Eskaleut languages

Internal classification

• Eskaleut
  • Aleut (Unangam Tunuu) (40–80 speakers)
    • Western–Central dialects: Atkan, Attuan † (1997), Bering † (2021), Unangan
    • Eastern dialects: Unalaskan, Pribilof
  • Eskimoan
    • Sirenik (Uqeghllistun) † (1997)
    • Yupik or Western Eskimoan
      • Alutiiq or Pacific Gulf Yupik (c. 80 speakers)
        • Koniag Alutiiq (Alutiit'stun)
        • Chugach Alutiiq (Sugt'stun)
      • Central Alaskan Yupʼik (5,000 speakers ±50%)
        • General Central Alaskan Yupʼik (Yugtun)
        • Chevak Cupʼik (Cugtun)
        • Nunivak Cupʼig (Cugtun) (5–25 speakers)
      • Naukan (Nuvuqaghmiistun) (70 speakers)
      • Central Siberian Yupik (Yuit/Yupigestun) ("Yuit" in Russia, "Yupigestun" in Alaska; Chaplino and St. Lawrence Island)
        • Chaplino (Chaplinski) Yupik (Ungazighmiistun) (ca. 200 speakers)
        • St. Lawrence Island Yupik (Sivuqaghmiistun) (400–750 speakers)
    • Inuit or Eastern Eskimoan (c. 100,000 speakers)
      • Iñupiaq or Inupiat (northern Alaska, 5,000 speakers ±50%)
        • Qawiaraq or Seward Peninsula Inupiaq
        • Inupiatun/Iñupiatun or Northern Alaska Inupiaq (including Uummarmiutun (Aklavik, Inuvik))
      • Inuvialuktun (western Canada; 1,020 speakers, 2016 census)
        • Siglitun (Paulatuk, Sachs Harbour, Tuktoyaktuk)
        • Inuinnaqtun (in Ulukhaktok also known as Kangiryuarmiutun)
        • Natsilingmiutut (Netsilik area, Nunavut)
      • Inuktitut (eastern Canada; 36,000 speakers, 2016 census)
        • Inuttitut or Nunatsiavummiutut (Nunatsiavut, 550 speakers)
        • Nunavimmiutitut (Nunavik)
        • Qikiqtaaluk nigiani (South Baffin)
        • Qikiqtaaluk uannangani or Iglulingmiut (North Baffin)
        • Aivilingmiutut (east-central Nunavut)
        • Kivallirmiutut (Southeast Nunavut)
        • Inuktun or Avanersuaq (Polar Eskimo, Greenland, 800 speakers)
      • Greenlandic (Greenland: 50,000 speakers Greenland, 7,000 Denmark)
        • Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic, 44,000 speakers)
        • Tunumiisut (East Greenlandic, 3,000 speakers)

Position among the world's language families

Eskaleut does not have any proven genetic relationship to any of the world's other language families. There is general agreement that it is not closely related to the other language families of North America. The more credible proposals on the external relations of Eskaleut all concern one or more of the language families of northern Eurasia, such as Chukotko-Kamchatkan just across the Bering Strait. One of the first such proposals, the Eskimo–Uralic hypothesis, was suggested by the pioneering Danish linguist Rasmus Rask in 1818, upon noticing similarities between Greenlandic and Finnish. Eskimo-Uralic is the oldest proposal which connects the Eskaleut languages to other language families, having been suggested soon after European contacts with Inuit. Perhaps the most fully developed proposal to date is Michael Fortescue's Uralo–Siberian hypothesis, published in 1998 which links Eskaleut languages to Yukaghir and the Uralic languages. Fortescue's observations have been evaluated by specialists with a limited degree of positivity but are viewed as scattered evidence and still remain highly speculative and unproven and the soundness of the reconstructed common ancestors is challenging to evaluate.

Joseph Greenberg suggested grouping Eskaleut with all of the language families of northern Eurasia (Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, Korean, Japanese, Ainu, Nivkh/Gilayak, and Chukchi–Kamchatkan), with the exception of Yeniseian, in a proposed language family called Eurasiatic. Criticisms have been made stating that Greenberg's hypothesis is ahistorical, meaning that it lacks and sacrifices known historical elements of language in favour of external similarities. Although the Eurasiatic hypothesis is generally disregarded by linguists, one critique by Stefan Georg and Alexander Vovin stated that they were not willing to disregard the theory immediately although ultimately agreed that Greenberg's conclusion was dubious. Greenberg explicitly states that his developments were based on the previous macro-comparative work done by Vladislav Illich-Svitych and Bomhard and Kerns. By providing evidence of lexical comparison, Greenberg hoped that it would strengthen his hypothesis.

