Talk:Na-Dene languages

Untitled
One point - Na-Dene strictly refers to Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit+Haida(Which is strongly contested as a language family.), whereas this page only refers to Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit. Should it be moved? &mdash;The preceding unsigned comment was added by 62.254.128.5 (talk • contribs).


 * I have always been under the impression that Na-Dené refers to Althabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit, and that although Haida was once considered part of the family and linguists will still occasionally make proposals for its conclusion, there is no significant evidence.


 * Of course according to Greenberg's usage of the term, it does indeed include Haida (which has many similarities to the Na-Dené languages) &mdash;The preceding unsigned comment was added by Node ue (talk &bull; contribs).


 * Na-Dene is used in two senses:


 * Sapir's Na-Dene: includes Haida
 * current Na-Dene: does not include Haida


 * Sometimes Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit is used instead of Na-Dene so that there wont be any confusion with Sapir's Na-Dene. &mdash; ishwar  (S PEAK )  19:36, 2005 Apr 17 (UTC)


 * The term Na-Dené is composed of na, the Haida word for 'house', and dené, a version of the common Athabaskan term for 'person'. Strictly speaking, "Na-Dené" explicitly includes Haida and therefore should not be used for Tlingit-Eyak-Athabaskan. --N. Pharris (talk) 09:02, 1 April 2008 (UTC)


 * Enrico's recent work (including a massive 2-vol dictionary of Haida) effectively re-opens the controversy. I added a sentence on Enrico and also some references on the controversy. --Gholton 20:56, 8 July 2006 (UTC)


 * It was proved that Na-Dene speakers came from southern Siberia/Mongolia. Their genetic origin is the same like in speakers of the Altaic family. So, was there any attempt to connect them with the Altaic speakers? The Dene-Caucasian theory is an utter nonsense, by the way. It connects populations that have absolutely nothing in common genetically. 82.100.61.114 08:11, 27 February 2007 (UTC)


 * This makes no sense. You're confusing genetic and linguistic findings, which really don't need to have anything to do with each other: one cannot make any linguistic conclusions from genetic data (or vice versa). Comparative linguistics classifies languages, not their speakers. --AAikio 12:00, 27 February 2007 (UTC)

accent?
Why the accent Na-Dené rather than Na-Dene? I have only seen the unaccented version in print. --Gholton 20:54, 8 July 2006 (UTC)

Name?
What is the etymology of the name "Na-Dené"? It does not seem very obvious. --Tropylium (talk) 21:36, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
 * it comes from the common word for "human" in the languages which is either related to the root dené.·Maunus· · ƛ · 21:40, 9 January 2008 (UTC)

Dené-Yeniseic
The link between the Yeniseian and Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit seems to have been proven (http://www.uaf.edu/anlc/dy2008.html). I'll try to mention this in the article somehow as soon as I have some time. Cheers! --Pe t 'usek [ petr dot hrubis at gmail dot com ] 10:04, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
 * This does look very promising indeed.·Maunus· · ƛ · 12:48, 3 March 2008 (UTC)
 * I added a link to Vajda's paper. I also removed a sentence about how the Athabaskan/Eyak/Tlingit-Yeniseian link "support[s] the controversial theory of Starostin and others." An AET-Yeniseian link has nothing to say one way or another about whether or not these languages are in turn related to, say, Caucasian or Sino-Tibetan or whatever, so to say it lends any support to Starostin's (and others') wider-ranging proposals is false. --Miskwito (talk) 20:57, 7 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Okay, update: I created a new subsection within the genetic relationships section to discuss the Dene-Yeniseic link. I also removed a statement about genetic studies contradicting the evidence (which had originally said the study confirmed the evidence). Genes and languages don't necessarily correspond, so genetic studies can't prove or disprove linguistic relationships one way or another, although they can make suggestions. --Miskwito (talk) 21:28, 7 March 2008 (UTC)
 * Are there plans to create a higher-level Dene-Yeniseic taxonomic classification in the infoboxes? Would anyone object if I added this to the infobox? Thefamouseccles (talk) 08:08, 30 March 2008 (UTC)

CBC Radio interview with Vajda
It was on the nightly radio news show As It Happens tonight - the 3rd of April programme I guess. I'm not sure if it's suitable for the External Links, but chances are there'll be a permanent online recording of the show; I think As it Happens is fully archived....not sure about that but worth checking...Skookum1 (talk) 05:44, 4 April 2008 (UTC)

AET Correspondences
I will work on a table of AET correspondences here (see Leer (2008)). As soon as you consider it good enough, you can put it into the article.

