A Historical Dictionary Of Yukaghir

The Historical Dictionary of Yukaghir has two main purposes. First, it is intended as a relatively complete source of information on the lexicon of Yukaghir. Tundra and Kolyma Yukaghir are closely related, highly endangered languages spoken in the extreme North-East of Siberia. No modern comprehensive lexicographic description of these languages is available for the international linguistic community. The dictionary presents all known varieties of Yukaghir in comparative format. Some of the materials included come from published sources, others were obtained by the author through fieldwork and are published for the first time. The dictionary also contains examples of now extinct early forms of Yukaghir, which began to be recorded in the late 17th century. Second, the dictionary provides a first reconstruction of the common ancestor of all known Yukaghir varieties. The proto-Yukaghir stems are established based on internal reconstruction, comparison between various Yukaghir idioms, and external data. Although the dictionary does not attempt to provide etymologies for all Yukaghir words, it includes possible cognates of some Yukaghir stems from other languages, mainly Uralic and Altaic. Since Yukaghir forms are not only cited in their modern shape but are reconstructed, the dictionary will provide a foundation for future etymological work and contribute to investigating the genetic affiliation of Yukaghir, usually classified as isolated. The book will also be useful for linguists interested in the distant genetic relations between language families and the reconstruction of the ethnic and linguistic situation in prehistoric northern Asia.

As the first profound anthropological descriptions of that region, the publications of the Jesup North Pacific Expedition, undertaken in the first years of the 20th century, marked the beginning of a new era of research in Russia. Jochelson's work the Yukaghir and the Yukaghirized Tungus, for which he also draws on results of his earlier fieldwork in that area, was an important milestone for Russian and North American anthropology that provides to this day a unique contribution to thoroughly understanding the cultures of northeastern Siberia.

In this volume the authors discuss the fascinating and eventful biographies as well as the significant scientific work of Waldemar Jochelson, Waldemar Bogoras and Lev Shternberg. They investigate the question of how these men became involved in ethnography towards the end of the 19th century, when they had to spend many years as political exiles in remote parts of northeastern Siberia. This early revolutionary commitment shed light on their empathetic and pioneering methods during their later fieldwork with local people. At the same time they incorporated important ideas from American cultural anthropology gained from their close collaboration with Franz Boas. Their initial aims and methods were also reflected in the ambitious community-oriented research programs that they later had conceptualized and launched together with other colleagues at Leningrad University.

The Languages and Linguistics of Northern Asia: A Comprehensive Guide surveys the indigenous languages of Asia’s North Pacific Rim, Siberia, and adjacent portions of Inner Eurasia. It provides in-depth descriptions of every first-order family of this vast area, with special emphasis on family-internal subdivision and dialectal differentiation. Individual chapters trace the origins and expansion of the region’s widespread pastoral-based language groups as well as the microfamilies and isolates spoken by northern Asia’s surviving hunter-gatherers. Separate chapters cover sparsely recorded languages of early Inner Eurasia that defy precise classification and the various pidgins and creoles spread over the region. Other chapters investigate the typology of salient linguistic features of the area, including vowel harmony, noun inflection, verb indexing (also known as agreement), complex morphologies, and the syntax of complex predicates. Issues relating to genealogical ancestry, areal contact and language endangerment receive equal attention. With historical connections both to Eurasia’s pastoral-based empires as well as to ancient population movements into the Americas, the steppes, taiga forests, tundra and coastal fringes of northern Asia offer a complex and fascinating object of linguistic investigation.

Above and Beyond the Segments presents a unique collection of experimental linguistic and phonetic research. Mainly, it deals with the experimental approach to prosodic, and more specifically melodic, aspects of speech. But it also treats segmental phonetics and phonology, second language learning, semantics and related topics. Apart from European languages and dialects (including Dutch, English, Greek, Danish, and dialects from Italy and The Netherlands) there also are chapters on regions as widespread as China, Russia, South Africa, South Sudan, and Surinam. These all testify the enormous diversity of language and speech in the world. This book is of special interest to linguists working on prosodic aspects of speech in general and to those studying non-Western languages in particular.

Although major cognitively based studies of SPACE and TIME in language have appeared in terms of “Frames of Reference”, these do not extend to a wide selection of the world’s languages, nor do they combine SPACE and TIME in the overarching concept of WORLD, which has its own corresponding frames of reference. The aim of relating and unifying these concepts and their expression across languages constitutes the unique thrust of the present book, which will represent a significant extension of earlier approaches. Among its main conclusions will be that the complete separation of terms for SPACE and TIME is a relatively recent cultural phenomenon, rather than just a metaphorical extension of the latter from the former. The book will be of interest to all students and practitioners of Linguistics, in particular Cognitive Linguistics and Linguistic typology, but also to a more general readership interested in the historical evolution of concepts of SPACE and TIME.

Switch reference is a grammatical process that marks a referential relationship between arguments of two (or more) verbs. Typically it has been characterized as an inflection pattern on the verb itself, encoding identity or non-identity between subject arguments separately from traditional person or number marking. In the 50 years since William Jacobsen’s coinage of the term, switch reference has evolved from an exotic phenomenon found in a handful of lesser-known languages to a widespread feature found in geographically and linguistically unconnected parts of the world. The growing body of information on the topic raises new theoretical and empirical questions about the development, functions, and nature of switch reference, as well as the internal variation between different switch-reference systems. The contributions to this volume discuss these and other questions for a wide variety of languages from all over the world, and endevaour to demonstrate the full functional and morphosyntactic range of the phenomenon.

Orientation Systems of the North Pacific Rim is an extension of the author's earlier volume Eskimo Orientation Systems (also published in the series Monographs on Greenland | Meddelelser om Grønland, Man & Society, 1988). This time it covers all the contiguous languages ? and cultures ? across the northern Pacific rim from Vancouver Island in Canada to Hokkaido in northern Japan, plus the adjacent Arctic coasts of Alaska and Chukotka. These form a testing ground for recent theories concerning the nature and classification of orientation systems and their shared ?frames of reference?, in particular the many varieties of ?landmark? systems typifying the Arctic and sub-Arctic. Despite the wide variety of languages spoken here (all of them endangered), there is much in common as regards their overlapping geographical settings and the ways in which terms for orientation within the microcosm (the house) and within the macrocosm (the surrounding environment) mesh throughout the region. This is illustrated with numerous maps and diagrams, from both coastal and inland sites. Attention is paid to ambiguities and anomalies within the systems revealed by the data, as these may be clues to pre-historic movements of the populations concerned ? from a riverine setting to the coast, from the coast to inland, or more complex successive displacements. Cultural factors over and beyond environmental determinism are discussed within this broad context.