Edward J. Vajda (

Camp Lejeune, North Carolina Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune ( or ) is a United States Armed Forces, United States military training facility in Jacksonville, North Carolina. Its of beaches make the base a major area for Amphibious warfare, amphibious assault training, an ...

, September 10, 1958 as Edward M. Johnson; changed his name in 1981) is a historical linguist at

Western Washington University Western Washington University (WWU or Western) is a public university in Bellingham, Washington, United States. The northernmost university in the contiguous United States, WWU was founded in 1893 as the state-funded New Whatcom Normal School, s ...

, Washington. He is known for his work on the proposed Dené–Yeniseian language family, seeking to establish that the Ket language of

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 ...

and therefore its broader Yeniseian family have a common linguistic ancestor with the Na-Dené languages of

North America North America is a continent in the Northern Hemisphere, Northern and Western Hemisphere, Western hemispheres. North America is bordered to the north by the Arctic Ocean, to the east by the Atlantic Ocean, to the southeast by South Ameri ...

. He began to study the Ket language in the 1990s, after the dissolution of the

Soviet Union The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...

; he interviewed Ket speakers in

Germany Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the north and the Alps to the south. Its sixteen States of Germany, constituent states have a total popu ...

and later traveled to

Tomsk Tomsk (, ) is a types of inhabited localities in Russia, city and the administrative center of Tomsk Oblast in Russia, on the Tom (river), Tom River. Population: Founded in 1604, Tomsk is one of the oldest cities in Siberia. It has six univers ...

in southwestern Siberia to perform fieldwork. In August 2008 he became the first North American to visit the Ket homeland in north-central Siberia's Turukhansky District, where he conducted intensive fieldwork with some of the remaining Ket speakers. Vajda's 67-page article "A Siberian link with Na-Dene languages" was published in 2010 in the ''Anthropological Papers of the University of Alaska.'' His theory has earned widespread, but not universal, support among professional linguists.Bill Poser.
The languages of the Caucasus
. ''Language Log'', 25 August 2008. Accessed 22 July 2017.

