Pumpokol language

Pumpokol is one of the Yeniseian languages. It has been extinct since the 18th century. Along with Arin, it shares many features with the ancient Xiongnu and Jie languages, and according to Alexander Vovin, Edward Vajda, and Étienne de la Vaissière, is closely related to them. It is poorly attested, the only available lexicon amounting to about 65 words, and some of them have been identified as being Yugh, not Pumpokol.

It has traditionally been viewed as being grouped with Arin in an Arin-Pumpokol subfamily of Southern Yeniseian, but Vajda 2024 challenges this, stating that "Arin, Pumpokol and Kott-Assan display no shared innovations to suport them as an opposite "Southern Yeniseian" branch" of Yeniseian, reflecting only their geographical position rather than a genealogical grouping.

The name Pumpokol was originally a geographic one, referring to the name of a town and a former district, originating from Khanty  "grassy village".

Pumpokol is notable among the Yeniseian languages in that the phoneme /s/ is often replaced by /t/. This idiosyncrasy of Pumpokol seems to be shared with Jie, suggesting that Jie is more closely related to Pumpokol than other Yeniseian languages. For example the Jie word kot 'catch' seems to be a cognate with the Ket word 'qos', having the same sound change.

Moreover, this aforementioned characteristic of Pumpokol has been used by Vajda to demonstrate that Yeniseian-derived hydronyms in northern Mongolia (the southernmost known extent of Yeniseian influence) are exclusively Pumpokolic. Since the Jie, as a tribe of the Xiongnu, are likely to have come from the same area, rather than further north, this finding lends credence to the possibility that Jie is a Pumpokolic language.

Vocabulary
Selected Pumpokol words are presented here, sourced from Werner 2005.