Paleosiberian Languages
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Paleosiberian Languages
The Paleo-Siberian languages are several language isolates and small language families spoken in parts of Siberia. They are not known to have any genetic relationship to each other; their only common link is that they are held to have antedated the more dominant languages, particularly Tungusic and latterly Turkic languages, that have largely displaced them. Even more recently, Turkic (at least in Siberia) and especially Tungusic have been displaced in their turn by Russian. Classifications Four small language families and isolates are usually considered to be Paleo-Siberian languages: # The Chukotko-Kamchatkan family, sometimes known as Luoravetlan, includes Chukchi and its close relatives, Koryak, Alutor and Kerek. Itelmen, also known as Kamchadal, is also distantly related. Chukchi, Koryak and Alutor are spoken in easternmost Siberia by communities numbering in the thousands (Chukchi) or hundreds (Koryak and Alutor). Kerek is extinct, and Itelmen is now spoken by fewe ...
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Siberia
Siberia ( ; , ) is an extensive geographical region comprising all of North Asia, from the Ural Mountains in the west to the Pacific Ocean in the east. It has formed a part of the sovereign territory of Russia and its predecessor states since the lengthy conquest of Siberia, which began with the fall of the Khanate of Sibir in 1582 and concluded with the annexation of Chukotka in 1778. Siberia is vast and sparsely populated, covering an area of over , but home to roughly a quarter of Russia's population. Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk, and Omsk are the largest cities in the area. Because Siberia is a geographic and historic concept and not a political entity, there is no single precise definition of its territorial borders. Traditionally, Siberia spans the entire expanse of land from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, with the Ural River usually forming the southernmost portion of its western boundary, and includes most of the drainage basin of the Arctic Ocean. I ...
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Itelmen Language
Itelmen () or Western Itelmen, formerly known as Western Kamchadal, is a language of the Chukotko-Kamchatkan family spoken on the western coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula. Fewer than a hundred native speakers, mostly elderly, in a few settlements in the southwest of Koryak Autonomous Okrug, remained in 1993. The 2021 Census counted 2,596 ethnic Itelmens, virtually all of whom are now monolingual in Russian. However, there are attempts to revive the language, and it is being taught in a number of schools in the region. (Western) Itelmen is the only surviving Kamchatkan language. It has two dialects, the Southern dialect of Khayryuzovo and the Northern dialect of Sedanka. Classification There are two points of view about where Itelmen belongs genetically. According to the first theory, Itelmen and Chukotkan descend from a common proto-language; the sharp differences of Itelmen, noticed at all levels, are explained by the intense influence of other languages. It is sug ...
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Michael Fortescue
Michael David Fortescue (born 8 August 1946, Thornbury) is a British-born linguist specializing in Arctic and native North American languages, including Kalaallisut, Inuktun, Chukchi and Nitinaht. Fortescue is known for his reconstructions of the Eskaleut, Chukotko-Kamchatkan, Nivkh, and Wakashan proto-languages. Biography As a young teenager, Michael Fortescue and his family moved to California where he went to La Jolla High School 1956-1959. He finished school at Abingdon School in 1963. In 1966, he received a B.A. with "Honours with great Distinction" in Slavic languages and literatures from University of California, Berkeley, where he then taught Russian 1968-1970 and finished an M.A. in Slavic languages and literatures. In the years 1971-1975 he taught English for the International Language Centre in Osaka and the University of Aix/Marseille. He took a PhD in Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh 1975-1978 with the thesis ''Procedural discourse generation mod ...
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Uralic Languages
The Uralic languages ( ), sometimes called the Uralian languages ( ), are spoken predominantly in Europe and North Asia. The Uralic languages with the most native speakers are Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian. Other languages with speakers above 100,000 are Erzya, Moksha, Mari, Udmurt and Komi spoken in the European parts of the Russian Federation. Still smaller minority languages are Sámi languages of the northern Fennoscandia; other members of the Finnic languages, ranging from Livonian in northern Latvia to Karelian in northwesternmost Russia; the Samoyedic languages and the others of members of the Ugric languages, Mansi and Khanty spoken in Western Siberia. The name ''Uralic'' derives from the family's purported "original homeland" (''Urheimat'') hypothesized to have been somewhere in the vicinity of the Ural Mountains, and was first proposed by Julius Klaproth in ''Asia Polyglotta'' (1823). Finno-Ugric is sometimes used as a synonym for Uralic but more accu ...
