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 |
The language of the Kïldamnï (gentile noun; individually, Kïldaï) ethnic group is a likely member of the League of Lost Languages, 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 Kïlda 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 Kïlda 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 ə i u o (in standard Latin transcription e i ü ö) while "back" vowels are a ɪ ɯ ɔ (Latin orthography: a ï o u). The former series is described, by different researchers, as "tense", "pharyngialized", or "advanced tongue root (ATR)". There is limited "rounding harmony" where the vowels a ə appear as ɔ o (respectively) in suffixes when attached to stems containing only ɔ o. Vowel length is additionally distinguished, and two additional phonemes are recognized by the Kïldamnï as diphthongs, in conventional Latin orthography e (ɛi) and aï.
Syllable structure is generally simple and of (C)V(C) form, and the language permits almost no internal clusters of more than two consonants. Word-initial or word-final consonant clusters are very rare even in loanwords.
| Consonants | ||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bilabial | Dental-Alveolar | Post-alv. | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | |||||||||||
| Nasal | m | n | ɲ | ŋ | ||||||||||||
| Plosive | p | b | t | d | k | g | ||||||||||
| Fricative | β | ɸ | s | ʃ | h | |||||||||||
| Affricate | tʃ | dʒ | ||||||||||||||
| Approximants | w | l | r | j | ||||||||||||
The phonological status of β ɸ are disputed.
| Vowels | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| +FRONT | -FRONT | |||||||||
| +ATR | -ATR | +ATR | -ATR | |||||||
| +HIGH | ɪ | i | ɯ | u | ||||||
| -HIGH | a | ə | ɔ | o | ||||||
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.
Inflectional morphology for nouns includes categories of number (collectives and an obsolete, nonproductive dual form, as well as singular vs. plural number, with a fair number of suppletive forms to indicate plurals), possession, inalienable possessability, and case (around ten in number, depending on whether one categorizes certain local case forms as proper cases or not). Inflectional morphology for verbal elements is more complicated, but categories include mood or modality, aspect, tense, finiteness, switch-reference (in non-finite verbs only), and person/number. There is a rich variety of verbal nouns (or "participles") which can serve as finite and non-finite verbs, attributive modifiers, and nominals. In addition there are a number of important periphrastic constructions to express certain TAM combinations (e.g., contact causation, pluperfect and future perfect) and polite and honorific language.
Its phonology, however, shows signs of being more archaic than either Evenki or Even. 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 Kïlda, 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 K◌ilda belief that they are descendants of the Khitans who ruled northern China under the Liao dynasty (907-1125 CE).
The Kïlda language 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. (Kïlda 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, it 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 Kïldamnï in Kamchatka used forms of the Khitan logosyllabic writing system until the early 1800s, when Latin orthographies were adopted. The original Khitan "Large Script" and "Small Script" writing systems themselves seem to have died out by approximately 1300 and are documented in Kamchatka only by a few short and poorly-preserved inscriptions in stone. They did, however, give rise to a third related script first attested around the same time; this writing system consisted of 1200-1600 graphemes and during its period of use became gradually more and more regularized and rationalized. Since the 1820s the official and generally used orthrography for kïlda kēlen has been one of several Latinate systems (also successively modified and modernized over the decades). 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 that looked back to the old Khitan script as well as to the recently-discovered Old Turkic "runic" script from the Orkhon and Yenesei valleys in Central Asia.
