabaskan -, Tlingit ÿi > yi = 2nd pl.; Tlingit i, Eyak "thou".
9 Feminine verb prefix.
10 Proto-Athabaskan -, Haida dang /dàŋ/, Tlingit wa.é, where the hypothesis of a connection between the Proto-Athabaskan and Haida forms on the one hand and the rest on the other hand requires ad hoc assumptions of assimilation and dissimilation.
11 Feminine.
12 Proto-Athabaskan -, Eyak -, Tlingit wé, Haida 'wa.
13 2nd sg.
Shared noun class pre- and infixes
Noun classification occurs in the North Caucasian languages, Burushaski, Yeniseian, and the Na-Dené languages. In Basque and Sino-Tibetan, only fossilized vestiges of the prefixes remain. One of the prefixes, */s/-, seems to be abundant in Haida, though again fossilized.The following table with its footnotes, except for Burushaski, is taken from Bengtson.
| Proto-Dené–Caucasian | Proto-Basque #clas.note.a| | Proto-Caucasian #clas.note.b| | Burushaski #clas.note.c| | Proto-Sino-Tibetan #clas.note.d| | Ket #clas.note.e| |
| /u̯/- | /o/-, /u/- | I /u̯/- | /u/- | /a/, /o/ | |
| /j/ | /e/-, /i/- | II /j/- | /i/- | /g/- | /i/, /id/ |
| /w/ | /be/-, /bi/- | III /w/-, /b/- | /b/-, /m/- | /b/ | |
| /r/ | IV /r/-, /d/- | /r/-, /d/- | |||
| /s/ | -/s/- | /s/- |
Footnotes:
a In Basque, the class prefixes became fossilized.
b In many Caucasian languages, systems of this type more or less persist to this day, especially in the East Caucasian languages, whereas in West Caucasian, only Abkhaz and Abaza preserve a distinction human-nonhuman. The Roman numbers are those conventionally used for the East Caucasian noun classes. The forms in parentheses are very rare.
c Burushaski seems to have reversed the first two animate classes, which may have parallels in some East Caucasian languages, namely Rutul, Tsakhur, or Kryz.
d As with Basque, the class system was already obsolete by the time the languages were recorded.
e Objective verb prefixes; /a/ and /i/ are used in the present tense, /o/ and /id/ in the past.
Verb morphology
In general, many Dené–Caucasian languages have polysynthetic verbs with several prefixes in front of the verb stem, but usually few or no suffixes.The following is an example of a Kabardian verb from Bengtson :
Bengtson suggests correspondences between some of these prefixes and between their positions.
For example, a preverb /t/- occurs in Yeniseian languages and appears in position −3 or −4 in the verb template. In Burushaski, a fossilized preverb /d/- appears in position −3. In Basque, an element d- appears in position −3 of auxiliary verbs in the present tense unless a first or second person absolutive agreement marker occupies that position instead. The Na-Dené languages have a "classifier" /d/- or */də/- that is either fossilized or has a vaguely transitive function and appears in position −3 in Haida. In Sino-Tibetan, Classical Tibetan has a "directive" prefix /d/-, and Nung has a causative prefix /d/-.
A past tense marker /n/ is found in Basque, Caucasian, Burushaski, Yeniseian, and Na-Dené ; in all of these except Yeniseian, it is a suffix or circumfix, which is noteworthy in these suffix-poor language families.
Another prefix /b/ is found in some Sino-Tibetan languages; in Classical Tibetan it marks the past tense and precedes other prefixes. It may correspond to the Tlingit perfect prefix wu-/woo- /wʊ, wu/, which occurs in position −2, and the fossilized Haida wu-/w- /wu, w/ which occurs in verbs with "resultative/perfect" meanings.
"There are also some commonalities in the sequential ordering of verbal affixes: typically the transitive/causative *s- is directly before the verb stem, a pronominal agent or patient in the next position. If both subject/agent and object/patient are referenced in the same verbal chain, the object typically precedes the subject : cf. Basque, West Caucasian , Burushaski, Yeniseian, Na-Dené, Sumerian templates . -D Eyak allows for subjects and objects in a suffix position."] In Yeniseian and Na-Dene noun stems or verb stems can be incorporated into the verbal chain."
The mentioned "transitive/causative" */s/- is found in Haida, Tlingit, Sino-Tibetan, Burushaski, possibly Yeniseian and maybe in Basque. A causative suffix *-/s/ is found in many Nostratic languages, too, but its occurrence as a prefix and its position in the prefix chain may nevertheless be innovations of Dené–Caucasian.
Family tree proposals
Starostin's theory
The Dené–Caucasian family tree and approximate divergence dates proposed by S. A. Starostin and his colleagues from the Tower of Babel project:Bengtson's theory
John D. Bengtson groups Basque, Caucasian and Burushaski together in a Macro-Caucasian family. According to him, it is as yet premature to propose other nodes or subgroupings, but he notes that Sumerian seems to share the same number of isoglosses with the western branches as with the eastern ones:Proposed subbranches
Macro-Caucasian
thinks that, within Dené–Caucasian, the Caucasian languages form a branch together with Basque and Burushaski, based on many shared word roots as well as shared grammar such as:- the Caucasian plural/collective ending of nouns, which is preserved in many modern Caucasian languages, as well as sometimes fossilized in singular nouns with collective meaning; one of the many Burushaski plural endings for class I and II nouns is.
- the consonant -, which is inserted between the components of some Basque compound nouns and can be compared to the East Caucasian element - which is inserted between the noun stem and the endings of cases other than the ergative.
- the presence of compound case endings in all three branches.
- the case endings themselves:
A genitive suffix -/nV/ is also widespread among Nostratic languages.