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Uralic–Yukaghir Languages
Uralic–Yukaghir, also known as Uralo-Yukaghir, is a somewhat controversial proposed language family composed of Uralic and Yukaghir. Uralic is a large and diverse family of languages spoken in northern and eastern Europe and northwestern Siberia. Among the better-known Uralic languages are Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian. Yukaghir is a small family of languages spoken in eastern Siberia. It formerly extended over a much wider area (Collinder 1965:30) and it consists of two surviving languages, Tundra Yukaghir and Kolyma Yukaghir. Proponents of the Uralo-Siberian proposal include Uralo-Yukaghir as one of its two branches, alongside the ''Siberian'' languages (sometimes Nivkh, (formerly) Chukotko-Kamchatkan and Eskimo-Aleut). History Similarities between Uralic and Yukaghir were first pointed out by Paasonen (1907) and Lewy (1928), although they did not consider these to be sufficient evidence for a genetic relationship between the two. Holger Pedersen (1931) inc ...
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Chuvan Language
Chuvan () is an extinct Yukaghir language of Siberia, part of a dialect continuum with the two surviving languages. It was most likely last spoken in the 19th century. Already in the 1860s, no more speakers of Chuvan could be located. Chuvan was widespread in the lower region of the Anadyr River (near Chuvanskoye), spoken by Chuvans. The translations of 22 sentences, recorded in 1781 Events January–March * January – William Pitt the Younger, later Prime Minister of Great Britain, enters Parliament of Great Britain, Parliament, aged 21. * January 1 – Industrial Revolution: The Iron Bridge opens ... by I. Benzig, and 210 words written by Fyodor Matyushkin in 1821 have been preserved.Matyushkin FF, Collection of the words of the Chuvansky and Omok languages, in: Vrangel F.P., Journey through the northern shores of Siberia and along the Arctic Ocean, accomplished in 1820-1824, Part 2, Additions, St. Petersburg, 1841; Chuvan descendants are know ...
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Indigirka
The Indigirka (; ) is a river in the Sakha Republic in Russia between the Yana to the west and the Kolyma to the east. It is long. The area of its basin is . History The isolated village of Russkoye Ustye, located on the delta of the Indigirka, is known for the unique traditional culture of the Russian settlers whose ancestors came there several centuries ago. Some historians have speculated that Russkoye Ustye was settled by Pomors in the early 17th century. In 1638 explorer Ivan Rebrov reached the Indigirka. In 1636–42 Elisei Buza pioneered the overland route to the Indigirka river system. At about the same time, Poznik Ivanov ascended a tributary of the lower Lena, crossed the Verkhoyansk Range to the upper Yana, and then crossed the Chersky Range to the Indigirka. In 1642 Mikhail Stadukhin reached the Indigirka overland from the Lena. Zashiversk on the Indigirka was an important colonial outpost during the early days of Russian colonization. It was subsequently ab ...
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Kolyma
Kolyma (, ) or Kolyma Krai () is a historical region in the Russian Far East that includes the basin of Kolyma River and the northern shores of the Sea of Okhotsk, as well as the Kolyma Mountains (the watershed of the two). It is bounded to the north by the East Siberian Sea and the Arctic Ocean, and by the Sea of Okhotsk to the south. Kolyma Krai was never formally defined and over time it was split among various administrative units. , it consists roughly of the Magadan Oblast, north-eastern areas of Sakha Republic, Yakutia, and the Bilibinsky District of Chukotka Autonomous Okrug. The area, part of which is within the Arctic Circle, has a subarctic climate with very cold winters lasting up to six months of the year. Permafrost and tundra cover a large part of the region. Average winter temperatures range from (even lower in the interior), and average summer temperatures, from . There are rich reserves of gold, silver, tin, tungsten, mercury (element), mercury, copper, a ...
