Anchorage Daily News

Anchorage was a busy place on Feb. 29. Fifteen hundred of the best canine athletes in the north were getting pumped for their remarkable race to Nome that would start the next day. About the same number of Alaska's best human citizen-athletes were waxing their skis and readying themselves for that Sunday's Tour of Anchorage.

And Friday, in a second-floor meeting room of a downtown hotel, a small group of linguists, anthropologists and Native scholars were redrawing the map of the world's languages. The featured presenter at a session of the Alaska Anthropological Association was Edward Vajda, a personable professor from Western Washington University, who has spent a decade studying a remote language called Ket spoken in the Yenisei River area of central Siberia.

As described by George Bryson in a recent ADN article, for years Ket was considered an isolated language. Now, Vajda has shown that Ket has both a sound system and a verb structure like that of the Athabascan or Dene languages of Alaska and Canada as well as Apache and Navajo and a few languages in northern California.

That Ket and Dene verbs are similar is irrefutable evidence of a historic connection. The Dene verb is one of the most complicated and unique structures in linguistics, and for Ket to have independently arrived at the same grammatical structure has the same probability as there being a parallel Anchorage somewhere in the universe--virtually nil. That means that at some point in the distant past ancestors of the Ket migrated to Alaska or an Alaska Dene group migrated back to Siberia. Working out the historic details will involve piecing together evidence from linguistics, archaeology, DNA studies, and origin stories.

Sadly, Ket and the Alaskan Dene languages have another commonality--they are becoming extinct. Each language has no more than a few hundred elderly speakers. The tragic truth is that within the next 10 or 15 years northern languages that have lasted for millennia will be gone unless something drastic is done.

That elevates the work of elder-scholars who have worked with linguists like Vajda, James Kari, Jeff Leer and Michael Krauss, among others, to some of the most important scholarship done during our generation. Even if the languages are no longer spoken we will have a record of their vocabulary and grammatical structure and that is like having a DNA record of a species. When a species becomes extinct, we lose genetic diversity and the planet suffers. When we lose a language we lose cognitive diversity and human thought patterns subconsciously embedded in grammar become more narrowly defined.

Understanding indigenous languages challenges assumptions of how we think. For example, Western educational psychology gives precedence to the noun. When 2-year-old Johnny points to a moose and says "dog" we smile even though he got it wrong because he has made the connection between a noun and something in the real world. English-language based schema theory and other theories of mind give precedence to the noun from age 2 up through analogies on SAT tests at which point Johnny has figured out the difference between dog and moose and might go to college if he knows his nouns.

But in Dene languages there are many instances where a verb defines the noun. In other words, verbs categorize things (nouns) by how they are used, rather than some inherent property in a thing that schema theory would suggest is "natural." Anyone who has ever had a child who expressed themselves through action--making things, sports, art--and was frustrated by schools that gave him or her low marks understands the tyranny of noun-based education. Those children would have been better off had they been born Dene where the relationship between thought and action is intuitively understood because it is in the grammar.

It is not surprising that a northern language should be based on the verb. Action embracing the land is fundamental to the meaning of life in the north, a prospect understood by the mushers heading to Nome (and their dogs) and the skiers crossing America's largest sub-arctic city. And when Dene and Ket finally meet they won't discuss verb grammar. They will dance and sing and share the foods of the land they caught themselves.

Alan Boraas is a professor of anthropology at Kenai Peninsula College.

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