The Baikal-Yeniseian region, after the departure of groups that headed to North America, became the incubator of four language families – Turkic, Uralic, Yeniseian, and Tungusic – which had strong influence over three other Asian language families: Amuric (Nivkh), Itelmen, and Chukotko-Kamchatkan.
Some big advances have already been made in linking the Asian families just mentioned to the related North American language families. Edward Vajda has successfully shown that Yeniseian and Na-Dene are sufficiently related to merit calling them a single family, “Dene-Yeniseian.” Sergei Nikolaev has reconstructed a proposed proto-language for Nivkh, Wakashan, and Algonquian. I think I have shown that Tsimshian language is a direct descendant of Itelmen.
But a general problem in these attempts is that they have been too isolating. At the times of separation, which range from 14,000 to as little as 1,500 years ago (the latter for the separation of Yupik from Chukchi), the Asian languages on the list had usually not yet separated from each other. Between 14,000 and at least 9,000 years ago, the language most likely spoken in the Baikal-Yenisei region was something we could label Proto-Turkic-Uralic-Yeniseian-Tungusic-Almosan-Dene, and even that is an abbreviation. (I propose that this be called Baikalic.) For this reason, I suggest that the main reason for difficulty finding lexical correspondence is that so much differentiation and mixing has occurred within Asia and within the Americas over the long time period.
The linguist Joseph Greenberg proposed two large and related macro-families that he called Eurasiatic and Amerind. Both have been roundly rejected by historic linguists and I am absolutely not resurrecting his proposal. I am proposing a far more limited macro-family that emerged from the Baikal-Yenisei region and extended only to those North American groups that have proven genetic descent from the Baikal-Yeniseian region. I do think that real commonalities of languages within this group, such as agglutinative suffixing morphology with counting classes and an animate-inanimate gender system, provided Greenberg with the backbone of his overly-grand proposal.
I am also not including Indo-European in my macro-family, as Greenberg did for his “Eurasiatic,” though because Proto-Indo-European developed significantly later than Baikalic language (what we can call the Asian component of my macro-family), the latter did influence the former and we can see some PIE words that came from Baikalic. That influence was east to west, opposite of what is usually assumed with Indo-European bias. The Baikalic language was spoken between 15,000 and 9,000 years ago, before it began to break up into Amuric, Turkic, Yeniseian, Uralic, and Tungusic. Most scholars date the speaking of Proto-Indo-European to between 6,500 and 4,500 years ago.
For the reasons already stated, we should not expect much lexical correspondence between the Baikalic languages in Asia and their descendant North American languages. However, there is one class of words that were highly preserved. These can be called cosmological terms common to the system of northern shamanism and considered sacred, so care was given to their preservation. Major evidence of the connection between these specific cultures is the sharing of a complex of cosmological motifs, which includes:
1. Seeing the Big Dipper as the Great Bear or a related quadruped, pursued by hunters.
2. Seeing the Milky Way as the path of souls carried by migratory birds.
3. The Earth-Diver motif of world creation, connected to a World Flood, or original cosmic sea.
4. The Hero Twin motif generally applied to the Orion constellation, involving the murder of one brother by the other.
5. Seeing the Pleiades as a group of women, often sisters, potential mates of the bear hunters.
6. Seeing a primary role of the shaman (male or female) as being journeying to the Sky World, seen as an island among the stars of the north celestial pole, for communication with the souls of the ancestors.
The Russian ethnographer Yuri Berezkin has spent a career cataloging the variations of all six of these motifs exhibited in Eurasia and North America. All six motifs are especially evident in Algonquian cosmology. Most of these motifs were also borrowed by the Proto-Indo-Europeans from the east, resulting in variations of the same motifs appearing in familiar Greek cosmology, and some, particularly the flood motif, were borrowed by the Sumerians and the Semitic cultures, ending up in the Hebrew bible.
