User:Allisonpasechnick/Yugh language

The Yugh (Yug) language is a Yeniseian language closely related to the Ket language. Ket is the last surviving language of the Yeniseian family. It was formerly spoken by the Yugh people, one of the southern groups along the Yenisei River in central Siberia. It was once regarded as a dialect of the Ket language, which was considered to be a language isolate, and was therefore called Sym Ket or Southern Ket; however, the Ket considered it to be a distinct language. In the literature, Yugh is referred to as the Sym dialect of Ket, due to the fact that the Yugh speaker s lived on the banks of the river Sym, the left tributary of the river Yenisei. By the 1980's, the last full fluent-remaining speakers had died in Vorogovo and Jarcevo. In the early 1990s, there were only two or three non-fluent speakers remaining, and the language was virtually extinct. However, the 2002 Census recorded 19 ethnic Yugh in all of Russia. But t hen in the 2010 census only one ethnic Yugh was counted. The Yugh Language is now currently believed to be extinct today.

Recent History (Новейшая история)
The Yugh people (pronounced ɟuk; often written Yug) were part of an indigenous group believed to be survivors of an ancient people who originally lived throughout central Siberia. The Yugh people have previously been considered part of the Northern group of Ket people. The "Yenisey Ostyaks" of the Symsko-Kasov-Tribe were speakers of the Yugh language(Sym-Ket); later Soviet censuses did not differentiate these from Ket speakers. However, in the 1960's, Yugh was different from Ket, they have separate and unique, although related, Yugsk language and customs. Some believe, Yugh went extinct in the 70's. By the end of 1980's, the Yugh people, along with their language, had disappeared as a separate ethnic group. By the early 1990s, the Yugh language was thought to be extinct, as only two or three non-fluent languages in Yugsk were still spoken. Yugh people, along with their relatives and other extinct related tongues, were named "Yeniseians" by linguists and ethnographers. In 1991, the population consisted of 10 to 15 people that resided in the Turukhansk district of the Krasnoyarsk territory in the village, Vorogovo. Yugh was formerly spoken in the villages of Yartsevo and Vorogovo on the Yenisei River. The 2002 census recorded 19 ethnic Yugh in Russia. During the 2010 census, only one ethnic Yugh was recorded.

Official Status
The Yugh Language is listed as officially endangered in 1993, with less than 5 native speakers worldwide. The degree of speakers competent in the Yugh language is mainly rudimentary, although it is under strong interference from the Russian language. Speakers are said to reside in the basins of the rivers Sym, Kas, and Dubches. These are western tributaries to the middle Yenisei river, opposite to the Podkamennaya Tunguska. Yugh was once believed to be a Ket dialect until it was reclassified, but it was too late, there's only one Yugh than more or less speaks it. When he will die, Yugh will face the same destiny of its sister languages and Ket will be the only living Yeniseian language, sparsely spoken in the central-northern area across the Yenisei river.

Dialects/Varieties
The current view, that Ket and Yugh have to be regarded and described as separate languages was only developed from the 1960's and onwards. Traditional terminology viewed Yugh as a mere dialect of Ket (=Sym-Ket). In 1985,at the Krasnoyarsk Dam, Nomadic tribes such as the Ket people and the Yugh people have lived along the banks of the Yenisei river since ancient. According to the last census (in 2010) there were 1220 Ket but only 213 spoke the language. The building of Azerbaijan State Yugh Theate r that is located at Murtuza Mukhtarov on Street 83, was also a building with extremely few speakers that could possibly be extinct now today.