In the 1960s Morris Swadesh suggested a connection with the Wakashan languages. This was expanded by Jan Henrik Holst (2005).

Notable features

Every word must have only one root (free morpheme), always at the beginning. Eskaleut languages have a relatively small number of roots: in the case of Central Alaskan Yup'ik, around two thousand. Following the root are a number of postbases, which are bound morphemes that add to the basic meaning of the root. If the meaning of the postbase is to be expressed alone, a special neutral root (in the case of Central Alaskan Yup'ik and Inuktitut pi) is used.

The basic word schema is as follows: root-(affixes)-inflection-(enclitic). Below is an example from Central Siberian Yupik.

angyagh-(gh)lla-ng(e)-yug-tuq-lu

boat-big-acquire-want.to-IND.3S-also

‘also, he wants to acquire a big boat’

There are a total of three affixes internal to the word angyagh. The root (or free morpheme) angyagh and the inflection -tuq on the right consist of the indicative mood marker plus third person singular. The enclitic –lu ‘also’ follows the inflection.

Following the postbases are non-lexical suffixes that indicate case on nouns and person and mood on verbs. The number of cases varies, with Aleut languages having a greatly reduced case system compared to Eskimoan. The Eskimoan languages are ergative–absolutive in nouns and in Yup'ik languages, also in verbal person marking. All Eskaleut languages have obligatory verbal agreement with agent and patient in transitive clauses, and there are special suffixes used for this purpose in subordinate clauses, which makes these languages, like most in the North Pacific, highly complement deranking.

At the end of a word there can be one of a small number of clitics with meanings such as "but" or indicating a polar question.

Phonologically, the Eskaleut languages resemble other language families of northern North America (Na-Dene and Tsimshianic) and far-eastern Siberia (Chukotko-Kamchatkan). There are usually only three vowels—, , —though some Yup'ik dialects also have . All Eskaleut languages lack both ejectives and aspirates, in which they resemble the Siberian languages more than the North American ones. Eskaleut languages possess voiceless plosives at four positions (bilabial, coronal, velar and uvular) in all languages except Aleut, which has lost the bilabial stops (though it has retained the nasal). There are usually contrasting voiced and voiceless fricatives at the same positions, and in the Eskimoan subfamily a voiceless alveolar lateral fricative is also present. A rare feature of many dialects of Yup'ik and Aleut is contrasting voiceless nasals.

Phonology

Eskimoan

The following vowels and consonants were taken from Michael Fortescue et al., 2010.

Vowels

Eskimoan corresponds to Aleut .

Consonants

Inuit allows only a single initial consonant and no more than two successive consonants between vowels.

Yupik exhibits no consonant assimilation process so common to Inuit.

Consonants in parentheses are non-Proto-Eskimoan phonemes.

Aleut

The following vowels and consonants were taken from Knut Bergsland, (1997).

Vowels

The Aleut language has six vowels in total: three short vowels , , , and three long vowels , , . Orthographically, they would be spelled ii, uu, and aa. There are no diphthongs in Aleut vowels. The length of the vowel is dependent upon three characteristics: stress, surrounding consonants, and in particularly Eastern Aleut, surrounding vowels. Short vowels are in initial position if a following consonant is velar or labial. For example: the demonstratives uka, ika, and aka.

Long vowels are lower than their short counterpart vowels, but are less retracted if they make contact with a uvular consonant. For example: uuquchiing 'blue fox', qiiqix̂ 'storm-petrel', and qaaqaan 'eat it!'

Consonants

The Aleut consonants featured below include single Roman letters, digraphs, and one trigraph. Phonemes in parentheses are found only in Russian and English loanwords, the phoneme in italics is found only in Eastern Aleut, and the bold phonemes are a part of the standard Aleut inventory.

Aleut has no native labial stops and allows clusters of up to three consonants as well as consonant clusters in word initial position.

Cross-linguistically rare phonological features include voiceless nasals and absence of a .

