Beringian in the News.

The PLOS paper apparently doesn’t necessarily endorse the hypothesis that Na-Dene and Yeniseian are genetically related–it just concludes that, assuming the hypothesis is true, a back-migration from Beringia to Asia (and a migration into North America by another branch) is more probable than a migration from Asia to North America.

The study uses a bunch of typological characters to cluster the Athabaskan and Yeniseian languages, and finds Yeniseian tucked among the coastal languages, rather than show Yeniseian and Dene as two primary branches.
My quick observations:
— The Beringian pause hypothesis is reasonable by itself, based on entirely non-linguistic criteria. That’s neither here nor there.
— Sicoli and Holton do not entertain any other explanations for their data. For example, their tree is consistent with proto-Dene splitting from Dene-Yeniseian somewhere in Siberia, moving to Alaska and spreading to the interior from there, after which the interior and Apachean groups share some innovations, perhaps because of contact with other language groups.
— The fact remains that the Athabascan languages (setting Tlingit aside) are very clearly relatable to each other in grammar, lexicon, etc., whereas Yeniseian is remotely related to them. That is clearly inconsistent with their typological tree, but they do not attempt to reconcile the two. The only reference they make to other linguistic methods is to Wichmann et al.’s automatic lexicostatistical technique, which is more consistent with traditional historical method though inferior to it.
— S&H do not place any other language groups of the area in their typological phylogeny (e.g. Tungusic, Eskimo-Aleut, Nivkh, Salishan, etc.), except Haida. Haida (now considered unrelated to Tlingit-Dené, and typologically distinct from them) shows up as an outlier, but I wonder if the other language groups would be so clearly separated as well.
— S&H make no attempt to tease out what particular typological features are responsible for separating the two clusters. Without that, it’s hard to make an informed linguistic (as opposed to merely statistical) judgment of their results.

My understanding of the Yeniseian-Dene hypothesis is that, while many linguists find it plausible, it’s based primarily on striking correspondences in the structure of verb-forms, but that sound-correspondences haven’t been securely established (and consequently some prominent American language specialists such as Lyle Campell have remained skeptical). I don’t have the background to really dig deep into the S&H paper, but I wonder how they could produce these results on the basis of what are apparently skimpy data.

Here’s more. I got the data files from the paper’s supplementary information. There are 116 characters in total, 81 phonological and 35 morphological. If you run SplitsTree on the morphological characters alone, there’s a very clear separation of the Yeniseian languages and all the rest (with Haida clustering with Eyak and Sarsi. A NeighborNet graph based on phonological characters alone is close enough to Sicoli and Holton’s diagram.
In other words, this all comes down to comparing phonological inventories. pretty weak. I spent about a whole hour on this. Why didn’t the authors? Feh.

If I spent another hour or two on this, I could tell you which phonological features set the coastals + Yeniseian apart from the rest.

“Striking correspondences in the structure of verb-forms beats sound correspondences any day.”

That may be true for the purpose of supporting the hypothesis that the Yeniseian and Dene languages are genetically related, but for purposes of determining degrees of relatedness, or the likelihood of the back-migration hypothesis, as opposed to the out of Asia hypothesis, I question how morphological correspondences can be used effectively. I really don’t know what I’m talking about here, but I think I’m saying the same thing as Y, and maybe Trond, too. At any rate, the NYTimes article seems like a gross distortion.

Has anyone read the Language Log thread about this? I read it a few days ago, was trying to find it again, but could not, in spite of it being so recent. Perhaps it is hidden under a misleading title? I wanted to look at some of the comments again, especially the one by Sally Thomason who is a well-known historical linguist, notably about the Salishan family and the problem of mixed languages (pidgins, etc).

Anyway, I find Wade’s article to be a little muddled, but perhaps not as much as expected. Of course the linguistic work being reported on was done by genuine linguists who have both worked on Athabaskan languages (Holton has been in Alaska for quite a few years, and Sicoli was on staff there for a couple of years), not by other kinds of scientists basically ignorant of linguistics.

I have followed Vajda’s work (from a distance since I am not an Athapaskanist) ever since he presented evidence for a Ket (Yeniseian) – Na-Dene at a conference some years ago, using morphological data (the similar verbal “templates” in both families), and I also attended the 2008 conference in Alaska were he presented further evidence, especially lexical-phonological comparisons (words and their sound correspondences) and proto-language reconstructions. (It should be said that Vajda was not the first person to link the two families: a fair amount of work had been done by Russian linguists, dating from the time when there were several related languages in the Yenisei valley, so Vajda had the benefit of their descriptive and comparative work, and some of those linguists had already noticed resemblances with Na-Dene). At the conference, a number of specialists in Athabaskan and historical linguistics had been invited to attend, and Vajda was highly praised by them, even by people like Michael Krauss who had until then very skeptical of the hypothesis. There was agreement that more work was needed to really flesh out the hypothesis, but that it could be considered very plausible. Of course, not everyone is going to agree, but not that many linguists are specialists in Athabaskan languages, which are (to my mind) fiendishly difficult as well as morphologically quite different from other families in the Americas. I would not take Lyle Campbell’s opinion very seriously: he is a competent enough historicist when dealing with languages which have already been hypothesized to be related, but his reputation is also that of a negativist always ready to shoot down other people’s work.