Derived Languages
Linguists and specialists are familiar with the name Ket, which designates a small ethnic group on the Yenisei and their language. Ket is a severely endangered language with today less than 500 native speakers. Together with Yugh, Kott, Arin, Assan and Pumpokol, it forms the Yeniseic family of languages, which has no known linguistic relatives. Yugh (also called Sym Ket, D’uk or Jug) is a Yeniseian language, a very ancient language family located in Central Siberia. Russian is the principal language of the remaining speakers. The Yeniseian language family is supposed to be related with the Na-Dené people of North America (Navajo is the most famous and successful member)

Documentation of the Yugh Language
'Henrich Werner was the last linguist to document the Yugh language, working with the last eight or ten speakers during 1961-1971 While completing his extensive fieldwork, he was able to compile a full vocabulary, as well as, an entire description of the Yugh language. Between 1961 and 1991, Werner made dozens of linguistic field trips to remote encampments where completely fluent Ket and Yugh speakers could still be found. His persistent efforts have yielded over 150 articles touching upon every facet of synchronic and diachronic Yeniseic linguistics. Were it not for his perseverance, much that we know about the Ket and Yugh language structure would probably never have been recorded.

The American linguist Edward Vajda traveled and spent his time in Siberia where he studied the Ket, relatives of the Yugh, and found similarities with the Navajo, the Apache and other Na-Dené people, this theory is called Dené-Yeniseian and its popularity is growing among the academics.

Of the extinct Yeniseic tongues, only Kott and Yugh (Sym-Ket) were recorded in any detail.

The Finnish pioneer-linguist, and true founder of Yeniseian linguistics, Matthias Alexander Castre n, brought an exhaustive grammatical description of Ket, Yugh, and Kott home from his Siberian journey (1845-1848)

Sounds/Phonology
In the Yugh language, phonology and morphology preserve a number of archaic features no longer attested in Modern Ket, therefore, comparative data from Yugh is extremely helpful in helping to reconstruct Proto-Yeniseian linguistic systems. Ket and Yugh have a system of five to six phonemic word-based tonemes.

=== Deaffrication === A number  of features of Ket phonology have been described as atypical of the languages of the Siberian type, primarily, the system of word-based tonal prosody and the lack of vowel harmony. However, a range of other features and characteristics of Yeniseian languages are also found in several other indigenous Siberian languages. These include a process of deaffrication, as well as a four-way nasal contrast in Ket and Yugh(Proto-Yeniseic) and various other Siberian language s.

Proto-Yeniseic appears to have possessed a symmetrical system of voiced and voiceless palatal and alveolar affricates. A comparison of the closely related Ket and Yugh with the other Yeniseian languages suggests that a process of deaffrication, or lenition, was operative during the development of these two languages.

Grammar
Apart from Ket, the object of this grammar, Yugh is the best know of all Yeniseic languages. Casrtren in 1858 was though principally pan-dialectal, heavily based on data from Yugh. Other aspects of Ket and Yugh grammar were studied extensively by A. P. Dul'zon and his pupils. He initiated large-scale linguistics field work activities on the vanishing languages of the region and put Yeniseyan studies on a firm methodological and factual footing.

Morphology
Yugh, ūr ‘water’ shows up occasionally in Yugh territory river names as the final combining form "–ur". River names ending in "–ur" are also found in south Siberia east of Lake Baikal, including the same areas containing the possibly Yeniseian-derived river names in –ši. Ket and Yugh have a number of complex word containing this morpheme in the meaning "water".

The prevalence of major non-Yeniseian hydronyms in the lands that Ket and Yugh people actually inhabited during the historic period can be explained by the relatively recent migration of Ket and Yugh family groups from more southerly areas.

A number of river names, mostly in Yugh territory, are built with the syllable sɨm. These include the Sym river itself and some of its tributaries. River names with final combining form –sɨm reflect a pre-Yeniseian substrate of unknown origin, since the anlaut /t/ in the Yeniseian formant –tɨm would not have become /s/ in Ket or Yugh

Also unexplained are the Yeniseian names for the Bakhta river: Ket Baqtoq, Yugh Beaχtaχ, which are unlikely on phonological grounds to contain *to ‘water’ as their final combining form. More likely, the shape of these names represent a form originally ending in the syllable –qol, which has reduced to coda /q/. This is unproven but would be in keeping with the fact that the Bakhta is also an eastern tributary of the Yenisei, draining from the same Central Siberian Plateau as other river names with the final combining form –qol.