Accordingly, I’ve found four words connected to these cosmological motifs that are cognate between one or more of the Baikalic languages and at least some of the northern North American languages. These are the words for bear, soul, sun/south, and shaman/knowledge. Note that my purpose is not to prove genetic relationship between all of the involved languages. Rather, it is to show that these languages in East-Central Asia and northern North America were part of a single culture complex. In turn:
1. Bear:
I have already treated this extensively in numerous prior posts, and here I will just provide a list to summarize. Most or all of these names may have originally applied to the Great Bear in the sky:
Turkic-Tungusic-Uralic:
Chulym (Turkic) moɣ or mok or moɣalaq or mokai (bear, grandfather)
Karachay-Balkar (Turkic) mamuray
Evenki (Tungusic) mangi or ŋamendi or omootii
Tunguz (Tungusic) amaka (bear, grandfather)
Negidal (Tungusic) amaxa (bear, grandfather)
Orochi (Tungusic) mangi
Udihe (Tungusic) мафа (mafa)
Nanai (Tungusic) mapa
Selkup (Uralic) ma-ta-la
Kamassian (extinct Samoyedic language) ši̭ʔmdə
Eastern Mari (Uralic) маска (maska)
Western Mari (Uralic) мӧскӓ (möskä)
Balto-Slavic:
Bulgarian (Slavic) ме́чка (méčka)
Macedonian (Slavic) mechka
Serbo-Croatian (Slavic) ме̏чка, mȅčka
Russian (Slavic) ми́шка (míška)
Polish (Slavic) miś
Lithuanian (Baltic) meška
Caucasian:
Abaza (Northwest Caucasian) мшвы́ (mš°ə́)
Adyghe (Northwest Caucasian) мышъэ (məŝă)
Kabardian (Northwest Caucasian) мыщэ (məŝă)
Chukchi-Kamchatkan:
Itelmen массу (massu)
Koryak умӄа (umqa)
Chukchi umka or uumky (polar bear)
Yukaghir me:me
Ainu-Japanese:
Ainu kamuy
Japanese (derived from Ainu) kuma
Tsimshian-Mosan:
Tsimshian: mediik (grizzly bear), mεs’o´l (polar bear), mes-ol (red bear), mas-g-m'ol (brown bear)
Tla'amin (Wakashan) mɛχaɬ
Proto-Salishan: míx̌aɬ, máyukʷ
Coer d'Alene (Salish) hnłamqe
Algic:
Wiyot maqh
Proto-Algonquian reconstruction: maθkwa
Cree maskwa
Atikamekw masko
Innu mashku
Montagnais mashkᵘ
Algonkin machke
Ojibwe makwa
Potawatomi mko
Shawnee m’kwa
Myaamia mahkwa
Meskwaki mahkwa
Munsee mahkw, machque
Unami màhkw, maxkw
Massachusett mosq
Maliseet muwin
M'kmaw muin
Cheyenne nahkohe
Arapaho wox
(note that Cheyenne substitutes n for m, while Arapaho substitutes w for m)
Yuman:
Yuma (Arizona, California) mŭch
Quechan (Arizona) maxwét
Maricopa (Arizona) maxwet
Kiliwa (Baja California) maqn
Mojave (California, Nevada, Arizona) mahwat
Seri (northwest Mexico) mų́ǰe
2. Soul
The concept of soul is inherently ambiguous as in English it can refer to a whole individual (as in “the number of souls on board”), or a disembodied spirit, or the immortal part of an individual, though the last meaning has been highly Christianized. In languages that use animate-inanimate gender, the concept of soul is crucially important as a gender determinant; animate gender is used only for things that have souls, meaning things that have consciousness and agency, and this supersedes any Christian sense of the term.
The Algonquian word in this sense is clearly maneto (rendered into French and English as manitou), frequently mistranslated as meaning god. A typical conversation in early contact days would involve a Native speaker pointing to the sun or moon or a sacred mountain and saying “maneto.” The Christian would think that the object pointed to was being called a god, while the intent was to instruct the barbarian on language use by pointing out unexpected things that take animate gender. It would be very disrespectful to discuss the sun as just a soulless thing, as Christians tended to do.
