Kilda Kelen
| Language | |
| Spoken in: | Kamchatka Peninsula, Northeast Siberia |
| Timeline/Universe: | Possibly the League of Lost Languages |
| Total speakers: | At least 50,000. |
| Genealogical classification: | Altaic Tungusic |
| Basic word order: | SOV AdjN GenN RelHead |
| Morphological type: | Agglutinative |
| Morphosyntactic alignment: | Accusative |
| Created by: | |
| author | date |
"Neo-Khitanese" is a preliminary label to describe a likely member of the League of Lost Languages that is spoken today on the Kamchatka Peninsula in northeastern Siberia. Foreign scholars universally consider it to be an Altaic language -- the family consisting of the Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungusic language groups, and according to some, Korean or Japanese. However, contemporary native Neo-Khitanese scholarship rejects the 'Altaic Hypothesis' and considers these three (or five) groups to be related only through prolonged contact and mixing.
All parties generally agree that Neo-Khitanese is a Tungusic language. Within that family, it has most in common with the northern branch of that family -- specifically to Evenki (or "Tungus") and to Even (or "Lamut").
Phonologically, it has a regular system of so-called front/back vowel harmony, in which lexical stems determine the vowel quality of their affixes. "Front" vowels are e i ö ü while "back" vowels are a ï o u. The former series is described, by various researchers, as "tense", "pharyngialized", or "advanced tongue root (ATR)". There is limited "rounding harmony" where the vowels a e appear as o ö in suffixes when attached to stems with only o ö. Vowel length is additionally distinguished.
Syllable structure is generally simple and of (C)V(C) form, with almost no clusters of more than two consonants, and word-initial or word-final consonant clusters are very rare even in loanwords.
| Consonants | ||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bilabial | Labiod. | Dental | Alveolar | Post-alv. | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | |||||||||
| Nasal | m | n | ɲ | ŋ | ||||||||||||
| Plosive | p | b | t | d | k | g | ||||||||||
| Fricative | β | f | s | ʃ | h | |||||||||||
| Affricate | tʃ | dʃ | ||||||||||||||
| Approximants | w | r | j | |||||||||||||
| Lateral Approximant | l | |||||||||||||||
| Vowels | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Front | Near-front | Central | Near-back | Back | ||||||
| High | i | u | ||||||||
| Near-high | ʊ | |||||||||
| High-mid | e | o | ||||||||
| Mid | ə | |||||||||
| Low-mid | ɔ | |||||||||
| Near-low | ||||||||||
| Low | a | |||||||||
Grammatically, it is highly agglutinative and almost exclusively suffixing. It has basic SOV word order, accusative syntax, and a wealth of non-finite verb forms, many tense and aspect distinctions, and a fairly elaborate system of local cases. In all these respects it is a quite typical North Tungusic language. Though it has a slightly reduced and simplified inflectional morphology compared to its closest relatives, most morphological and syntactic constructions can be directly matched to corresponding forms in Even and/or Evenki.
Its phonology, however, shows signs of being more archaic than either of those languages. Most noticeable is its preservation of initial *p- as p- or f- (which has gone > h- > 0- in the other North Tungusic languages). Furthermore it has many lexemes found only in the Southern (or "Amuric") branch of Tungusic. Tungusic etymologies are, however, complicated by a sizable number of loanwords from Even or Evenki into Neo-Khitanese, in some cases supplanting the inherited lexeme. Additionally, the large quantity of extra-Tungusic Altaic cognates or early borrowings (depending upon interpretation), from Preclassical or Middle Mongolian and from Old Turkic, is generally now accepted as evidence in support of the traditional Neo-Khitanese belief that they are descendants of the Khitans who ruled northern China under the Liao dynasty (907-1125 CE).
Neo-Khitanese has furthermore absorbed very large numbers of lexical items from languages indigenous to Kamchatka (Kurile Ainu, Southern and Eastern "dialects" of Itelmen) and from languages neighboring Kamchatka: the Koryak and Alutor languages, and later from Aleut and even Pacific Yupik -- confusingly now called Aluutiq. (Neo-Khitanese thus has been influenced by "Alutor", "Aleut", and "Aluutiq", actually three different languages belonging to three different language families or branches thereof.) There are also a smaller number of foreign loans from the early modern period (primarily Portuguese, French, English, Japanese, and Russian, but also Chinese and Chinook Jargon). Perhaps as much as 1/4 or even 1/3 of the total lexicon is of non-Altaic or non-Tungusic origin. In the 19th and 20th century, Neo-Khitanese proved much more conservative towards foreign influence than in the past, and has (relatively) few "global" or "international" items of vocabulary taken from English or Russian.
The Neo-Khitanese in Kamchatka used forms of the Khitan logosyllabic writing system until the early 1800s, when Latin orthographies were adopted. The language has also been written in the Russian Cyrillic alphabet (primarily by Orthodox missionaries, priests, and converts beginning in the early 1700s), Japanese katakana (during 1941-1945), and to a very limited extent in a "runic" syllabary devised in the late 1800s on the basis of the old Khitan script.
