The Tundra Yukaghir language (also known as Northern Yukaghir; self-designation: Вадул аруу ()) is one of only two extant
Yukaghir languages
The Yukaghir languages (; also ''Yukagir, Jukagir'') are a small family of two closely related languages—Tundra and Kolyma Yukaghir—spoken by the Yukaghir in the Russian Far East living in the basin of the Kolyma River. At the 2002 Russian ...
.
Last spoken in the
tundra
In physical geography, tundra () is a type of biome where tree growth is hindered by frigid temperatures and short growing seasons. The term ''tundra'' comes through Russian (') from the Kildin Sámi word (') meaning "uplands", "treeless mou ...
belt extending between the lower
Indigirka to the lower
Kolyma basin (), Tundra Yukaghir was formerly spoken in a much wider area extending west to the
Lena
Lena or LENA may refer to:
Places
* Léna Department, a department of Houet Province in Burkina Faso
* Lena, Manitoba, an unincorporated community located in Killarney-Turtle Mountain municipality in Manitoba, Canada
* Lena, Norway, a village in ...
basin.
Classification and grammatical features
The relationship of the Yukaghir languages with other language families is uncertain, though it has been suggested that they are distantly related to the
Uralic languages
The Uralic languages (; sometimes called Uralian languages ) form a language family of 38 languages spoken by approximately 25million people, predominantly in Northern Eurasia. The Uralic languages with the most native speakers are Hungarian (w ...
, thus forming the putative
Uralic–Yukaghir language family.
Tundra and Kolyma Yukaghir are the only two remnants of what used to be one of the dominant languages/language families of northeastern Siberia, spreading from the
River Anadyr in the east to the
River Lena in the west. On the basis of the evidence of early sources, it can be assumed that there existed a Yukaghir dialect continuum, with what is today Tundra Yukaghir and Kolyma Yukaghir at the extremes.
[Nikolaeva, Irina (2008) Chuvan and Omok languages? In: A. Lubotsky et al. (Eds.) Evidence and Counter-Evidence. Festschrift Frederik Kortland. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 313–336.]
Tundra Yukaghir and Kolyma Yukaghir are not mutually intelligible. Both Yukaghir languages have residual
vowel harmony
In phonology, vowel harmony is an assimilatory process in which the vowels of a given domain – typically a phonological word – have to be members of the same natural class (thus "in harmony"). Vowel harmony is typically long distance, mea ...
and a complex phonotactics of consonants, rich
agglutinative
In linguistics, agglutination is a morphological process in which words are formed by stringing together morphemes, each of which corresponds to a single syntactic feature. Languages that use agglutination widely are called agglutinative lang ...
morphology and are strictly
head-final
In linguistics, head directionality is a proposed parameter that classifies languages according to whether they are head-initial (the head of a phrase precedes its complements) or head-final (the head follows its complements). The head is the ...
. They has practically no finite subordination and very few coordinate structures. Yukaghir has a
split intransitive
Split(s) or The Split may refer to:
Places
* Split, Croatia, the largest coastal city in Croatia
* Split Island, Canada, an island in the Hudson Bay
* Split Island, Falkland Islands
* Split Island, Fiji, better known as Hạfliua
Arts, entertai ...
alignment system based on discourse-pragmatic features. In absence of
narrow focus, the system is organised on a
nominative–accusative basis; when focused, direct objects and subjects of intransitive verbs are co-aligned (special focus case, special focus agreement).
Orthography
Phonology
Vowels
The long mid vowels are realized as
diphthongs when
stressed: they are , respectively.
Consonants
¹The uvular fricative is realized as a stop after .
Phonotactics
Syllable structure is CVC, i.e. up to one consonant can occur at the beginning or end of a word and up to two in the middle.
Grammar
Tundra Yukaghir is largely head-final and dependent-marking: the default position for the verb is at the end of the clause, nouns are marked for case, adjectives precede nouns and relative clauses precede main clauses.
Case assignment for core participants behaves in a broadly
split-intransitive manner, though actual assignment is very complex, involving semantic role, focus, relative animacy of the participants (first or second
person
A person ( : people) is a being that has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship, ownership of prope ...
versus third), and nature of the noun itself. The assigned cases are primary (used for focused or high animacy
nominative arguments), neutral (for low animacy nominative arguments and high animacy
accusative
The accusative case (abbreviated ) of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb.
In the English language, the only words that occur in the accusative case are pronouns: 'me,' 'him,' 'her,' 'us,' and ‘th ...
ones), and focus case (most focused accusative arguments).
Indexation
Indexation is a technique to adjust income payments by means of a price index, in order to maintain the purchasing power of the public after inflation, while deindexation is the unwinding of indexation.
Overview
From a macroeconomics standpoin ...
of arguments on the verb is similarly conditioned by
focus
Focus, or its plural form foci may refer to:
Arts
* Focus or Focus Festival, former name of the Adelaide Fringe arts festival in South Australia Film
*''Focus'', a 1962 TV film starring James Whitmore
* ''Focus'' (2001 film), a 2001 film based ...
and
animacy as well as
mood.
Oblique cases include
dative,
instrumental
An instrumental is a recording normally without any vocals, although it might include some inarticulate vocals, such as shouted backup vocals in a big band setting. Through semantic widening, a broader sense of the word song may refer to inst ...
,
comitative
In grammar, the comitative case (; abbreviated ) is a grammatical case that denotes accompaniment. In English, the preposition "with", in the sense of "in company with" or "together with", plays a substantially similar role (other uses of "with", l ...
,
locative,
ablative
In grammar, the ablative case (pronounced ; sometimes abbreviated ) is a grammatical case for nouns, pronouns, and adjectives in the grammars of various languages; it is sometimes used to express motion away from something, among other uses. ...
,
prolative, and transformative, the latter indicating the intended use or function of an argument.
There is limited
incorporation, used in
reflexive constructions.
Tundra Yukaghir verbs are marked for
switch reference
In linguistics, switch-reference (SR) describes any clause-level morpheme that signals whether certain prominent arguments in 'adjacent' clauses are coreferential. In most cases, it marks whether the subject of the verb in one clause is corefe ...
. Besides indicating whether the verb of a following clause shares the same subject, the switch-reference markers also describe the temporal relationship between clauses, the connection between the actions involved, and in the case of different subjects, the person (first or second versus third) and number of the subject.
References
*
External links
Elena Maslova's pages on Yukaghir(translated to English)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Yukaghir, Tundra, language
Agglutinative languages
Endangered languages
Languages of Russia
Tundra
In physical geography, tundra () is a type of biome where tree growth is hindered by frigid temperatures and short growing seasons. The term ''tundra'' comes through Russian (') from the Kildin Sámi word (') meaning "uplands", "treeless mou ...
Subject–object–verb languages