Not being an Athabaskanist, I can’t comment on the details of the hypothesis, but the one thing that bothered me was the time depth: the idea that the split between Yeniseian and Dene must have occurred 14,000 or so years abo, even though there were all those similarities between the two families. So the hypothesis that a population ancestral to both peoples spent a long period in an intermediary location, probably “Beringia”, sounds plausible to me. However, I don’t think one can assume that this population split up into two groups as soon as the ice started retreating: even assuming a fast rate of climate warming and sea level raise, it would have taken some time before the landscape changed drastically and all the people had to move away from the now submerged plain, some going West and other East. Also, although the majority of those languages are now found in North America, there is evidence (especially in toponyms) that Yeniseian languages were once spoken over a much wider area of Siberia, so a lot of the evidence which would be needed to fully substantiate a Dene-Yeniseian genetic relationship is probably lost forever.

As for Haida, which Sapir had classified together with Tlingit and Athapaskan. Krauss wrote something like “As soon as I started to look at Haida, I realized that the language was completely different from Na-Dene. Perhaps Holton & Sicoli included it in their database to try to determine who was right about the language. It is probably relevant that the traditional histories of the Haida tell of their ancestors arriving on the islands and finding there an existing people that they refer to as “the Old Haida”, which might have belonged to the same refugee population as in Beringia, since the islands too are supposed to have been free of ice while most ot the hemisphere was glaciated.

I cited Sally Thomason above: she is very leery of invoking typological arguments for determining genetic relationships, since she points out that there are many cases of historical changes drastically altering typological features. I think that she may be exaggerating the problem, which may depend on what are called “typological features”: phonological features are almost useless in this respect, since phonology can change quite radically and prevent intelligibility while vocabulary and grammar remain largely intact. Other general features such as presence or absence of gender, case, articles, and many others can indeed change, especially under situations of bilingualism. The most likely marker of relationship would seem to be shared complex morphology (such as the verbal system of Latin, Greek and Sanskrit), but such complexity can end up greatly simplified). All in all, there is no single element that is absolutvely decisive. One has to consider everything!

Where could I have read that comment by Sally Thomason? I will have to ask her in person.

Bill, thank you. The shared verbal template was the topic of Vajda’s early presentation which I attended, I don’t remember when but some time in the 1990’s, and I was very impressed. Michael Krauss who also attended was rather dismissive, but at the 2008 conference, by which time Vajda had added more evidence, especially lexical-phonological, he admitted publicly that he had been very doubtful but was now convinced of the link.

Re Beringia: I realize that I made a mistake about the dates: 14,000 years BP is supposed to be (the start) of deglaciation. I have just read relevant articles on Wikipedia. The one titled “Beringia” is very informative. Among other things it has an “interactive” map of the area showing the geography of Beringia from about 20,000 years ago to the present in about 10 increments that show the changing landscape, as well as other maps. It is obvious that the deglaciation process took several thousand years, as did the widening of the strait to its current size, allowing for plenty of time for a population in Beringia to have travelled back and forth easily, especially in the winter, and also at first in small boats, until the crossing became wider and more difficult. According to the information in the chapter, Siberia was not iced up while North America was, because there was little snowfall in Siberia where the climate was very dry. Consequently, an expanding population in shrinking Beringia would have been much more likely to turn westwards (back to Siberia) than eastwards where they would be blocked by the ice. This would have a bearing on when and how the Dene entered North America, closer to 6,000 years than 14,000 years ago, making the language relationship more explainable.

Actually, there are two claims in this paper. One is that the coastal languages (Pacific Coast Athabascan + Eyak + Tlingit) cluster together; the other is that Yeniseian fits in that cluster. I am skeptical that either of these has anything having to do with shared innovations.

“Rather, geneticists say, these ancestors must have lived in isolation for some 15,000 years to accumulate the amount of DNA mutations now seen specifically in Native Americans. […]”

If so, why in Beringia? why not in the Americas? why are people so determined to hold to the Clovis-first hypothesis despite earlier dates from Pedra Furada and Meadowcroft Rockshelter?