Because maneto was so often misinterpreted as meaning god, it was somehow missed that this is an obvious cognate to common words in many Eurasian languages, in which man, min, or mon refers to an individual (as in English man, from PIE man through Germanic), or used as a 1st person pronoun (as in English my or mine). We can reconstruct that when the ancestral languages used animate-inanimate gender, these words had the gloss of identifying the person as ensouled, a way of saying, “hey, I’m a person, not a thing.” This older sense is retained more in Indo-European languages such as Sanskrit, where brah-man is the universal soul (literally the expansive or infinite soul), and at-man is the individual soul.
The stem is also related to the culture-hero Mani in Indic creation mythology. Mani is the “first man” (first soul) and is also the hero-twin who murders his brother, just as does the Algonquian culture hero, who goes by many names (Michabo or Manabozho, the Great Hare in Central Algonquian tradition). The scholar Bruce Lincoln reconstructs a primal Indo-European origin myth he calls “Twin and Man,” in which man often appears in the name of the protagonist. (Note Manabozho is an alternate name of the Algonquian culture hero.)
But this is a perfect example of PIE borrowing from the east, because the same stem has the same gloss in Turkic, Uralic, Tungusic, and Nivkh languages, inherited from a common parent language. Thus we have, as the 1st person pronouns:
Proto-Uralic: minä (singular) and me or mek (plural)
Proto-Turkic: men or ben
Proto-Tungusic: mi or bi (nominative), mimbe (accusative)
Nivkh: ni (singular) men or mer (inclusive plural)
There has been a big debate about whether the Proto-Turkic and Proto-Tungusic forms have an initial m or b. I think from the other forms, it is clear that the original form in Baikalic language was men, with the b forms intrusive after contact with Mongolic during the period of the Mongol Empire. The Mongolian 1st person pronoun is bi. The Tungusic form is also a borrowing from Mongolian.
The Baikalic parent language almost certainly had an animate-inanimate gender system in which man/men was not only a 1st person pronoun but was also a marker of animate gender as in Algonquian. In Algonquian, m’ is also the 1st person pronoun, so there is complete parallelism. The form maneto is just man with a suffix of unknown origin.
This gets to another debated subject, which is the divergence between Eurasian and northern North American languages that begin the 1st person pronoun with m, versus the Amerind languages that begin the 1st person pronoun with n: the notorious m-n debate. Joseph Greenberg wanted to blur the distinction in order to count Algonquian as an Amerind language, but now we see that the Algonquian m form is important in linking Algonquian language to the Baikalic languages and not to Amerind, if the latter is a valid category at all.
3. Sun
This is the simplest and most obvious case, and it’s remarkable that it has not been more widely recognized. Following are words for sun unless otherwise noted:
Proto-Turkic siɣūn (south)
Proto-Tungusic siɣūn (sun)
Tsimshian: sagagyemk (sunny), shaggagiamg (sunshine),sgüüxs(southern Tsimshian language)
Proto-Indo-European seh₂-u̯l̥ (sun, nominative), sh₂wéns (sun, genitive), sh₂un-tero-s (south)
Proto-Uralic kaja
Proto-Yeniseian xʷaj
Proto-Athabaskan sa, sha, tse, from from Proto-Na-Dene caj
Cree: sâwanohk (south)
Shawnee: sawano (southerner)
Salishan words for sun: spukani (Flathead dialect), sp'q'n'i (Spokane dialect), sqwuqwul (Lummi dialect), sqwəqwəl (Saanich dialect), snx (Nuxalk)
Note that most words for south derive from words for sun, including in Proto-Indo-European and most Indo-European languages. There are a number of clear relations here. The Tungusic word for sun is the same as the Turkic word for south, and the Tsimshian forms are close to these. Proto-Uralic kaja is close to Proto-Yeniseian xʷaj, which gave rise to the Athabaskan forms. The Cree and Shawnee words for south, which are closely related – the latter being preserved in the tribe’s name – diverge from most other Algonquian words for sun and south and may derive from borrowing from Athabaskan. The Proto-Indo-European genitive-case word for sun winds up being close to the Cree and Shawnee words for south, leading to the easy understanding for English-speakers of the Shawnee name as meaning sunny (southerner).
