KET LANGUAGE(obsolete name - Yenisei-Ostyak). It belongs to the Yenisei languages ​​​​(Ket-Yug group) and is their unity. surviving representative. The names of "kets" (< кет. ке?т ‘человек’) и «кет. яз.» окончательно утвердились в отеч. науке лишь в 1920-х гг.

K. i. - agglutinative type, using prefixation (predominantly in the verb system) and suffixation (mainly in the noun system), sometimes they talk about the presence of infixation, there are also elements of incorporation. There are bases to assume that at early stages of development To. I. he was analytical. K. i. has a non-typical for the languages ​​of the North. Eurasia phonetic. and grammar. build. It is characterized by the absence of synharmonism: the presence of 4 syllabic tones - syllabic accentuation, but its function. the load is insignificant, because in polysyllabic words, tonal oppositions are neutralized. The noun has grammar categories. class (male, female, real), number, case. There are many ways to express the category of number. There is no formal opposition between the case of the subject and the direct object; these functions are marked subject-object. verb markers. The conjugation system is complex and includes several paradigmatic series (series) subject-object. indicators, the distribution of which has not yet received an unambiguous semantic, morphol. or syntax. justification. Through subject-object. The indicators of the verb agree with the actants in the categories of person, number, and class. At the same time, the categories of the person and the number of the subject are expressed separately: the indicators of the person occupy the leftmost position in the word form, and the numbers occupy the rightmost position. Personal-subject. indicators are prefigured. K. i. with some reservations, they are attributed to the languages ​​​​of the nominative system, and a number of researchers note otd. relic. ergative and active traits. building. Word order - Prem. subject, object, predicate, and its change can be caused by the needs of communicative emphasis. The connection of parts of a complex sentence is carried out asyndetically (through intonation) or with the help of braces, in the function of which services are used. words that go back to questions. pronouns and adverbs or formally coinciding with case. indicators and postpositions. Actually unions are practically absent.

The hypotheses bringing together in tipol are put forward. plan K. I. from the North Caucasus, Sino-Tibet, Burushaski, Basque, Indian and some other languages. Borrowings from the Selkup language, a little from the Turkic and a large number from Russian have been identified. lang.

It is believed that the Kets entered Siberia from the south. By the time the Russians arrived on the Yenisei, the neighbors of the Kets were the ancestors of the Selkups and Khanty (in the west), the Tundra and Forest Enets (in the north), the Nenets (in the northwest) and the Evenks (in the east). Main occupations are fishing and hunting. Reindeer herding had a season. har-r - in the spring, deer were released for free grazing. The distribution area of ​​the Kets is characterized by dispersion. Dep. their groups are distant from each other by means. distances. Kets live in the main. in bass. Yenisei from Podkam. Tunguska in the south to Kureika in the north in the Turukhansky, partly Baikitsky districts (the villages of Kellogg, Surgutikha, Vereshchagino, Baklanikha, Goroshikha, Maduyka, Farkovo, Bakhta, Verkhneimbatsk) and the village. Sulomai of the Evenki Aut. env. Krasnoyarsk kr. Most of the ket. The population is concentrated in Kellogg, Maduika and Sulomai. According to censuses in the Krasnoyarsk kr. in 1989 there were 994 Kets, in 2002 - 1,189.

Almost all Kets who speak K. Ya. are Ket.-Rus. bilinguals. Rus. lang. became the main means of communication in all spheres of life. K. i. used predominantly. for family life. level of the older generation. M.A. Castren, followed by E.A. Kreinovich and A.P. Dulzon was isolated in Yenis.-ost. lang. 2 dialects: Imbatsky and Symsky, by name. rivers Inbak and Sym, in the basins to-ryh pre-im. native speakers of these dialects lived. Def. The differences between these dialects allow a number of researchers to consider the language of the Sym Kets to be independent. "Southern".

In present time K. i. subdivided into 3 dialects (G.K. Werner): North-Ket. (along the river Ku-reika and on lake Munduysky) and south.-ket. (from the river Podkam. Tunguska to the river Elogui), in Krom one can distinguish dialects of the Kets Podkam. Tunguska and Eloguya. The latter is the middle-kettle, or lower imbat. (from the village of Surgutikha to Turukhansk) - includes the south. (settlement Surgutikha) and sowing. (from the village of Vereshchagin to Turukhansk) dialects. In view of the constant migration of the population, the boundaries of the dialect. ranges are fuzzy.