The superscript [ ^-] used in Yugh forms denotes a high even tone, which is accompanied by half length in the vowel. Sometimes in Yugh, the symbol  [ ^7] denotes a glottal stop preceded by a sharp rise in pitch. Yugh also has the rising [ ' ] and falling [ ' ] tonemes.

Vocabulary/Lexis
The Yugh lexicon reflects a typical culture of hunter, gatherers, and fishers living in a Siberian taiga and riverine environment. Many words also echo ancient aspects of spiritual culture.

Yugh > English: 850 words

English > Yugh: 505 words

Werner introduces Yeniseian language structure by the most valuable part of which is the comparative list of 100 basic vocabulary items juxtaposed in Ket, Yugh, and Kott, the three bestattested Yeniseic languages.

In Yugh hydronyms, although the Ket and Yugh word for ‘river’ is sēs, the Yugh combining form is normally –čes, in contrast to Southern and Northern Ket –ses and Central Ket –šeš. The change of syllable anlaut /s/ to /č/ in the middle of compounds also occurs sporadically in Northern Ket (cf. Southern Ket bənsaŋ ‘it is not’, but Northern Ket bənčaŋ ~ bənsaŋ)

Yeniseian-derived river names that survive as substrate toponyms among the current Russian- or Turkic-speaking populations of southern or western Siberia are built using virtually identical final combining forms that can easily be connected to a particular Yeniseian daughter language: –ses ~ sis ~ zis ~ sas ~ zes ~ zas (Ket), –čes (Yugh), –set ~ sat ~ zet ~ zat, also –kul (Arin), –šet ~ čet (Kott), –ul (Assan), –tet ~ tat ~ det ~ dat (Pumpokol)

Examples
Yugh toχojiŋ ‘drying’ < to ‘water’ + qoj ‘dry’ + ŋ (action nominal suffix); Ket totaləŋ, Yugh totarɨŋ ‘shallow’ < to ‘water’ + tol ‘low’ + ŋ (adjective suffix); Central Ket dialectal tɨmet ‘lake’ < tɨm ‘water’ + et ‘surface (?)’; and Central Ket dialectal tamtul ‘lake’ < tɨm ‘water’ + tul ‘cavity, bottom, low area’.

Lake names in Ket-Yugh areas often end in the formant –de, derived transparently from the Ket and Yugh noun de’ ‘lake’: Ket Dɨnde < dɨn ‘spruce’ + de’ ‘lake’, tomulde < tūm ‘dark’ + ūl ‘water’ + de’ ‘lake’.

The most common Ket-Yugh equivalent for the verb to 'bite' is a compound expression whose main lexical morpheme is Proto-KY *laʔp 'piece' (> Yugh laʔp, pl. lˈaf-ɨŋ

*qɔː or *qɔ-deŋ 'to die' (the addition of the suffixal component reduces vowel length)

*dɔp 'to drink'. The fluctuation between the variants =dɔp ~ =dop and =ɔp ~ =op may be reliably projected onto the Proto-KY level as well. There are three possibilities to explain it: (a) original suppletivism of two unconnected roots (*=dɔp in the present tense and infinitive, *=ɔp in the past tense and imperative); (b) original suppletivism of the simple root *=ɔp and its extended variant *=d=ɔp, containing a fossilized prefix; (c) fracturing of the original paradigm due to a rare preterritoral marker, i. e. *d=a=b=dop 'I drink it' vs. *d=o=b=i=Y=dop > *d=o=b=i=y=op 'I drank it', where *=Y= is a phonetically not quite clear grammatical morpheme (it is also encountered in several other paradigms as well, always manifested as =y=). All three scenarios also surmise later analogical processes in Ket, with formation of new paradigmatic variants, which would hardly be surprising. External comparison with Kott would seem to support scenario (a), but not in a conclusive manner.