4. Shaman/Knowledge
Because the Tungusic word saman/shaman was early borrowed into Russian, from which it spread into virtually all European languages, there has been an unfortunate assumption that this represents some primal form of the word. There therefore arose a very early error of believing that the Tungusic word derived from Indo-Iranian sramana, naming a Buddhist priest, as spread through Asia to Mongolia by way of Tibetan Buddhism. Thankfully, this error was conspicuous enough that it was exposed in 1917 by Berthold Laufer, writing in the American Anthropologist. (See sources.)
Laufer debunked an Indo-Iranian source of the word and instead showed that the word and concept derive from Turkic kam (shaman), through a standard k>s substitution evident in other words that passed from Turkic into Tungusic. Laufer cannot be faulted for failing to realize that Turkic and Tungusic split off from a common parent language roughly 3,000 years ago, with separation of lifestyles between Turkic horse-breeders and Tungusic reindeer herders.
The correction was important because the role of the Turko-Tungusic kam is very different from that of a Buddhist priest. The kam or shaman, as it has come to be known, is principally a healer and a communicator with the dead, two roles traditionally connected as healing was believed to be accomplished by intercession of the ancestors. The shaman was seen as possessing and accessing specialized knowledge acquired through apprenticeship and journeying to the sky world, and for this reason was called a kam, which derives from the likely Baikalic word kam, meaning knowledge, as it still means in most Turkic languages. Literally, the shaman is a knower, wise man, or wise woman. Importantly, the word passed through Amuric to Nivkh as cham/tsam, with meaning unchanged.
We can be confident that the Baikalic term used the k form rather than the s or ch form because it passed into Wakashan and Algonquian unchanged. Nikolaev reconstructs the Proto-Algonquian-Wakashan (PAW) word for “to know” as follows (PNi is Proto-Nivkh, PAlg is Proto-Algic, Yu is Yurok, Quil is Quileute):
“45a. Know 1. PWS *χam 70 ‘know, know how, recognize’ ▪ Quil. χab ‘to know how’ ▪ PNi *khim, *him ‘know, understand, realize’ ▪ PAlg *kom (~ a:) > Yu. kom- ‘understand, feel’ [also ‘hear’, formally containing prefix k and root PAlg *Vm ‘by thought’ (also ‘by hearing’)] # PAW *χemV.”
As the word for shaman, the Algonquians chose pawewa, from the verb that means to dream (as in powwow), but we can assume there was some former term based on kam or χem.
It is sometimes said that there are no linguistic connections between Siberian and Native American languages. I think I have shown that this is quite mistaken. Moreover, the linguistic connections precisely follow the migration of DNA from the Baikal-Yenisei region through the Amur Valley to northern North America.
Sources:
Berthold Laufer, “Origin of the Word Shaman,” American Anthropologist , Jul. - Sep., 1917, New Series, Vol. 19, No. 3 (Jul.-Sep., 1917), pp. 361-371 https://www.jstor.org/stable/660223
Bruce Lincoln, , “The Indo-European Myth of Creation,” History of Religions, (November 1975) 15 (2): 121–145. doi:10.1086/462739. S2CID 162101898
Sergei L. Nikolaev, “Toward the reconstruction of Proto-Algonquian-Wakashan. Part 1: Proof of the Algonquian-Wakashan relationship,” Journal of Language Relationship • Вопросы языкового родства, 13/1 (2015), Pp. 23—61.
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