Hey guys, it’s time for Office Hours with the Brofessor, the Show Where I Say Things. Before going into specific detail about Ket, let’s talk a little about the different language and cultures of the indigenous Siberians, who we first heard about last time. Indigenous Siberian peoples and languages can be grouped into five main categories:
1.
Turkic
2.
Tungusic
3.
Uralic
4.
Mongolic
5.
Paleosiberian
The first four categories represent
language families. The fifth is an
umbrella term for a number of not-necessarily-related peoples and languages
that predate the arrival of the others:
(1)
Let’s look at our big, beautiful
Siberian language map. The first four
groups, you’ll notice, are pretty widespread throughout Siberia and the Russian
Far East. Their spread-outness is mainly
due to the fact that these peoples have traditionally practiced nomadic
pastoralism; that is, they raise herds of animals and follow a carefully timed
seasonal migration. In the northern
taiga, or forest, people keep reindeer, while in the southern steppes we have
cattle and sheep, for example among the Mongolic-speaking Buryat people. The Turkic Sakha people of eastern Siberia
even keep these cute little mini horses that have the superpower of resisting
cold:
(2)
Pastoral nomadic people are
actually quite new to Siberia—they’ve only been around for the last few
thousand years.
The Paleosiberians, on the other
hand, are the survivors of the region’s pre-pastoral peoples. Instead of herding animals, Paleosiberians
are hunter-gatherers, following a way of life as old as humanity itself. Their ancestors have lived in Siberia since
time immemorial, perhaps even since the very glaciers receded. The Paleosiberians are really a diverse group
of people, and for the most part aren’t really linked either by genetics or
linguistics. One of these peoples, of
course, is known as the Ket.
So what’s the deal with these Ket
guys? The Ket are interesting because
they’re the last surviving true hunter-gatherers of inland Eurasia. A few other Paleosiberian hunter-gatherer
groups exist, but these are all coastal peoples who rely on the sea. The Ket are the last living representatives
of a lifestyle that was once, thousands of years ago, widespread across
interior Eurasia.
Their language, too, is a last
survivor. Ket belongs to the small
Yeniseic language family, all other members of which have gone extinct:
(3)
Of the
Yeniseic languages and peoples, Ket is as I say the only one to survive to the
present day, but even now it is what we would call a moribund language—that is,
kids aren’t learning it anymore and it’s spoken only by older people. Within a few decades, barring a dramatic
change in the situation of the Ket, it will have gone extinct as a native
language. This is sad, because a number
of linguists since the twenties have been drawing parallels between Ket and
some of the native languages of North America.
When Ket dies, so will what appears to be the only known prehistoric
linguistic connection between the Old and New Worlds.
So,
let’s review: the Ket are the last of the Yeniseic ethnolinguistic family,
which for the sake of convenience is classified with several other families as
“Paleosiberian”. Paleosiberians stand in
contrast to the more widespread pastoralists, or “neo-Siberians”, who again
comprise several different language families.
So not only are the Ket linguistically unique, but they’re also a
culturally distinct people who traditionally practiced hunting and gathering as
opposed to their reindeer-herding neighbors.
Now
that we know the very basics of who the Ket are, our next topic will be what
daily life was like in traditional Ket culture.
What was important, what did people care about? What did they do every day, and does this
culture live on today? Find out in our
next discussion.
Sources:
2. By Maarten Takens from Germany - A Yakutian horse, CC
BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38384584
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