Very few people have heard of Marina Irikova, but she is a very important person. Marina lives in the Yenisei River region of Siberia and is just one of 200 people who speak the Ket language. Now, however, Edward Vajda from the Western Washington University has found that there are several links between Ket and the Athapaskan group of languages spoken by First Nations People in Western Canada and in some areas of the U.S. Professor Vajada has discovered that the Dene, Gwich’in, Navaho and Apache languages have nearly identical words for ‘canoe,’ ‘prow’’ and ‘cross-piece’ as are found in the Ket language. Though scholars have long realized that the Inuit of Canada, Alaska, Greenland, and Russia all speak the Eskimo-Aleut family of languages, no clear link has ever been established between Old World languages and the myriad languages spoken by First Nations people of North and South America.
Professor Vajda says that he began to explore the connection between the two language groups after reading a book written in Russian that spoke of Ket. The Russian book described Ket verbs and Vajda noticed that these verbs were unlike any others used in Asia. They reminded him of the verbs used in Navajo, a Na-Dene language, and, working with the “deep verb structures” of the two groups he was able to establish important similarities not shared by any other known language groups. In addition, Professor Vajda found laws of phonetic shift common to the two languages that do not have counterparts in other languages. Vajda writes:
Only items of core vocabulary, notably body parts, natural phenomena, and basic actions, appear to be cognate. Most notably, …words for biota, natural history, anatomy, and skill sets that specifically reflect hunter-gatherer life in the northern subarctic taiga forests. This is exactly what one should expect if these two language groups were related over a time depth of many thousands of years.
The new hypothesis has been labeled the ‘D-Y Hypothesis’ or ‘Dene-Yeniseic’ hypothesis, and was endorsed in March at an academic conference on linguistics and anthropology held in Alaska. Attendee Johanna Nicholas, a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley, states that: “The news isn’t the Siberian connection, but the successful demonstration of a long-distance, temporally deep connection.” Bernard Comrie, the director of the department of linguistics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, agrees saying that Vajda has: “…succeeded in convincing a number of linguists who are normally quite skeptical about long-range comparisons as well as specialists in Na-Dene who are normally skeptical about attempts to relate ‘their’ languages to others.”
Though not all linguists, notably Lyle Campbell of the University of Utah, and Merrit Rhlen, are completely convinced of the Ket-Dene link, most seem to feel that Professor Vajda’s work has opened a door to the possibility of a rich and ancient linguistic heritage for the First Nation’s people of western North America.
