Ket Alphabet and Tones

            Ket has a phonemic inventory—that is, an inventory of sounds—that’s pretty different from what we have in English, and quite different from what most people are used to.  In our discussions on this blog we’ll be using the following alphabet for the Ket language, developed by Vajda et al. (2014)

ətn ostɨʁanbes diriŋbetn! (We write in Ket!)

Ket Letter with Variants	Example (“Is for…”)	English Meaning of Example
Aa [æ, a, ɑ]	A:t	“I”
Bb [b]	Bə:n	“No, not”
Dd [d] *In between vowels /d/à[ ɾ] represented by “r”.  See US English “butter”	Dɯ:l	“Child”
Ee [e, ɛ]	E’	“Yes”
ə [ə, ʌ, ɤ]	ətn	“We”
Gg [ɣ, g] *Intervocalic/word-final and postvocalic pre-obstruent allophones of /k/	Tag(im) [taɣ(im)] Tìg [tìɣ] qɔgd [qɔgdi]	“(It is) white” “Swan” “Autumn”
Hh [h]	Hɯna	“Small”
Ii [i]	I:m	“Pine nut”
ɯ [ɯ]	ɯ:n(am)	“two (of them)”
Jj [j]	Jelok	“Yelogui” (a river of Central Siberia)
Kk [k]	Ku’	“Soot, embers”
Ll [tɬ, l, ɬ] *Word-initial [tɬ] *Intervocalic [l] *Word-final [ɬ]	La’q [tɬa’q] Allel [al:e ɬ]	“Selkup” “female family guardian spirit”
Mm [m]	Mamul	“Milk” lit. “Breast-water”
Nn [n]	Na’n	“Flatbread made from dried lily bulb” Nowadays made from bread flour.
Ŋŋ [ŋ]	Ba’ŋ	“Earth”
Oo [o, ɔ]	O:p	“Father, Dad”
Pp [p] *Word-final allophone of /b/	Ap	“My”
Qq [qχ, ʁ, q]	Qu’ [qχu’] Aqta(m) [aʁta(m)] lә̄q [tɬә̄’q]	“Mouth of river” “(It is) good” “Animal pelts”
Rr [ɾ] *intervocalic allophone of /d/	Kire	“this”
Ss [s]	Súùl	“Sled”
Tt [t] *allophone of /d/	Ti:p	“dog”
Uu [u]	U:	“You”
Vv [v] *intervocalic allophone of /v/	Ovaŋ	Parents

            Ket also has four tones that we should be aware of.  Just like in Chinese, a word’s meaning can change if you get the tone wrong—so be careful!  Also, tone is lost before suffixes, so in longer words we usually don’t use our tones, at least as prominently:

High Even	Qo:j E:n E:s E: A:t	“uncle, aunt” “now” “sky god” “iron” “I”
Glottalized	Qo'j E’n E’s E’ A’t	“wish” “pine trees” “wooden nail” “Yes!” “bone, body part (coll. Relative)”
Rising-Falling	Qóòj	“neighboring”
Falling	Qòj	Bear
No tone or marker	D-(qoj)-olboksibed	“I get turned into (a bear)” (a phrase that could in fact be conceivably used by a Ket shaman!)

            Now that we have the basics of Ket pronunciation down, let’s get to the fun part.

Ket Shamanism

                Hey everybody, welcome back to Office Hours with the Brofessor, the Show Where I Say Things.  Today we’re going to do a very basic outline of the shamanistic belief system of the Ket people.  This is one of the most important aspects of Ket culture, but on the other hand one of the most mysterious; we know very little about Ket shamanism, especially as it existed prior to the arrival of the Russians in the 17^th century.

                Peoples all over Siberia have historically been shamanists.  That is, they believe that particular people, i.e. shamans, have the ability to interact with the spirit world, and could act as representatives of the community thereto.  That didn’t make the shaman better than anyone else, just different—I like to think of the muggle-wizard distinction from Harry Potter.  Indeed, despite their vital role in the community, shamans weren’t necessarily the most popular people.  Shamans were treated with some degree of “fearful reverence”.  There was often something a bit "off" about them.  At the onset of a shaman's powers, he or she would go through a period of mental illness.  During this time they would go off into the woods and learn to work with the spirits; if the spirits were ignored, the shaman would go crazy and die.  Even after rejoining the community, shamans were still feared by some.  It was a position that we really have no parallel to in our society, and one that I for one struggle to understand. 