1st cat. an alphabet based on the Latin alphabet was developed in the beginning. 1930s, and the 1st primer was published by N.K. Karger in 1934, but they did not find a practical. applications. Creation of ket. writing actually began in the 1980s, when an alphabet based on the Cyrillic alphabet was developed, schools were published. primer, dictionary and textbooks for the beginning. classes. In a number of villages, K. I is taught. in the beginning. classes. Lit. lang. is absent.

Lit.: Castrén M.A. Versuch einer Jenissei-Ostjakischen und kottischen Sprachlehre nebst Wörterverzeichnissen aus den genannten Sprachen. St. Petersburg, 1858; Dulzon A.P. Ket language. Tomsk, 1968; Kreinovich E.A. A verb in the Ket language. L., 1968; Languages ​​of the peoples of the USSR. M.; L., 1968. T. 5; Paleoasian languages. M., 1997; Werner H. Die ketische Sprache. Wiesbaden, 1997; Languages ​​of the peoples of Russia: Red Book: Encyclopedia. reference dictionary. M., 2002; Krivonogov V.P. Kets - ten years later (1991-2001). Krasnoyarsk, 2003; Peoples of Western Siberia: Khanty. Mansi. Selkups. Nenets. Enets. Nganasany. Kets. M., 2005.

The appearance of the Kets differs sharply from the appearance of other Siberian peoples. The neighbors of the Kets - Yakuts, Evenks, Selkups, Khanty - are typical representatives of the Mongoloid race. Paleo-Asians, Eskimos and Chukchi form a special arctic branch of the Mongoloid race.

And the Kets combine in their appearance the features of Caucasians (quite often blue eyes, sometimes blond hair) and Indians of America (aquiline nose, "Indian cheekbones", a special eye shape). The language of the Kets and other Yenisei languages ​​close to it have nothing in common with the languages ​​of neighboring peoples, and so far it has not been possible to notice reliable signs of its relationship with any other languages ​​of the world. The Ket language is very peculiar. For example, it has an unusually complex system of conjugation of verbs. And many dozens of them conjugate in their own way, not like the rest. In 1971, Professor of Tomsk University A.

P. Dulzon received the State Prize for a monograph on Ket grammar. Much of this grammar is devoted to the verb.

“Summer movement along the river in boats is denoted by the Kets with a completely different verb than winter movement on ice,” writes another Soviet researcher, E. A. Kreinovich. “Winter and summer movements of the Kets down the river are also denoted by different verbs. And the verb denoting moving down the river by boat in the summertime is formed differently, depending on whether the movement down the Yenisei and its large tributaries, for example Podkamennaya Tunguska, or along small rivers flowing into the Yenisei or its tributaries is indicated. !" Kets appeared on the lower Yenisei relatively recently. Back in the 17th-18th centuries, their ancestors lived much to the south, in the area of ​​\u200b\u200bthe present-day Yeniseisk, Krasnoyarsk, Achinsk.

As a matter of fact, the Ket language, which is native to nine hundred Kets (the rest of the Kets switched to Russian) is just one of the languages ​​once spread along the Yenisei, right up to its sources, as well as in the upper reaches of the Ket and Chulym rivers, tributaries of the Ob . Travelers and scientists of the 18th century were able to compile small dictionaries of the now extinct Arin, Assan, Pumpokol, Kott languages, related to Ket. They form a special family - the Yenisei. In addition to Ket, another Yenisei language, Yugsky, has survived. He owns...

8 people living in the Russian villages of Vorogovo and Yartsevo, located a hundred kilometers south of the Ket villages. Most of the Yenisei languages ​​disappeared not because their speakers died out. Just after the upper reaches of the Yenisei were occupied by the Turkic peoples, part of the Yenisei, the ancestors of the current Kets, went north along the course of the great Siberian river.

