Walkabout

There's an ongoing war of words between people who consider themselves generalists and those who consider themselves specialists.

I recall being in the Graduate School of Oceanography at the University of Washington -- a placement that only lasted a semester, for a variety of reasons -- and my advisor sneeringly referring to generalists as "people who lack the focus, drive, and brains to stay with something long enough to learn it thoroughly."  Countering this is the quip that specialists are "learning more and more about less and less, until finally they'll know everything about nothing."

Although I am squarely in the generalist camp, I'm strongly of the opinion that we need both.  The specialists' depth and the generalists' breadth should be complementary, not in contention.  The focus of specialists has given us most of our detailed knowledge of science and technology; the wide-ranging interest of generalists -- who, in a kinder time, were called polymaths rather than dilettantes or dabblers -- allow them to draw connections between disparate fields, and bring that curiosity and wonder to others.

I'm hoping this doesn't come across as self-defensive, given my B.S. in physics, attempted/abortive M.S. in oceanography, final M.A. in historical linguistics, and teaching certification in biology.  Perhaps my long-ago advisor wasn't entirely incorrect; my "oh look something shiny!" approach to learning would likely have made a Ph.D. in anything unattainable.  But it does have the distinct advantage that I'm still unendingly curious about the world, and almost on a daily basis stumble on cool things in a vast array of disciplines that I didn't know about.

Take, for example, the fact that yesterday I learned about a language I'd never heard of before, belonging to an entire language family I'd never heard of before.  Illustrating, perhaps, that even at the master's degree level, my study of linguistics had already narrowed to the point of excluding all but a tiny fraction of what's out there (my study focused primarily on Scandinavian and Celtic languages; my only real work in a non-Indo-European language has been my recent attempts to learn some Japanese).  But this odd language I found out about has a curious history -- and a possible connection to another language family, on the opposite side of the world.

The language is called Ket, and is spoken by a small number -- estimates are between fifty and two hundred -- people in the remote region of Krasnoyarsk Krai in central Siberia.  It is the sole surviving member of the Yeniseian language family; the last speaker of the related language called Yugh died in 1970, and other members of the Yeniseian family, Kott, Arin, Assan, and Pumpokol, were all extinct by the mid-nineteenth century.

A Ket family, circa 1900 [Image is in the Public Domain]

Here's where it gets interesting, though.  There's some evidence that Ket and the other Yeniseian languages are related to the language spoken by the Xiongnu Confederation, a group of interrelated nomadic peoples who dominated the east Eurasian steppes -- what are now parts of Siberia, Mongolia, and northern China -- from the third century B.C.E. to the first century C.E.  And one hypothesis is that when the Xiongnu Confederation fell to pieces, in part because of a climatic shift that led to severe drought, they upped stakes and moved west, where they became known to history as...

... the Huns.

So an obscure language currently spoken by under two hundred people may be the closest surviving cousin of the language spoken by one of the most feared warrior people ever, who made it all the way to what is now eastern France before finally being defeated.

But it gets weirder still.  Because linguistic analysis has suggested one other possible relative of Ket -- the Na Dene languages of western North America, including Athabaskan, Tlingit, Eyak, and Navajo.  Linguist Bernard Comrie calls it "the first demonstration of a genealogical link between Old World and New World language families that meets the standards of traditional comparative historical linguistics."  Supporting this is a study by Edward Vajda of Western Washington University finding that the Q1 Y-chromosome haplogroup is extremely common in Na Dene speakers, and close to universal amongst the Ket -- but is found almost nowhere else in Eurasia.

How the Ket (and the other Yeniseian speakers) got where they are is a matter of conjecture.  One possibility is that the ancestors of the Yeniseians (including, possibly, the Xiongnu and the Huns) were left behind when the ancestors of today's North American Na Dene speakers crossed Beringia into Alaska during the last Ice Age.  Other anthropologists believe that the split occurred later, as some of the North American migrants crossed back into what is now Siberia, and got stranded there when the seas rose.  It's hard to imagine what evidence could settle this conclusively; but the relationship between the Yeniseian languages and the Na Dene languages, along with the highly suggestive DNA connection, seems to support a relationship between those two now-widely-separated groups.  However the walkabout happened, it's left its fingerprint in three different continents.

So there you have it.  A link between the Huns, the Navajo, and a tiny and declining group of Siberians.  That's our excursion into linguistics for today.  Tomorrow it might be astronomy or geology or archaeology or meteorology or, perhaps, ghosts and Bigfoots or whatnot.  You never know.  I presume you must on some level enjoy my random musings, or you wouldn't be here.  Even if I might well "lack focus, drive, and brains," I still have more fun jumping from topic to topic than I would if I'd buckled down and focused on one cubic centimeter of the universe.

Here's to being a generalist!

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