                These shamans, as I say, had the special ability to interact with the spirit world by going into a trance.  Usually such a state was brought on by singing and beating a drum, sometimes with the help of fly agaric mushrooms (Vajda 2009).  Among the Ket, both men and women could become shamans, although the most powerful shamans were men, at least in the 20^th century.  Male shamans were known as sening, while female shamans were called senam—note here the Ket word am “mother”.  Shamans didn’t make up a single homogeneous group; there were different types of shaman, as well as a kind of earth sorcerer called a bangos (literally “earth one” or “earthy one”).  They could belong to a few different classes, depending on their animal helpers: bear, reindeer, eagle, dragonfly or anthropomorphic-bear-man.  The last category is cool because their helper was this guy who had bear paws instead of hands, known as a kandelok.  So my guess is that America’s founding fathers were Ket scholars too.  After all, they gave us the right to bear arms!

…sorry.

                Anyway, different shaman classes had different abilities, strengths and weaknesses:

• ·        Dragonfly shamans were strongest, but could only shamanize in summer—i.e. when dragonflies are around, and they could only travel southwest in their spiritual journeys.  That was kind of a bother, since the main Ket adversary, the soul-eating witch Hosedam, lived to the north.

• ·         Bear and kandelok shamans couldn’t fly.  On the plus side they had the ability to call on not just their own spirit helpers, but the family’s allel guardian spirits too.

• ·         Eagle shamans weren’t as strong as the dragonfly guys, but they got the most most badass spirit helper--a giant eagle that was bigger than the sun.  Also, they were heirs of the very first shaman, who is said to have either kept an eagle or been an eagle himself.

• ·         Reindeer shamans were the most common.  In their séances their drums would turn into these flying female reindeer called qaduks that would take the shaman up into the sky.  There they would have epic battles against Hosedam and her army of demons.  Kind of like Santa, but infinitely cooler:

Hosedam's on the naughty list.

Out of these five types, there were also great “full time” shamans and lesser “part time” shamans.  Most shamans were somewhere in between, while relatively few “leveled up” to great shamans.  Lesser shamans had just rejoined the community after their "illness", and had a drumstick, but no drum.  Upon "graduating" to a full shaman, they would recieve drums and an increasing amount of equipment, until the greatest shamans were more or less covered in spiritual regalia.

So, basically, these guys were the real deal.  I would’ve loved to sit in on a séance and observe this beautiful ancient tradition, but unfortunately I can’t.  Not because they’re secretive or anything, but because there are no more shamans left to observe.  The last Ket shaman died in the 70s, bringing an end to this tradition.  Given the persecution and eradication of traditional lore by the USSR in the 20^th century, along with the social issues of modern Ket life, it does not seem likely that there will be a comeback.  All we have now are fragments of the traditional beliefs practiced by the Ket, and even these are fading fast (Vajda 2010).  On the other hand, we may have some cause for optimism, considering that other Siberian groups have extensively revitalized their ancient practices, e.g. Buryats and Tuvans.

The fate of Ket shamanism sends a sobering message to Western academia, not only about the importance of documenting indigenous spiritual traditions, but also of simply respecting them.  Had it not been for the ravages of Western exploitation, this tradition from Ket prehistory might still live on today.

Source:

1. Ed Vajda, "Ket Shamanism".  From Shaman, Spring/Autumn 2010.  http://linguistics.uoregon.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Vajda-2010-Ket-Shamanism-Shaman.pdf 

Ket Life and Culture

Ket Life and Culture

                Hello all, welcome back to Office Hours with the Brofessor, the Show Where I Say Things.  Today: I didn’t choose the Siberian hunter-gatherer life, the Siberian hunter-gatherer life chose me.

                So today we’re going to be talking about the traditional lifestyle and culture of the Ket people, past and present.  We’ve already talked about the very basics of the Ket, but today we’ll go into more detail. What was important in the traditional Ket world?  What did traditional Ket people do every day?  Let’s take a journey through space and time and take a look at the ancient Ket way of life, the last remnant of an age-old tradition that once held sway across inner Eurasia.  When we examine the Ket forest hunter-gatherer lifestyle we are seeing in modern times a cultural succession with roots that go back far beyond recorded history.  It’s really cool stuff, so let’s get started.  We’ll be dividing our discussion today into six parts: worldview, nomadizing, other people, animals, food and the present situation of the Ket.

Part I: Worldview

                The Ket worldview and concept of space was influenced by two major features: the river and the forest.  The river was a place of plenty and ease, while the forest was harsher and more austere (Vajda 2011).  Geographically, the Ket positioned themselves in relation to the river.  The upriver south was seen as an idyllic land of warmth and plenty, where dwelt a kind of good witch or goddess named Tomam.  She’s the one who saves the Ket from starvation each spring by sending the birds on their migration north. Supposedly she lives at the Yenisei’s headwaters.  I’ve been there, stood on the very banks of the Yenisei at its source, but I didn’t see her.  Maybe next time.  At any rate I could feel the spirit of Tomam as I stood on top of the cliffs looking over the very upper Yenisei.  On those cliffs, every year, Tomam comes and shakes out her feathered cape; the down is carried away by the wind to become the birds so necessary to Ket life (Vajda 2011).