Notes: See Leer (2008) for more details.--Pe t 'usek [ petr dot hrubis at gmail dot com ] 08:58, 15 September 2010 (UTC)
 * 1) PAET, PAE and PA stand for Proto-Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit, Proto-Athabaskan-Eyak and Proto-Athabaskan, respectively.
 * 2) To prevent cluttering the table, phonemes in the PAET, PAE and PA columns are not asterisked.
 * 3) Leer (2008) doesn't reconstruct the PAET affricates */dɮ/, */tɬ/ and */dz/. Judging from their rarity, he assumes they may be attributable to the resolution of former consonant clusters.
 * 4) In Athabaskan and Eyak, sibilants can be diminutive variants of shibilants. In Tlingit, on the other hand, shibilants might sometimes be diminutive variants of sibilants. These correspondences are in parentheses.

Spelling Conventions
Hello. I have never moved a whole page, that is why I am asking for help. I would like to change the spelling of the page "Na-Dené languages" to simple "Na-Dene languages". Let me explain why:

Most authors dealing with the famous hypothesis of Edward Sapir use the name "Na-Dene":
 * Dumond, D. E. 1969 - Toward a Prehistory of the Na-Dene, with a General Comment on Population Movements among Nomadic Hunters
 * Dürr, Michael; Renner, Egon 1995 - The History of the Na-Dene Controversy: A Sketch
 * Dürr, Michael; Whittaker, Gordon 1995 - The Methodological Background to the Na-Dene Controversy
 * Krauss, Michael 1964 - Proto-Athapaskan-Eyak and the Problem of Na-Dene: The Phonology
 * 1965 - Proto-Athapaskan-Eyak and the Problem of Na-Dene II: The Morphology
 * 1968 - Noun-Classification Systems in Athapaskan, Eyak, Tlingit and Haida Verbs
 * 1979 - Na-Dene and Eskimo-Aleut


 * Levine, Robert D. - 1979 - Haida and Na-Dene: A New Look at the Evidence
 * Li, Fang-Kuei - 1956 - A Type of Noun Formation in Athabaskan and Eyak
 * Pinnow, Heinz-Jürgen - 1964 - On the Historical Position of Tlingit
 * 1968 - Genetic Relationship vs. Borrowing in Na-Dene
 * 1970 - Notes on the Classifiers in the Na-Dene Languages

...including many others, such as John Bengtson or Edward Vajda. Ethnologue uses "Na-Dene" as well.
 * Ruhlen, Merritt - 1998 - The Origin of Na-Dene
 * Thompson, Chad	- 1996 - The Na-Dene Middle Voice - An Impersonal Source of the D-Element

Actually, a question arises here whether we should rename it to "Na-dene", since that is what Edward Sapir called the theory in 1915 (and he invented it, of course).

Only Hymes, D. H. (1956) - "Na-Déné and Positional Analysis of Categories" uses diacritics above both e's. I cannot remember whether I have seen Dené at all...

Please, feel free to add more examples of spelling and document it by means of citations. --Pe t 'usek [ petr dot hrubis at gmail dot com ] 10:57, 9 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Comment The page for Dene uses no diacritical, nor do any of the member nations, nor any of the other Dene peoples not yet listed on that page (e.g. Ache Koe Dene (or is that Ache Dene Koe?) and other non-NWT Dene peoples). If it's a question of ethnographically correct, I'd say the indigneously correct choice is the one to follow.  There is no consistency in the use of latin alphabets across the language group, either, even just within the Athapskan group never mind the inclusion of Tlingit and Tsimshianic..  So I say "no diacriticals needed" - although it's worth noting that in BC ethno articles we have begun a convention of using the diacriticals as chosen by the peoples themselves (see where St'at'imc, Nuxalk and Sto:lo redirect to...admittedly all Salishan examples, though).  Also one other thing - I've seen Na-Dene piped as "Nadene" in many Wiki articles and it looks downright odd, as if to be pronounced Na-DEEN because of English pronunciation convnetions; the hyphen to me is necessary....but I'm not a linguist.  I note also that linguist-started articles often use totally English names, like Thompson language and Shuswap language, which is anomalous though it's true the native-name forms aren't comon even in BC English (though Halkomelem and certain others are, albeit generally without diacriticals).Skookum1 (talk) 14:39, 9 August 2008 (UTC)