Publications

;Monographs *''Ket'' (Languages of the World/Materials Volume 204.) Munich: Lincom Europa, 2004. *''Mid-Holocene Language Connections between Asia and North America.'' Leiden: Brill, 2022 (authors: Michael Fortescue and Edward Vajda) *''Yeniseian Peoples and Languages: a history of their study with an annotated bibliography and a source guide.'' Surrey, England: Curzon Press, 2001. (389 pages) *''Ket Prosodic Phonology.'' (Languages of the World 15.) Munich: Lincom Europa, 2000 *''Morfologicheskij slovar’ ketskogo glagola na osnove juzhnoketskogo dialekta'' orphological dictionary of the Ket verb, southern dialect(co-authored with Marina Zinn), Tomsk: TGPU, 2004. (257 pages) *''Russian Punctuation and Related Symbols'' (co-authored with V. I. Umanets), Bloomington, Indiana: Slavica Publishers, 2005. (249 pages) ;Edited volumes *"Subordination and coordination strategies in North Asian languages." ''Current issues in linguistic theory,'' 300.) Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2008. (225 pp.) *''Languages and Prehistory of Central Siberia.'' (Current issues in linguistic theory, 262.) Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2004. (275 pp.) *''Studia Yeniseica: in honor of Heinrich Werner.'' Language typology and universals 56.1/2 (2003). Berlin: Akademie Verlag. (Co-edited with Gregory Anderson.) ;Refereed journal articles *"Ket shamanism." ''Shaman'' 18.1/2: 125-143 (2010). *"A Siberian link with Na-Dene Languages." ''Anthropological Papers of the University of Alaska,'' Volume 5, New Series. (2010): 31-99. *"Yeniseian, Na-Dene, and Historical Linguistics." ''Anthropological Papers of the University of Alaska,'' Volume 5, New Series. (2010): 100-118. *"Dene–Yeniseian and Processes of Deep Change in Kin Terminologies." ''Anthropological Papers of the University of Alaska,'' Volume 5, New Series. (2010): 120-236. (co-authored with John W. Ives and Sally Rice) *"The languages of Siberia." ''Linguistic Compass'' 2 (2008): 1-19. *"Yeniseic diathesis" ''Language Typology'' 9 (2005): 327-339. (Review article of Die Diathese in den Jenissej-Sprachen aus typologischer Sicht, H. Werner). *"Ket verb structure in typological perspective." ''Sprachtypologie und Universalienforschung'' 56.1/2 (2003): 55-92. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. *"The role of position class in Ket verb morphophonology." ''Word'' 52/3: 369-436 (2001). *"Actant conjugations in the Ket verb." ''Voprosy jazykoznanija'' inguistic Inquiry67/3 (2000): 21-41. Moscow: Nauka. ;Book chapters or encyclopedia articles
Morphology in Dene-Yeniseian Languages
. In ''Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics''. 2019.
Dene-Yeniseian
. In ''Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics''. 2016. *"Loanwords in Ket." ''Loanwords in the World’s languages: a comparative handbook,'' eds. Martin Haspelmath and Uri Tadmor. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2009. pp. 471–494. *"Una relación genealógica entre las lenguas del Nuevo Mundo y de Siberia." (co-authored with Bernard Comrie) ''X Encuentro Internacional de Lingüística en el Noroeste: Memorias.'' 2009. *"Ditransitive constructions in Ket" ''The typology of ditransitives,'' ed. Bernard Comrie and Martin Haspelmath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. *"Siberian landscapes in Ket traditional culture." ''Landscape and culture in the Siberian North,'' ed. Peter Jordan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2009. *"Head-negating enclitics in Ket" ''Subordination and coordination strategies in North Asian languages,'' ed. Edward Vajda. 2008. Amsterdam & Philadelphia. pp. 179–201. *"Ket morphology" 2007. ''Morphologies of Asia and Africa,'' Vol. 2, ed. Alan Kaye, pp. 1277–1325. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns. *"Losing semantic alignment: from Proto-Yeniseic to Modern Ket" ''The typology of semantic alignment,'' eds. Tim Donohue & Soeren Wichman. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 140–161. *"Distinguishing referential from grammatical function in morphological typology." ''Linguistic diversity and language theories,'' ed. by Zygmunt Frajzyngier, David Rood, and Adam Hodges. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 2004. pp. 397–420. *"Tone and Phoneme in Ket." ''Current trends in Caucasian, East European and Inner Asian linguistics: Papers in Honor of Howard I. Aronson'' (Current issues in linguistic theory.), pp. 291–308. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2003. *"Toward a typology of position class: comparing Navajo and Ket verb morphology." Proceedings from the Fourth Workshop on American Indigenous Languages ''Santa Barbara Papers in Linguistics,'' 11, ed. Jeanie Castillo, pp. 99–114. Santa Barbara, CA: University of California, Santa Barbara. (2001). *"The origin of phonemic tone in Ket." ''Chicago Linguistics Society'' 37/2: ''Parasession on Arctic Languages,'' pp. 305–320. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. *"Kazakh Phonology." ''Opuscula Altaica: Essays Presented in Honor of Henry Schwarz,'' pp. 603–650. Western Washington University, 1994. *"A Critique of the Notion that Language Imprisons the Mind." ''Anthropological World: An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology,'' pp. 95–103, 1990.

References

External links

March 24, 2012 Dene-Yeniseian Workshop, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Lectures by Ed VAjda and other papers now available via ANLC and UTube.''

Table of contents and ordering information for ''The Dene–Yeniseian Connection.''

Vajda's homepage
at Western Washington University

{{DEFAULTSORT:Vajda, Edward 1958 births Living people People from Bellingham, Washington Western Washington University faculty Linguists of Dené–Yeniseian languages Linguists of Na-Dene languages Linguists of Navajo Linguists of Yeniseian languages Historical linguists 20th-century American linguists 21st-century American linguists People from Camp Lejeune, North Carolina