                Meanwhile, the north was a place of evil, cold and misfortune.  If we traveled far enough north, we would run into a very mean lady named Hosedam, The Wicked Witch of the North:

Kinda like this, but colder and no monkeys.

                Hosedam’s favorite food is human souls.  If we ran into her we’d be done for unless Alba, the great hero of Ket myth, came along and made her vomit the souls back up.  Pretty cool.

Nomadizing

                A major part of Ket life was moving to new encampments every season.  Unfortunately, a lot of people have the wrong idea that nomadic people kind of just wander around aimlessly.  Not true.  Nomadic migration patterns are very precisely calculated to things like weather and food availability.  And they’re consistent.  For instance, a Ket families tended to use their own winter hunting trails that were remembered without the use of markers or other aids (Vajda 2011).

                Ket family groups had a migration for each season.  In spring they emerged from the forest to camp at the riverside in birchbark tipis.  With the summer come the mosquitoes, so the people would hang out on houseboats on the river, where the mosquitoes couldn’t reach.  When the mosquitoes died, the Ket returned to shore; and when winter came they would go away deep into the forest.  During the coldest weeks Mom and the kids would hole themselves up in an earthen shelter, while Dad and older sons would be out hunting.

                Such were the patterns of the Ket year, and so did they cope and even thrive in the harsh environment of central Siberia.

Neighbors

                In terms of interactions with other Siberian peoples, the Ket most frequently ran into two groups, the Selkups and the Evenki.

                The first group, the Selkup, lived in the swampy lowlands to the west.  Speakers of a language distantly related to Finnish and Hungarian, they were known to the by their word for “friend”—kind of like if, instead of saying someone was from Mexico, we just said “he’s an amigo”.  The Selkup were (and are) reindeer herders, which is fundamentally different from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle of the Ket.  This difference, however, seems not to have impeded the bro-level relationship (brolationship?) between the two peoples.

                The Evenki, on the other hand, were on not-so-good terms with the Ket.  The Evenki lived in the hilly east, their ancestors’ expansion having forced the Ket downriver from their ancient homeland.  In a reference to the more mountainous territory of the Evenki, they were known to the Ket by the less-than-flattering name of “stone spirits”—a reference to the rugged topography of their home.  Also less friendly were relations with the Enets, a group related to the Selkup.

                A fourth group with whom the Ket frequently interacted, at least in modern times, were the Russians.  They showed up every year to trade and collect the tsarist fur tax. 

Animals

                The traditional Ket world was of course shared with a number of animals.  Dogs were the only domesticate of the Ket.  According to legend, the first dog was the son of the sky god Es, who was sent to teach the people how to revive their dead.  Instead he told the people to put the dead in the ground, thereby condemning humankind to mortality.  For his forgetfulness he was cursed to serve humans for all eternity, sniffing and digging around in the ground (Vajda 2011).

                The singularity of the dog as the Ket’s sole domesticate sets them apart from their reindeer-herding neighbors, and there’s a reason that they survived while other forest hunter-gatherers didn’t make it.  The Ket had a secret ally: mosquitoes.  Every summer, mosquitoes would be so thick on land that reindeer would literally suffocate on the insects that they’d inhaled.  The Ket, meanwhile, would be sitting comfortably on houseboats in the middle of the river, away from the bugs and enjoying the excellent fishing.  So the reindeer was never as central to Ket life as it was for others. 

                The other main animal in Ket life was the bear.  Believed to be inhabited by human spirits, the Ket treated bears with a reverence bordering on worship.  Whenever a bear what brought down in a hunt, the dead animal was considered a special guest among the people and eaten at a feast in its own honor.  This tradition of “bear festivals” seems to have extremely ancient roots, as we can observe ceremonies like it across boreal Eurasia, from Finland (as mentioned in the Kalevala) to Japan (practiced among the Ainu people of Hokkaido).

Present Situation

                The current state of the Ket people is a tragic one.  Having been subjected to forced assimilation throughout the 20^th century, little remains of their traditional way of life that is being actively maintained and passed to the next generation.  No fluent native speakers of Ket are younger than fifty and even though kids in school get an hour a week of Ket class, that’s just not enough to make a difference in the survival of the language. 

                The days of birchbark tipis and bear festivals appear to be gone forever.  The Ket have been entirely sedentarized, and forced into a world drastically alien to that of their ancestors.   The modern situation, therefore, is tragically one of people forced in between worlds with a decimated culture, punishing isolation, and few employable skills.  The results have been predictable.  Furthermore, alcoholism is a serious problem in Ket communities.  Domestic violence and alcohol-related illness appear, with the tremendous human suffering they entail.