 * I think Na-Dene is probably most common. Second most common is Nadene. So, let's move it to Na-Dene. Sapir also spelled it Nadene, incidentally. (And, on an unrelated note, people before Sapir considered the relationship between these languages.)
 * Let me disagree:
 * In his 1915 "Na-Dene languages: Preliminary report" he spells the term "Na-dene"
 * That there were predecessors will be mentioned in the article, of course. People like Wrangell, Boas, Swanton are just a few examples. I am preparing a section on the historiography of the hypothesis. Of course, ANY HELP is welcome! --Pe t 'usek [ petr dot hrubis at gmail dot com ] 18:38, 11 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Yes, he spelled it that way, too. He uses in Nadene in his Encyclopedia Britannica classification of North Amer. langs and in his article on Athabascan tone (in American Anthroplogist) and probably elsewhere. Others to add to the history are Fleurieu (1798-1800), Nikoai Petrovich Rezanov (1805), Johann Christoph Adelung & Johann Severin Vater (1816), and Leopold Radlov (1858), Pliny Goddard (1920). – ishwar  (speak)  19:28, 11 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Excellent! Thank you for that information. Do you possibly know the precise citations? I have already seen Rezanov, Adelung & Vater and Radlov mentioned here and there, but the only reference has been the publication date. I didn't know about Fleurieu.--Pe t 'usek [ petr dot hrubis at gmail dot com ] 11:07, 16 August 2008 (UTC)


 * Since the pronunciation of dene doesnt follow English spelling conventions, the acute accents are added to indicate a different pronunciation on analogy with French café. So we get Dené as well as Japanese saké (although this is usually pronounced [sakí] or '"Sah-Kee"). Both Nadene and Na-Dene do not following spelling conventions. Hyphens really only (rarely) change the pronunciation of some words with prefixes. I dont know why Hymes spelled it Déné, but I imagine it's due to Northern Athabascan langs have high tones in both syllables (but of course, there are other langs which have no tones). English orthography generally doesnt tolerate diacritics. (So, we even get spellings like cafe.) – ishwar  (speak)  17:57, 9 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Comment .... but "Dene" doesn't have the same stress as "café". Don't see the comparison....Skookum1 (talk) 18:31, 9 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Stress is not relevant to this orthographic convention. Cf. saké with 1st syllable stress, as well as filé with 1st syllable stress (although some say with 2nd syllable stress), André, etc. French words like café just happen to have syllable-final stress. I also looked in one book for synonymies and found that Morice suggesting using the term Déné for the Athabascan family in 1890s so maybe Hymes got his spelling from Morice. – ishwar  (speak)  04:39, 10 August 2008 (UTC)


 * I support the move to Na-dene.·Maunus· ƛ · 18:25, 9 August 2008 (UTC)
 * I also support the move to Na-Dene. (Taivo (talk) 08:52, 10 August 2008 (UTC))
 * Fine. I will move the article instantaneously. By the way, it would be nice if an English native speaker added the IPA pronunciation of the term ;) --Pe t 'usek [ petr dot hrubis at gmail dot com ] 18:40, 11 August 2008 (UTC)
 * As I seem to be unable to move the page (the page name collides with an existing redirect), I have just requested it here. --Pe t 'usek [ petr dot hrubis at gmail dot com ] 19:10, 11 August 2008 (UTC)


 * I moved it. – ishwar  (speak)  19:33, 11 August 2008 (UTC)

Extinct languages and the map
On all such maps, including the one for Athabaskan languages on that page, the map shows former language-territories as if they were still extant; the Nicola language of the Nicola Athapaskans for instance, which is now entirely Salishan territory. Ditto with the little blotch of territory on the Oregon Cost; these should be coloured differently to indicate they are extinct.Skookum1 (talk) 14:38, 9 August 2008 (UTC)
 * On the other hand, if we only showed current distributions of the languages, where would be Eyak (which is gone forever)? I agree there should be a more detailed map (or, perhaps, several maps, each focusing on different eras). Unfortunately, I have neither skills nor the necessary tools nor the necessary knowledge to create such maps :( --Pe t 'usek [ petr dot hrubis at gmail dot com ] 10:59, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

Historiography
Legend:


 * A: Athabascan
 * E: Eyak
 * T: Tlingit
 * H: Haida
 * S: Sino-Tibetan
 * Y: Yeniseian


 * R: Related
 * U: Unrelated or Isolated
 * NA: Not assessed, not applicable, not available or not considered
 * ?: Unknown or uncertain

Preliminary notes...