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Krasnoyarsk Krai
Krasnoyarsk Krai (, ) is a federal subjects of Russia, federal subject (a krai) of Russia located in Siberia. Its administrative center is the types of inhabited localities in Russia, city of Krasnoyarsk, the second-largest city in Siberia after Novosibirsk. Comprising half of the Siberian Federal District, Krasnoyarsk Krai is the largest krai in Russia, the list of subdivisions of Russia by area, second-largest federal subject in the country after neighboring Sakha Republic, Sakha, and the list of the largest country subdivisions by area, third-largest country subdivision by area in the world. The krai covers an area of , constituting roughly 13% of Russia's total area. Krasnoyarsk Krai has a population of 2,856,971 as of the 2021 Russian census, 2021 census. Geography The krai lies in the middle of Siberia, and occupies nearly half of the Siberian Federal District, almost splitting it in half, stretching from the Sayan Mountains in the south along the Yenisei River to the Tay ...
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Turukhansk
Turukhansk () is a rural locality (a '' selo'') and the administrative center of Turukhansky District of Krasnoyarsk Krai, Russia, located north of Krasnoyarsk, at the confluence of the Yenisey and Nizhnyaya Tunguska Rivers. Until 1924, the town was known as Monastyrskoye, and from 1924 to 1930 as Novo-Turukhansk. It is not to be confused with , known as Turukhansk until 1920. History One of the first Russian settlements in Siberia, Turukhansk was founded in 1607 as a winter camp () for Cossacks and merchants. After the disastrous fires of Mangazeya in 1619, 1642, and 1662, Turukhansk welcomed a large portion of the older colony's population and became known as New Mangazeya. A timber fort with cannons was built there in 1677. The settlement hosted one of the largest fairs in Siberia and was incorporated as an uyezd town of Turukhansk in 1785. The town declined after 1822. During the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, Turukhansk was often used as a destination for politi ...
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Ket Language
The Ket ( ) language, or more specifically Imbak and formerly known as Yenisei Ostyak ( ), is a Siberian language long thought to be an isolate, the sole surviving language of a Yeniseian language family. It is spoken along the middle Yenisei basin by the Ket people. The language is threatened with extinction—the number of ethnic Kets that are native speakers of the language dropped from 1,225 in 1926 to 537 in 1989. According to the UNESCO census, this number has since fallen to 150. A 2005 census reported 485 native speakers, but this number is suspected to be inflated. According to a local news source, the number of remaining Ket speakers is around 10 to 20. Another Yeniseian language, Yugh, has recently become extinct. History Documentation The earliest observations about the language were published by Peter Simon Pallas in 1788 in a travel diary (, ). Matthias Castrén was one of the last known to study the Kott language. Castrén lived beside the Kan river ...
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Yenisei River
The Yenisey or Yenisei ( ; , ) is the list of rivers by length, fifth-longest river system in the world, and the largest to drain into the Arctic Ocean. Rising in Mungaragiyn-gol in Mongolia, it follows a northerly course through Lake Baikal and the Krasnoyarsk Dam before draining into the Yenisey Gulf in the Kara Sea. The Yenisey divides the Western Siberian Plain in the west from the Central Siberian Plateau to the east; it drains a large part of central Siberia. Its delta is formed between the Gyda Peninsula and the Taymyr Peninsula. It is the central one of three large Siberian rivers that flow into the Arctic Ocean (the other two being the Ob (river), Ob and the Lena River, Lena). The maximum depth of the Yenisey is and the average depth is . Geography The Yenisey proper, from the confluence of its source rivers the Great Yenisey and Little Yenisey at Kyzyl to its mouth in the Kara Sea, is long. From the source of its tributary the Selenga, it is long.
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