And those who remained gradually mixed with the newcomers and began to speak Turkic. Apparently, there are descendants of the Turkicized Yenisei among the modern Khakass (along with the Turkicized descendants of the Samoyeds).

It is possible that the Shors living on the territory bordering the Khakass and Gorno-Altai Autonomous Regions have the same origin. In Tuva, many river names can only be explained with the help of the Yenisei languages. This means that before the arrival of the Turks, tribes related to the Kets once lived here. They probably participated in the formation of the Tuvan people.

So, the birthplace of the Yenisei languages ​​\u200b\u200bis the Sayan Mountains? There are many facts that indicate that here, as later in the lower reaches of the Yenisei, the ancestors of the Kets came from somewhere in the south. Not so long ago, Professor Pullyblank, one of the world's best experts in Sino-Tibetan languages, came up with a sensational hypothesis.

Comparing the words of the Xiongnu language that have come down to us in Chinese texts, which were considered the ancestors of the Turks, with the Yenisei words, he came to the conclusion that the Xiongnu spoke the Yenisei language! Hun and Yenisei words meaning "son", "stone", "milk", "horse" sound very similar. But most historians still believe that it is impossible to put an equal sign between the ancient Xiongnu and the Yenisei. Most likely, the ancestors of the Kets were part of the huge power of the Xiongnu, along with the ancestors of the Turks, Mongols, and possibly other peoples.

A number of foreign scientists are also inclined to see in the Yeniseians, in their last representatives - the Kets, one of the "islands" of the most ancient Paleo-Eurasians, along with the Caucasians, Burishes and Basques. By the way, these non-Borea languages ​​have something in common in both grammar and vocabulary. For example, a root with the meaning "water".

In the Borean parent language, it sounded like wete, in the Indo-European language it changed to wodor (hence Russian water, Hittite vatar, German Wasser, English water). In the Ural proto-language, he gave the sound wete (hence the Estonian vesi, the Hungarian visa), etc. But in the Basque language, water is called the word ur. In the Yenisei languages, the same word sounds like ul or ur.

So in the future, perhaps, it will turn out that two amazing languages ​​- Basque and Ket - are related to each other. But so far there is little evidence. There were attempts to find traces of the relationship of the Yenisei languages ​​with the dialects of Tibet, as well as with the Austrian languages. However, no convincing results have yet been obtained here either: there are only isolated coincidences.

It would be extremely interesting to look for links between the Yenisei family and the languages ​​of the New World. The Indians, according to anthropologists, are a large branch of the Mongoloids. And yet, many features, such as a characteristic aquiline nose, sharply distinguish the indigenous inhabitants of the New World from typical Mongoloids (but not skin color - only a few Indian tribes have bronze-red skin, while most Indians have dark skin).

Scientists explain this by the fact that the settlement of America happened a very long time ago, back in those days when the Mongoloid race was not fully formed. And only a few peoples of Asia have preserved the most ancient racial type: these include the Kets and some small peoples of Tibet. This interesting hypothesis of anthropologists is echoed by the hypotheses of linguists who are trying to find similarities between the languages ​​of the Indians of America, the Ket and Tibetan dialects. An outstanding researcher of the peoples of Siberia, V. G. Bogoraz, believed that the Ket language is the extreme western link in the chain connecting the Paleo-Asiatic languages ​​(Nivkh, Ainu, etc.)

M. Holmer believes that once there was a Paleo-Eurasian language type, traces of which are found in the space from the Pyrenees to the Bering Strait. He assumes a connection between the Basque, Caucasian, Burushaski, Yenisei, Paleo-Asiatic languages ​​and tries to trace their family ties with the Indian languages ​​of America. True, they tried to build a bridge to the languages ​​of the New World not only with the help of the Ket and Paleo-Asiatic (Nivkh, Itelmen) languages.

About half a century ago, the American linguist E. Sapir suggested that the languages ​​of the Athabaskans and some other Indian tribes inhabiting the northwestern corner of America are related to Sino-Tibetan. The famous Americanist Paul Reeve found similarities between the Austronesian languages ​​(especially those spoken in Melanesia) and the languages ​​of the California Indians. He also found a number of matches in the dictionaries of the languages ​​of Australia, the Indians of Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia. The famous traveler Thor Heyerdahl finds traces of the languages ​​of the Indians of South America in the geographical names of Easter Island and other islands of Polynesia. All these hypotheses, although sometimes too bold, are nevertheless based on some historical and linguistic justification. In addition to them, there are a huge number of absolutely fantastic assumptions.

