The Kott (Kot) language () is an extinct Yeniseian language that was formerly spoken in central

Siberia Siberia ( ; , ) is an extensive geographical region comprising all of North Asia, from the Ural Mountains in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east. It has formed a part of the sovereign territory of Russia and its predecessor states ...

by the banks of the Mana River, a tributary of the

Yenisei river The Yenisey or Yenisei ( ; , ) is the list of rivers by length, fifth-longest river system in the world, and the largest to drain into the Arctic Ocean. Rising in Mungaragiyn-gol in Mongolia, it follows a northerly course through Lake Baikal a ...

. It became extinct in the 1850s. Kott was closely related to Ket, still spoken farther north along the Yenisei river. Assan, a close relative, is sometimes considered a dialect of Kott. The term ''kott'' may be derived from Buryat ' 'town', applied to neighbouring non-pastoral peoples, including the last few Kotts.

Geographical distribution

Kott was spoken to the southeast of

Krasnoyarsk Krasnoyarsk is the largest types of inhabited localities in Russia, city and administrative center of Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia. It is situated along the Yenisey, Yenisey River, and is the second-largest city in Siberia after Novosibirsk, with a p ...

, in the Biryusa and Kan river basins. However,

hydronyms A hydronym (from , , "water" and , , "name") is a type of toponym that designates a proper name of a body of water. Hydronyms include the proper names of rivers and streams, lakes and ponds, swamps and marshes, seas and oceans. As a subset of top ...

indicate a much wider area in the past, ranging from the Uda and Chuna rivers in the east to the Tom in the west.

Documentation

One of the earliest written records of Kott is in 1791, with the publication of

Peter Simon Pallas Peter Simon Pallas Fellow of the Royal Society, FRS FRSE (22 September 1741 – 8 September 1811) was a Prussia, Prussian zoologist, botanist, Ethnography, ethnographer, Exploration, explorer, Geography, geographer, Geology, geologist, Natura ...

's ', a comparative dictionary of various world languages and dialects. In 1858,

Matthias Castrén Matthias Alexander Castrén (2 December 1813 – 7 May 1852) was a Finnish Swedish ethnologist and philologist who was a pioneer in the study of the Uralic languages. He was an educator, author and linguist at the University of Helsinki. Castrén ...

published the grammar and dictionary (''Versuch einer jenissei-ostjakischen und kottischen Sprachlehre''), which included material on the Kott and Ket ( Yenisei-Ostyak) languages, recording two different dialects of Kott in the 1840s. There also exists two books written by about the Kott language, namely ' (Kottskij jazyk), which includes a 110-page Russian-Kott glossary, and .

Phonology

Vowels

In multisyllabic words,

vowel length In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived or actual length (phonetics), duration of a vowel sound when pronounced. Vowels perceived as shorter are often called short vowels and those perceived as longer called long vowels. On one hand, many ...

is phonemic. # is only attested in a few words dated to the 18th century, and can be considered an allophone of . Vajda 2024 gives a different vowel system for Kott, based on Castrén 1858.

Consonants

Consonants as recorded by Castren 1858 are presented below. Allophones are presented next to their grapheme.

Grammar

Kott has special end markings to indicate that the noun being described is a

hydronym A hydronym (from , , "water" and , , "name") is a type of toponym that designates a proper name of a body of water. Hydronyms include the proper names of rivers and streams, lakes and ponds, swamps and marshes, seas and oceans. As a subset of top ...

which are /. Kott is an

agglutinative In linguistics, agglutination is a morphological process in which words are formed by stringing together morphemes (word parts), each of which corresponds to a single syntactic feature. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglu ...

polysynthetic In linguistic typology, polysynthetic languages, formerly holophrastic languages, are highly synthetic languages, i.e., languages in which words are composed of many morphemes (word parts that have independent meaning but may or may not be able t ...

language which typically uses SVO word order, but can vary depending on situation. It uses

suffixes In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns and adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs. Suffixes can ca ...

prefixes A prefix is an affix which is placed before the stem of a word. Particularly in the study of languages, a prefix is also called a preformative, because it alters the form of the word to which it is affixed. Prefixes, like other affixes, can b ...

and

infixes An infix is an affix inserted inside a word stem (an existing word or the core of a family of words). It contrasts with '' adfix,'' a rare term for an affix attached to the outside of a stem, such as a prefix or suffix. When marking text for i ...

in its verbal inflection, however suffixation is more common than infixation. Personal-subject verbal indicators are usually suffixed to the verb form, and personal-objective indicators are affixed.

Case

Kott has 7 cases. The dative, ablative and locative cases developed from possesed nouns, similarly to Ket and Yugh.

Lexicon

Kott had been influenced by

Turkic languages The Turkic languages are a language family of more than 35 documented languages, spoken by the Turkic peoples of Eurasia from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe to Central Asia, East Asia, North Asia (Siberia), and West Asia. The Turkic langua ...

, and had borrowed some words from Turkic languages. For example Kott ‘to praise’ comes from

Proto-Turkic Proto-Turkic is the linguistic reconstruction of the common ancestor of the Turkic languages that was spoken by the Proto-Turks before their divergence into the various Turkic peoples. Proto-Turkic separated into Oghur (western) and Common Tu ...

*paktïr (based on phonetics, likely loaned from Kumandin or Shor), or Kott ‘copper, brass’ comes from Proto-Turkic *kola (of which the source is not phonetically identifiable). At the time of its extinction, it was also loaning words from Russian.

References

External links

Kott basic lexicon at the Global Lexicostatistical Database
{{Paleosiberian languages Extinct languages of Asia Yeniseian languages Languages extinct in the 19th century Agglutinative languages Polysynthetic languages