It is remarkably convenient (even if true . . .) to be able to say that “well, the place we think they were located for thousands and thousands of years is now under the ocean, so that’s why we don’t have any archeological evidence confirming the claim.”

why are people so determined to hold to the Clovis-first hypothesis despite earlier dates from Pedra Furada and Meadowcroft Rockshelter?

The NYT yesterday ran an article titled Discoveries Challenge Beliefs on Humans’ Arrival in the Americas. No mention of matters linguistic though some of its links may.

A thought struck me while reading the piece: Maybe people from Asia migrated to the Americas twice, once say 25,000 years ago, not thriving and and dying off some time later, and another migration or series of migrations at times that fit with the Clovis theory. Perhaps something like the pre-Inuit Dorset culture writ large.

Inconsistency, drama, credulity, and ignorance I expect, but not bias. What Wade is doing here is the equivalent of spending 90% of a crime article on the moral turpitude of the accused, and only mentioning at the end that he happened to be acquitted.

Inconsistency, drama, credulity, and ignorance I expect, but not bias.

Ignorance sooner or later always causes accidental sampling bias, and that’s before drama even shows up at the door.

But I haven’t read anything by Wade…

Asya refers us to her previous entry on wheel-words and mentions in passing that Tocharian cognates refer to wagons rather than wheels, but she doesn’t mention the opinions that these Tocharian words are most likely derived from a different (albeit related) PIE word (since the sounds of the TA/TB words apparently could not have emerged from the reconstructed PIE word).

Follow that link again: “these Tocharian words” are the ones that ended up meaning “wheel” (TA wärkänt*, TB oblique case yerkwantai), not the ones that are considered cognate to wheel and ended up meaning “wagon” (TA kukäl, TB kokale).

* The extra vowel of TA, conventionally transcribed ä, is now thought to have been [ɨ] or thereabouts. I have no idea what the evidence for or against any of this is.

And I think it may be legit in a scientific polemic piece, to skip over the rival hypotheses and their arguments.

…Not remotely.

The second paper (slides, rather) is obsolete: it doesn’t take Vajda et al 2012 (the conference) into account.

the ones that ended up meaning “wheel” (TA wärkänt*, TB oblique case yerkwantai), not the ones that are considered cognate to wheel and ended up meaning “wagon” (TA kukäl, TB kokale).

Thanks David, it clears my confusion indeed. So over at the Log, they were arguing for the commonality between Tocharian and Anatolian wheel-words (apparently related to the notions of turning or circling) but no link between those and wheel-words in the rest of the IE branches?

Very old. Originally, quoth Larry, Basque had a lenis/fortis contrast only in medial position, which led him to the supposition that it was a singular/geminated contrast in Proto-Basque. Initial consonants were always lenis, and final plosives probably did not exist.

Contact with Latin and Romance converted the contrast in the plosives to voiced/voiceless, which in turn allowed voiceless initial plosives in borrowings only. The oldest borrowings, however, convert voiceless initial plosives to voiced ones: bake ‘peace’ < PACEM, bekatu ‘sin’ < PECCATUM (note that the Latin geminate became fortis and then voiceless), dorre ‘tower’ < TURREM (or Spanish torre), denbora ‘time’ < TEMPORA, gela ‘room’ < CELLA, ganbara ‘room’ < CAMERA.

It appears that Bengtson agrees with Blevins: he postulates a *p which was aspirated at some point, and at the same time he is aware that Latin p became b. On his page 46 there’s a Basque word “*bilho > (BN, Z) bilho, (AN, BN) bilo, billo ‛hair, mane’”, and footnote 7 explains: “Attempts have been made to derive this word from Latin pilu– ‛hair’, but this clearly would have become Basque *biru. The cluster –lh– indicates native Basque origin. (See the discussion under *l.)”

There are plenty of places where Bengtson has explicitly disagreed with Trask.

Unrelated humans in Siberia 30,000 years ago says DNA.

Contrary to its forbidding reputation, seems prehistoric Siberia was more like Clapham Junction. How do this latest lot fit in with Pumpokol groups, etc?

The authors do speculate about Ket Na-Dene links. I mentioned it before in a very different thread, where Trond rolled the word Ymyyakhtyah on his tongue, because early Bronze Age was being discussed, and, as Trond suggested, linked to the present day Koryak and Chukchi. It’s in an Indoeuropean folk tales thread, for whatever reason

The classic Ymyyakhtakh years fall between the paper’s Dyvanny Yar (Kolyma) sample and Magadan coastal sample, and the authors believe that this population used to spread much further to the West, certainly beyond Taymyr peninsula, so of course I immediately remembered you, Trond.
But by discovering a complex chain of migrations and partial population replacements, the paper makes it clear that the mosaic of historic populations must have been much richer than they were able to sample, so further surprises are not unexpected.