- Boas was opposed to the idea that Tlingit was related to Athabaskan, let alone Haida. How is this documented????

- Boas supported Pliny Earle Goddard's (1920) article attacking the inclusion of not only Haida but also Tlingit in the family. How is this documented????

Question on Dating
In Proposals of deeper genetic relations involving A..E..T you say: The genetic relationship between Tlingit, Eyak and Athabaskan languages was suggested early in the 19th century, but not universally accepted until much later. Haida, with 15 fluent speakers (M. Krauss, 1995), was originally linked to Tlingit by Franz Boas in 1894. Don't you mean early 1900s? If not, who was studying those languages in the early 1800s? Also, I find the term "genetic" misleading. Insiders in the field may understand the analogy but it would be confusing to others.


 * Wrangell in 1839, others perhaps earlier. Yes, trending toward replacing "genetic" with "genealogical", but the former is still common in the lit. kwami (talk) 21:27, 29 October 2009 (UTC)


 * "Genealogical" is not used in the linguistic literature. We always use "genetic".  We shouldn't "dumb down" Wikipedia.  (Taivo (talk) 21:32, 29 October 2009 (UTC))


 * "Genealogical" is quite commonly used in the lit, especially at interdisciplinary institutions such as Max Planck, even if the switch is recent and only partial. This isn't dumbing things down, it's merely being precise. After all, "genetic" can also mean, well, genetic, and now that we have titles like "Genetic Evidence for the phylogenetic relationship between Na-Dene and Yeniseian speakers", there can be confusion as to what particular instances of the word mean even among linguists. kwami (talk) 21:49, 29 October 2009 (UTC)


 * I have never seen "genealogical" in any of the historical linguistic literature that I've read. Do you have a reference to this or to any discussion in the specialist literature about preferring it?  (Taivo (talk) 21:53, 29 October 2009 (UTC))


 * I remember Comrie does, for the reason I gave above, but I can't find an explicit statement of this preference. The closest I see offhand is Lehman 1992 Historical linguistics, who titled chap. 4 "Genealogical classification", and uses that term throughout; he only uses "genetic" to inform his reader that this is a synonym "in spite of the biological connotation". (I see Lahman's used the phrase since at least 1962.) Elsewhere, Haviland 1993 in Cultural anthropology speaks of "genealogical relationships of languages", as does Bynon's 1977 volume Historical linguistics in the Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics series. Mary Haas uses both terms in her chapter in vol. 5 of Current trends in linguistics (1969). The 2nd ed. of the Routledge dictionary of language and linguistics uses "genealogical" under the entry for "classification of languages", with parenthetic "(genetic)" at the first use of the word. Comrie, Dryer, Gil, & Haspelmath use "genealogical" in their intro to the The world atlas of language structures. A search turns up 30 instances of "genealogical" (not counting 28 mentions of their "Genealogical Language List") vs. only 10 of "genetic", despite the large number of contributing authors.


 * But it would seem that "genetic" is more likely to be used as an attributive of "feature". kwami (talk) 22:55, 29 October 2009 (UTC)
 * "Genetic" is far more likely in discussions of specific language families or individual languages. It is also found in all the contemporary dictionaries of linguistics that I have in my collection.  For example, Campbell & Mixco (A Glossary of Historical Linguistics, 2007) use the phrases "genetic relationship" and "genetic unit" throughout.  Matthews (Oxford Concise Dictionary of Linguistics, 2007) uses "genetic classification".  Crystal (A Dictionary of Linguistics & Phonetics, 2003) uses "genetic classification" with a note "also called genealogical classification".  Note that these are all fairly current resources and consist of standard dictionaries of linguistic terms.  If these current terminological dictionaries of the field are using "genetic", then that is the path we should trod as well.  Remember that Wikipedia isn't about what we would like to say, but about what is actually said by others.  The term that linguistics readers are most likely to encounter is "genetic".  (Taivo (talk) 00:59, 30 October 2009 (UTC))