The languages ​​of the Indians of America are brought closer to the Sumerian, Phoenician, Ancient Greek, Hittite, Sanskrit, and the languages ​​of the Guinean coast of Africa. Moreover, a number of seemingly striking coincidences are found here. For example, in Greek "theos" means "god", and in the language of the Indians of Central America, "god" is rendered by the word "teotl".

However, the coincidence of individual words in the languages ​​of the Old and New Worlds will not seem striking, given that before the Europeans began the colonization of America, they spoke ... 2 thousand different languages! And even now, despite the fact that the number of Indian tribes has declined sharply, there are still at least a thousand Indian dialects in the New World. And to find in them words that coincide in sound and meaning with the words of the languages ​​of the Old World (and there are also a huge number of them!) Is not so difficult.

And what if we compare not just individual languages ​​of the Old and New Worlds, but parent languages, the most ancient forms, and look for regular sound correspondences in words that are close in meaning? And not in one or two, but in hundreds of roots? ..

Unfortunately, such work is not yet feasible, because there is still no reconstruction of most of the proto-languages ​​of the Indians of America. That is why scientists do not know whether all Indian dialects go back to one single proto-language or are divided into several independent families. Moreover, different linguists also count a different number of these families - from five to several hundred!

KET LANGUAGE (obsolete - the Yenisei-Ostyak language), the language of the Kets. Distributed in the north of the Krasnoyarsk Territory (in the Turukhansk region, as well as in the southeast of the Evenki region) - along the Yenisei and its tributaries. It is on the verge of extinction: according to the 2002 census, out of 1.5 thousand Kets, 485 people speak the Ket language, according to experts, the number of competent native speakers is less than 100.

The Ket language is the last representative of the Yenisei languages. Together with the Yug language, it constitutes their northern branch. Previously, the linguonym "Ket language" united two dialects - Imbat and Sym; in modern linguistics, these idioms are assigned the status of separate languages ​​- Ket and Yug proper. As part of the Ket languages, 3 main dialects are distinguished: southern, middle and northern. Dialects are divided into dialects, named after the name of the settlement: for example, in the settlement of Sulomai - Sulomai. The largest number of speakers of the Ket language speaks the southern dialect, the smallest - the northern one.

The phonological system is characterized by the presence of a system of four words and form-distinctive tones. Depending on the approach to the phonological status of vocal allophones, the inventory of vowels includes from 7 to 11 phonemes. Synharmonism is absent. Unlike Kott, the Ket language (as well as the Yug language) retained a four-step system of mid-back unrounded vowels. The characteristic features of the vocalism of the southern dialect are the elimination of the final unstressed vowel and the iotation of the front vowels i, e. There are differences in the nature of the fourth tone compared to other dialects. The consonant composition of the Ket language varies from 12 to 18 phonemes, depending on the phonological interpretation. In consonantism, the southern and northern dialects differ from the middle dialect by the presence of rotacism d > r and spirantization b > v. In the middle dialect there is a transition s>š, and in the northern dialect there is a frequent transition s> č in consonant combinations ns and ls. The morphology of the name has a suffix-agglutinative character. There is a system of nominal classes: male, female and real. The traditionally distinguished case system (up to 13 cases) is mostly spatial in nature, there are no syntactic cases. A system of postpositions has been developed. The verb system is polysynthetic. The verb expresses the categories of tense and mood, as well as the concordant categories of person, class, and number. The presence of other categories [mode of action (see Aspectology), pledge, aspect, version, etc.] remains a subject of discussion. The verbal word form is built on the basis of morphemic orders (from 9 to 17, depending on the approach), mostly prefixed. Noun incorporation is limited to a few productive stems. The incorporation of other parts of speech (verbal name, adjective, adverb, etc.) is developed. The question of the structure of the Ket language has long been a subject of discussion. Some scientists attribute it to the active type, others to the nominative one (see Nominative system) with features of an active system and an ergative system. In modern linguistics, the point of view prevails that at the synchronous stage the Ket language cannot be attributed to any of the above types due to the lack of a general grammatical rule when choosing personal indicators in the verb.