Morphology

Language type

Polysynthetic language

Eskaleut is polysynthetic, which features a process in which a single word is able to contain multiple post-bases or morphemes. The Eskaleut languages are exclusively suffixing (with the exception of one prefix in Inuktitut that appears in demonstratives). Suffixes are able to combine and ultimately create an unlimited number of words. Some of the morphemes that are able to attach contain features such as carrying nominal subjects and objects, adverbial information, direct objects, and spatial noun phrases. Polysynthetic languages are said to be a form of extreme agglutination, which allows single words to carry the same information that another language expresses in whole clauses. For example, in Central Alaskan Yupik, one can say:

qayarpaliqasqessaagellruaqa

qayar-

kayak-

pa-

big-

li-

make-

qa-

POL-EV-

sqe-

A.ask-

ssaage-

but-

llru-

PAST-

aqa

1SG/3SG.IND

I asked him to make a big kayak. (but actually he has not made it yet)

As a polysynthetic language, Eskaleut is concerned with what "each morpheme means, which categories it can attach to, whether there is any category change, etc. and what type of morphophonological effect occurs to the left as it attaches to the stem".

Morphosyntactic alignment

Eskimoan languages are ergative–absolutive. This means subjects of intransitive verbs and objects of transitive verbs are marked with the absolutive case, while subjects of transitive verbs are marked with the ergative case.

Aleut is not an ergative–absolutive language. It does not matter if the verb is transitive or intransitive—subjects and objects are not marked differently.

If a transitive object or an object of possession is openly communicated, ergative case marking will not be expressed. If a transitive object or object of possession is not openly communicated, then ergative case marking will be expressed.

Syntax

Eskaleut languages follow the basic word order of subject–object–verb (SOV).

The syntax of Eskaleut is concerned with the functional use of its morphological structure. The two language branches, although part of the same family, have separated and detached themselves in relation to grammatical similarities. Bergsland states that Aleut, which was once a language more similar to Proto-Eskimoan than the current Eskimoan languages themselves, has distanced itself from the ancient language.

The case inflections, "relative *-m, instrumental *-mEk/meN, and locative *-mi have undergone phonological merger and led to a completely different explanation of ergative morphology in Proto-Eskimoan.

In order to further explain the profound changes that have occurred in Aleutian syntax, Bergsland proposed the Domino Effect, which is ultimately the chronological order of Aleut’s unique features. Below is a step by step list of the 'domino effect':

The Domino Effect:

1. The phonological reduction of final syllables and the ensuing syncretism of locative, relative, and instrumental case markers;
2. The collapse of the ergative system and of the distinction between relative and locative case in postpositional constructions;
3. The development of the unusual Aleut anaphoric reference system from the debris of this collapse, going hand in hand with a strict fixation of SOV word order;
4. The simple 3rd person forms when the original morphemes began to refer to any anaphoric (non-overt) referent, and;
5. The spread of such a referent's own number (including that of a possessor of some overt argument) to the final verb of the (complex) sentence, overriding agreement with the subject.

Vocabulary comparison

The following is a comparison of cognates among the basic vocabulary across the Eskaleut language family (about 122 words). Note that empty cells do not imply that a particular language is lacking a word to describe the concept, but rather that the word for the concept in that language is formed from another stem and is not a cognate with the other words in the row. Also, there may be shifts in the meaning from one language to another, and so the "common meaning" given is only approximate. In some cases the form given is found only in some dialects of the language. Forms are given in native Latin orthographies unless otherwise noted.

Cognates of the Eskimoan languages can be found in Michael Fortescue et al., 2010.

Cognates of the Aleut language can be found in Knut Bergsland, 1997.

Persons

Pronouns

There are two types of pronouns: independent pronouns and pronominal pronouns.

Pronouns in relation to nouns

In Eskaleut languages, singular, dual, and plural nouns are marked by inflectional suffixes, and if they are possessed, the number marker is followed by pronominal suffixes that specify the (human) possessor. There are no genders, and this can be seen in the four persons: my, your, his/her, his/her own.

"His/her own" specifies ownership, in contrast with "his/her", which does not. E.g., his house vs. his own house. (See Possessive determiner § Semantics.)

Pronouns in relation to verbs

Aleut uses independent pronouns, instead of pronominal marking on verbs. On the other hand, Eskimoan languages have four persons and three numbers marked by pronominal suffixes.

Independent pronouns

Pronominal suffixes

Interrogative words

Body parts

Animals

Other nouns

Adjectives

Numbers