Ket

The Ket are arguably one of the most enigmatic peoples of Eurasia. Yeniseic (or Yeniseian) languages, of which Ket is now the sole living example, differ strikingly from their Uralic, Turkic, and Tungusic neighbors (Comrie 1981:261-6). Aside from easily recognizable loanwords of Samoyedic, Turkic, or Russian provenance, the vocabulary lacks any obvious connection with other Eurasian languages. The phonology and grammar likewise display features absent elsewhere in aboriginal Siberia. Instead of vowel harmony (suffixes that mimic root vowel quality), one of five phonemically distinct tones marks each phonological word. Agreement reflects a class division between masculine animate, feminine animate, and inanimate (or neuter). The verb is a rich polysynthetic complex in which the strategy used to express subject/object coordination is an idiosyncracy of each stem. This creates lexically competing verb-internal agreement patterns: active/inactive, ergative/absolutive, nominative/accusative, and two that use redundant subject markers to express such meanings as action performed without a tool or conveyance. Subject and direct object noun phrases are zero-marked regardless of which pattern appears in the verb. Ket linguistic structure offers much of interest to typologists.