                This vicious cycle can only be ended by the Ket themselves, which they must be empowered to do.  One step towards this empowerment is preservation and promotion of the Ket language and traditional culture.  Before one rises up, one must have ground to stand on.  Hopefully, by sharing with everyone that I can the awesomeness of Ket language and culture, the effect will not be wholly negative, and I can do my part as an admirer of Ket.

Sources:

1.       Ed Vajda. “Siberian Landscapes in Ket Traditional Culture”. 2011. https://www.uaf.edu/files/anlc/2011ketlandscape.pdf

Ket as a Paleosiberian Language

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:

1. http://llmap.org/map/363222/

2. By Maarten Takens from Germany - A Yakutian horse, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38384584

3. http://starling.rinet.ru/maps/maps34.php?lan=en

Let's Ket Started!

I’m back!

            That’s right, it’s time for another season of Office Hours with the Brofessor: The Show Where I Say Things.  This fall we’re going to be revisiting the endlessly fascinating Ket language of north-central Siberia.  I thought that, first of all, it would be a good idea to review what we already know about Ket culture and life.  I did a video series about Ket a long time ago, but it was pretty cringeworthy, because I kept stammering and pausing, and it didn’t have cool stuff like my awesome title card.

            So let’s start by asking what I get asked a lot: what is Ket, and why is it important?  To answer this question, we need to take an epic journey across space and time, deep into the heart of Siberia.

            Now, if you ask around about Siberia, most people will say two things: it’s cold, and it’s where you go if you make Stalin mad.  Both of these are true, but there’s a lot more to this part of the world that’s actually really cool and fun to learn about.  Siberia is even home to its own indigenous people—unrelated to the Russians or Chinese.  These aboriginal Siberians are really diverse, just like the native peoples of the Americas or Australia.  These people have been there, speaking their own languages and maintaining their own cultures, for thousands of years before the Russians showed up.  These are nomadic tribal cultures which, because of their remoteness, we don’t hear very much about. 

One of these tribes is known as the Ket.  They’re important because their culture and language are really special and have a lot to teach us in the fields of linguistics and anthropology, even surrounded as they are by many other interesting cultures and languages.  For one thing, it’s much more ancient than any of the other languages around it.  For another, Ket bears an uncanny similarity to some of the native languages of North America.  Incredibly, it’s looking more and more like Ket represents one branch of an ancestral population that went on to migrate from Siberia to the Americas.  Unfortunately, young people are no longer learning this language, and within the next few decades it will probably have gone extinct as a primary medium of communication.

            The native peoples of Siberia have, sadly, run into a lot of problems in modern history.  The Ket are no exception.  Again, this parallels the challenges faced by indigenous peoples in America, Australia and elsewhere—among them crime, poverty, and alcoholism.  A history of economic exploitation and forced assimilation exists under the Russians, particularly under the Soviet regime.

As a result, a lot of traditional culture and knowledge was lost in the 20^th century, and continues to be lost to this day.  Linguists, anthropologists and indigenous activists are running a frantic race against time to record and revitalize this ancient knowledge, not just in Siberia but all over the world.  If we don’t act quickly, the Ket and people like them will never have the opportunity to enrich the world by sharing their language—and by extension, the unique knowledge and way of life expressed thereby.

            I am a firm believer that respect for indigenous peoples includes respect for indigenous languages.  We cannot truly work in a way that respects and honors an indigenous culture unless we approach it, quite literally, on its own terms—that is, giving the language the study and respect it deserves.  Lots of people seem to think that learning Ket, or Warlpiri, or Lakota, is in some way a less worthy endeavor than learning French or Chinese.  But the fact is that all languages, even and perhaps especially the marginalized ones, have a lot to teach us and a lot to contribute to the human story.  Despite what our culture tells us, the West is not perfect and all-knowing.  It’s only one cultural tradition among many.  There are things modern science and history cannot tell us, but indigenous knowledge can, from medicinal plant lore to population genetics.  Traditional indigenous knowledge is just as multifaceted, useful and worthy of study as Western science, and cannot be fully understood without the use of indigenous languages.  By limiting ourselves to the world’s most spoken languages, we are in fact throwing away the vast majority of all human knowledge!

            So to arms, linguists!  To arms!  We rally to the banner of linguistic diversity.  Let not this treasure slip from our grasp.  Let not the foe of language extinction go unchallenged.  LINGUISTS!  WHAT IS YOUR PROFESSION!?

            So on that note, let’s begin our study of Ket.