Vocabulary is predominantly of Yenisei origin. Early borrowings are mainly from Turkic languages ​​and Samoyedic languages, later ones are from Russian.

The first script for the Ket language was developed in 1934 on the basis of the Latin script by the Russian researcher of the Yenisei languages ​​​​N.K. Karger. Cyrillic-based writing, created by the Russian Yeniseist G.K. Werner, was officially adopted in 1985.

Lit .: Dulzon A.P. Ket tales. Tomsk, 1966; he is. Ket language. Tomsk, 1968; Kreinovich Yu. A. The verb of the Celtic language. L., 1968; Ket collection. Mythology, ethnography, texts. M., 1969; Ket collection. Linguistics. M., 1995; Werner H. Die ketische Sprache. Wiesbaden, 1997; Vajda E. Ket. Munich, 2004; Georg S. A descriptive grammar of Ket (Yenisei-Ostyak). Introduction, phonology and morphology. Folkstone, 2007.

Dictionaries: Werner G.K. Ket-Russian/Russian-Ket Dictionary. SPb., 1993; Maksunova Z. V. Brief Ket-Russian Dictionary. Middle Ket dialect / Edited by G. K. Werner. Krasnoyarsk, 2001.

Ket language

KET LANGUAGE (obsolete Yenisei-Ostyak) language of the Kets. It belongs to the Yenisei group of Paleoasiatic languages. Writing is being developed on the basis of the Russian alphabet.

Ket language

The Yenisei-Ostyak language is the last surviving representative of the Yenisei family of languages, which, according to hydronymy, was previously widespread up to the south of Western Siberia. K. i. belongs to the Ket-Pumpokol subgroup, which is different from the extinct southern Arino-Assano-Kott subgroup, known from the records of the 18≈19 centuries. On K. I. say about 900 people. (1970, census) in the Turukhansk and Baykitsk districts of the Krasnoyarsk Territory of the RSFSR. The two main dialects - Imbat (Northern) and Sym, or Yug (less than 10 people), diverged so much that they can be considered different languages. The phonological composition of K. i. characterized by a typologically rare combination of the presence of opposition between soft and hard consonants and tone differences (up to 5 tones in various dialects). The noun has a form of the main case (subject and direct object) and a system of secondary developed cases with spatial meanings. In nouns, a class of things stands out, opposed to animate classes (male and female). Most of the grammatical meanings in the verb are transmitted using prefixes and infixes (rarely suffixes), widely developed incorporation. Writing for K. Ya. was founded in 1934 by the Soviet scientist N. K. Karger.

Lit .: Dulzon A.P., Ket language, Tomsk, 1968; Kreinovich E. A., Ket language, in collection: Languages ​​of the peoples of the USSR, vol. 5, L., 1968: his own, Verb of the Ket language, L., 1968; Toporov V.N., Bibliography on the Ket language, in the book: Ket collection, M., 1969; Castrén M. A., Versuch einer jenissei-ostjakischen und kottischen Sprachlehre nebst Wörterverzeichnissen aus den genannten Sprachen, St.-Petersburg, 1858.

V. V. Ivanov:

Wikipedia

Ket language

Ket language- an isolated language, the only living representative of the Yenisei family of languages. It is spoken chum salmon in the area of ​​the Yenisei river basin. Russian scientists have made attempts to establish the relationship between the Ket language and the language of burushaski, as well as with the Sino-Tibetan languages ​​and the languages ​​of the North American Indians on the day, whose self-name is similar to the self-name of the Kets. Often the Yenisei languages ​​are included in the hypothetical Sino-Caucasian macrofamily. The language is under the threat of extinction - the number of ethnic Kets, for whom the Ket language is native, decreased from 1225 people in 1926 to 537 people in 1989, 365 people. in 2002 and 213 people. in 2010. According to the results of field research, the number of speakers of the Ket language is estimated at 150 people. (1999-2005). Another Yenisei language - Yugian seems to have died out quite recently.