Karasuk languages

Infobox Language family
name=Karasuk
region=Central Siberia and northern Pakistan
child1=Yeniseian
child2=Burushaski

Karasuk is a language family proposed by George van Driem [ [http://www.semioticon.com/people/vanDriem.htm website about George van Driem] ] of the University of Leiden that links the Yeniseian languages of central Siberia with the Burushaski language of northern Pakistan.

The family is named after the Karasuk culture, which existed in Central Asia during the Bronze Age in second millennium BCE. Van Driem postulates the Burusho people took part in the Indo-Aryan migration out of Central Asia that resulted in the Indo-European conquest of the Indian sub-continent, while other Karasuk peoples migrated northwards to become the Yenisei. These claims have recently been picked up by linguist [http://homepage.ntlworld.com/roger_blench/RBOP.htm Roger Blench] .Fact|date=February 2007

The evidence for Karasuk is mostly morphological. For example, the second-person singular prefixes on intransitive verbs are IPA| [gu-, gó-] in Burushaski and IPA| [ku-, gu-] in Ket.

However, in 2008 Yeniseian was demonstrated to be related to the Na-Dene languages of North America. (See Dene-Yeniseian.) The regular morphological correspondences between Na-Dene and Yeniseian are not found in Burushaski.

Although van Driem apparently does not endorse the Dené-Caucasian proposal, which traditionally includes both Yeniseian and Burushaski, his Karasuk proposal will need to be considered when evaluating such claims.

References