 * But we also have an obligation to avoid jargon wherever possible, as we have a broader audience than those sources were intended for. Here we have a traditional term which is ambiguous to the extent that linguists themselves are sometimes unsure what is meant, due to the integration with other fields, and then a newer term intended to overcome this defect. Linguists like Comrie who cover biological genetics in their writing, or who write for an interdisciplinary audience, tend to use "genealogical" for clarity. Readers coming to this article may not know that linguists use the word "genetic" differently than anyone else; also, there is biological-genetic information in a number of WP linguistics articles. The advantages of the interdisciplinary wording make it the obvious choice to me, even if it is still minority usage within pure linguistics. kwami (talk) 08:43, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

concept of recent migration
When was the idea first proposed that Athabaskan/Na-Dene was a more recent migration to America than other families? Was it Greenberg, or did he adopt a preexisting view? kwami (talk) 21:35, 14 January 2010 (UTC)
 * It appears to have originated with Sapir judging from Campbell 1997 (go to the end of p. 109). --Florian Blaschke (talk) 00:47, 2 April 2014 (UTC)

Inclusion of Tlingit
The quotation of Krauss and Golla (1981) in Campbell 1997 does not make it appear as if the inclusion of Tlingit in Na-Dené is really as cut-and-dried an issue as Wikipedia claims. A "close resemblance [...] in phonology" is irrelevant for this purpose, just like "grammatical structure" as both point to areal phenomena – i. e., probably a contact explanation, especially given the "little regular correspondence in vocabulary", which again points to contact, in the form of plain old borrowing.

(Of course, if "grammatical structure" does not refer to superficial typological similarity – along the lines of metatypy –, but material correspondences in the morphology, the case for genetic relationship would be much stronger, since morphological evidence for relationship is much more important than lexical evidence, after all. But I doubt that that is what is meant by the authors here.) --Florian Blaschke (talk) 01:33, 2 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Fine, per, Jeff Leer's reconstructions appear to have vindicated the inclusion of Tlingit. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 12:53, 21 May 2014 (UTC)

Link with Yeneseian - both may stem from a Beringian population
See and. North American Na-Dene family (traditionally spoken in Alaska, Canada and parts of the present-day U.S.) and the Asian Yeneseian family are said to "both appear to descend from an ancestral language that can be traced to the Beringia region. Both Siberia and North America, it seems, were settled by the descendants of a community that lived in Beringia for some time. In other words, Sicoli says, "this makes it look like Beringia wasn't simply a bridge, but actually a homeland—a refuge, where people could build a life." Which links to other recently reported research. Dougweller (talk) 15:55, 6 April 2014 (UTC)
 * There is an independent line of argument that suggests an extinct substratum on Kamchatka that typologically resembled languages of the Pacific Northwest, as Kamchatkan has developped in that very direction. This makes me (as a sceptic) wonder if these guys have not really hit on something. I do think this scenario is more plausible, and makes more geographical and historical sense: a migration from Kamchatka/Beringia to Central Asia/Western Siberia and Alaska/British Columbia respectively is less of a stretch than a migration from Western Siberia to the Pacific Northwest (or the opposite) directly. I don't even see the necessity for positing an age of 10+ kya for these migrations; they could have happened in the Holocene. Of course, the linguistic evidence comes first; as long as the connection is not demonstrated to the satisfaction of all specialists (and there is the very real possibility that it may never be, even if the hypothesis is correct), this is all idle speculation, much like speculation about the origin of the (say) Greeks was in 1800. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 18:22, 16 May 2014 (UTC)

Deeper relationships
According to Merritt Ruhlen, a follower of Joseph Greenberg (see https://images.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fjames.fabpedigree.com%2Flang12.gif&f=1), Dene-Yeniseian belongs to the "Cauco-Sinitic" "phylum" (one of 12) of Human Language. There is an article at http://www.kimmacquarrie.com/dna-confirms-that-first-north-south-americans-came-from-siberia/ in which it is claimed that recent DNA evidence is suggestive of Greenberg's classification of American languages into one main Eurasiatic-like (Amerind), and two later ( Sino-Caucasian Na-Dene, and Eurasiatic Eskimo-Aleut), smaller migrations from Asia. -lifeform (talk) 04:51, 21 March 2016 (UTC)

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